The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning

by Justin Smith-Ruiu

Overview

An original deep history of the internet that tells the story of the centuries-old utopian dreams behind it—and explains why they have died today

Many think of the internet as an unprecedented and overwhelmingly positive achievement of modern human technology. But is it? In The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, Justin Smith offers an original deep history of the internet, from the ancient to the modern world—uncovering its surprising origins in nature and centuries-old dreams of radically improving human life by outsourcing thinking to machines and communicating across vast distances. Yet, despite the internet’s continuing potential, Smith argues, the utopian hopes behind it have finally died today, killed by the harsh realities of social media, the global information economy, and the attention-destroying nature of networked technology.

Ranging over centuries of the history and philosophy of science and technology, Smith shows how the “internet” has been with us much longer than we usually think. He draws fascinating connections between internet user experience, artificial intelligence, the invention of the printing press, communication between trees, and the origins of computing in the machine-driven looms of the silk industry. At the same time, he reveals how the internet’s organic structure and development root it in the natural world in unexpected ways that challenge efforts to draw an easy line between technology and nature.

Combining the sweep of intellectual history with the incisiveness of philosophy, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is cuts through our daily digital lives to give a clear-sighted picture of what the internet is, where it came from, and where it might be taking us in the coming decades.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691212326
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/22/2022
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	626,121
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Justin E. H. Smith is professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris. His books include Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason; The Philosopher: A History in Six Types; and Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life (all Princeton). He lives in Paris. Twitter @jehsmith

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction. "Let us calculate!" 1

1 A Sudden Acceleration 14

Our Critical Moment 14

Paying Attention 21

Gadget Being 38

The Tragicomedy of the Private Commons 49

2 The Ecology of the Internet 57

Signals 57

"All things conspire" 59

Nature's Technique 65

Cetacean Clicking and Human Clicking; or, the Late-Adopter Problem 69

"I see a vestige of man" 78

3 The Reckoning Engine and the Thinking Machine 85

Aboutness 85

"They don't give a damn" 88

Dark Conjurations 100

"The ruling principles of the day" 111

4 "How closely woven the web": The Internet as Loom 124

Warp and Woof 124

Algebraic Weaving 127

Why Do Metaphors Matter? 140

Threads 146

5 A Window on the World 150

Unconfined Thoughts 151

The World Book 158

Do We See through the Internet? 163

The Infinite Book Wheel 168

Notes 175

General Bibliography 183

Index 191

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“We all know, or think we know, the scale of the problem of the internet. We all know, or think we know, who’s to blame. But it takes Justin Smith’s laser-like intelligence and profound knowledge of the history of ideas to show that we are almost certainly wrong. Oh, how I wish everyone in Silicon Valley, everyone on Wall Street and, frankly, everyone everywhere would read this.”—Stephen Fry

“Justin Smith’s The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is invites us to step back from current problems such as social media disinformation and to reimagine the role the internet might play in human life. The book should retrieve the internet debate from the Silicon Valley gurus and bring it into a more serious philosophical and historical light.”—Tamsin Shaw, New York University

“We are in desperate need of an accessible philosophy of the internet that so powerfully molds our lives, and Justin Smith has emerged as the phenomenologist for our times—delivering profound insights in unusually crystalline prose. This is a must-read for anyone trying to understand how we live now and how we just might conceive of living better in the future.”—Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of Self-Portrait in Black and White

“Justin Smith’s The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is is thoroughly and consistently engaging, mostly right, and willing to put the boot in where deserved. If it was a tweet, I would heart it.”—Jon Agar, author of Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone

Editorial Reviews

05/30/2022

Smith (Irrationality), a history professor at the University of Paris, draws on centuries’ worth of philosophy to examine the pervasive reach of the internet in this enlightening survey. Smith begins with a look at literature on the “philosophy of attention,” explaining how “the internet is an impediment to the cultivation of attention,” and characterizes the lack of “attentional commitment” required in scrolling through Twitter for hours as a “moral failure on my part, and... on the part of those who contrived to reduce me to this condition for profit.” Elsewhere, Smith considers the internet as a possible example of the Greek philosophical idea of a “world soul,” a force connecting all of nature, and explores the notion that reality is a simulation (people who think so probably wouldn’t if “the video games in question were, say, arcade consoles featuring PacMan”). He pulls from an impressive collection of thinkers, such as Kant, Francis Bacon, and lesser-known “cybernetician” Norbert Wiener, and though his angle’s a fascinating one, the book has its wobbles, notably with the occasional whiff of pretention (one chapter is titled, for instance, “How closely woven the web: The Internet as Loom”) and jargony sentences. Philosophy students and seasoned readers of the topic, though, will find Smith to be a capable guide to why what’s online is there, and how it came to be. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Smith has given readers a fresh interpretation of the history of technology . . . and a keen sense that we don’t always know what the internet is doing to us."—-Christine Rosen, Wall Street Journal

"Smith traces the early internet through the outlandish ideas of Renaissance inventors, ill-fated fraudsters and forgotten polymaths. It’s a provocative reframing of the internet, a lament for what might have been, and a fresh way of thinking about what we’re doing when we spend endless hours scrolling online. . . . Smith avoids offering easy solutions to the current crisis but suggests that we might be able to reach back into the past in order to reorient the internet towards a more meaningful end."—-Joshua Gabert-Doyon, Financial Times

"This heady, unusual book sets out to view the internet—idealistic experiment, revolutionary communication tool, repository of amusing cat memes—through a longer conceptual history. Instead of the expected trips to research laboratories and US university campuses, there are detours via Buddhist thought and a 19th-century hoax involving a ‘snail telegraph.’ Idiosyncratic, fascinating stuff."—-Rhiannon Davies and Matt Elton, BBC History Magazine

"The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is begins as a negative critique of online life. . . . But the book’s second half progresses into deeper philosophical inquiries. . . . [Smith] ends by recognizing that the interface of the Internet, and the keyboard that gives him access to it, is less an external device than an extension of his questing mind."—-Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker

"While Smith addresses what is wrong with the web—especially compelling is his exploration of how it affects our attention and how it encourages us to trade our sense of self for 'an algorithmically plottable profile'—he is also offering a big picture vision of this machine-assisted communication as an extension of all forms of communication in nature."—-Cameron Woodhead and Fiona Capp, Sydney Morning Herald

"Smith wants to make us think differently about the internet and much of his book is spent explaining that many of the ideas behind its uses are, in fact, ancient, and he gives myriad fascinating examples."—-Peter Neville-Hadley, South China Morning Post

"Smith examines the alarming problems of the Internet in its contemporary incarnation and insightfully explores some of the historical antecedents of this technology."—-Harvey Freedenberg, Shelf Awareness

"In a book that meditates upon networks, webs, and connections, Smith’s astounding range becomes something of a method for revealing the interconnectedness of everything between stars and modems."—-Trevor Quirk, Bookforum

From the Publisher

"An accessible philosophy of the internet, taking stock along the way of the faults and dangers resulting from the internet's invasion into people's lives. Whatever one’s preconceptions about the internet, Smith makes a convincing case that the internet is something more than what one might have thought.

"

Choice

"While Smith addresses what is wrong with the web – especially compelling is his exploration of how it affects our attention and how it encourages us to trade our sense of self for “an algorithmically plottable profile” – he is also offering a big picture vision of this machine-assisted communication as an extension of all forms of communication in nature."

Sydney Morning Herald

2021-12-14
A professor of history and philosophy of science casts a stony eye on the liberatory promises of the internet.

When most people talk about the internet, they’re really talking about the tiny slice that is social media. It’s a “reverse synecdoche, the larger containing term standing for the smaller contained term,” writes Smith by way of introduction to his central argument. These social media, he argues, are fundamentally enemies of human liberty. Employing that reverse synecdoche, he shows how the internet “has distorted our nature and fettered us” by, among other things, turning users into addicts (in the strictest terms) and serving as a surveillance device that often limits our political freedoms. We are bent by our technology, unable to concentrate on reading and no longer remembering anything without Google’s help. Of course, as Smith points out, this is a charge leveled against previous information technologies. When Gutenberg printed the Bible, people could simply read it rather than having to memorize it, which many critics at the time considered to be a diminution of human intelligence. Smith is not quite so doctrinaire about print, but he makes a good case that the computer of Gottfried Leibniz’s dreams more than 300 years ago was not the personality-shaping machine of today. Leibniz imagined something whose workings, in modern terms, “can be performed without ‘strong AI,’ without any internal life or experience of all the calculative operation it performs.” Leibniz further held that human thought is an instrument of excellence, whereas those who shape algorithms today seem not to think much about human thought (or excellence) at all. The best parts of this thoughtful book-length essay link those algorithms to the “gamification of social reality,” of which a strong example is the down-the-rabbit-hole entity called QAnon.

A worthy critique of a technology in need of rethinking—and human control that seeks to free and not enchain.

Kirkus Reviews