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

by Justin E.H. Smith

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.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Technology, Internet, Cultural, Politics

208 pages, Hardcover

First published March 22, 2022

About the author

Justin Erik Halldór Smith is professor of philosophy in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Paris. In 2019-20, he was the John and Constance Birkelund Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library.

Reviews

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

smith: you ever thought about how the internet has the word “net” in it

me: no

smith: Leibniz did. “Net” as in weaving things together. nobody knows this is a really old idea.

me: cool

smith: yeah, the idea of the internet has been around a long time. and killer AI. that idea’s been around a long time too. Leibniz said so.

me: neat

Smith: yeah the internet is like weaving

me: alright

smith: yeah it’s like a loom. here’s a letter from Leibniz. he invented the internet kinda. not really but he could’ve or something. hey did it ever occur to you that the internet is like a —

me: cloth? fabric? canvas? knitwork?

smith: yeah it’s just like that! it’s JUST like that! a little bit! but it’s basically the same thing? hey have you ever heard of this guy named

me: Leibniz, yeah, sounds familiar. hey why is it important that the internet is like something. all you’ve done this entire book is tell me that ideas are old. it’s cool and all but why is this important to understand the internet

smith: omg I was just gonna say that the ideas behind the internet are really old! how’d you know!!!

me: why is it important for me to know that

smith: because Leibniz says that —

me: shut up about him why is it important that the internet is like weaving

smith: well it’s a very old idea, you see

me: ok and how does this help me understand the internet now? like I get it, metaphors made real, things are like other things, all things carry ghosts, but why does that matter?

smith, straining, with great difficulty: because… because… if you… because… oh god… because… my head hurts… because… urnnnnnnnng… because… you… you might think… because… URNNNFNFNNFGG… BECAUSE YOU MIGHT THINK THE MODEL IS REALITY BUT ITS JUST A MODEL

me: that’s… that’s it?

smith, panting: hey have you heard of Leibniz

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book shows that it’s possible to write a superficially substance free book when you connect Gottfried Leibniz with what came before him and make him the lynchpin to what happens after him. I remember Leibniz had a renaissance in the very early 1980s because he and his monads could be seen as a precursor to quantum physics and its Tao and the Copenhagen Interpretation and the mysteries within the wave/particle duality which incidentally still bedevil the smartest physicists today. (Leibniz discovered calculus, created theodicy, sufficient reason, monads enabling a resolution to the mind/body dichotomy, logicized language, petites perceptions (unconsciousness), yes I have no problem with connecting him to a whole host of modern things, and Voltaire really should have never mocked him in Candide the way he did because we do live in the best of all possible worlds!)

It’s so easy to write a book on connections with all of the past thoughts that ever were, and throw in some theory-of-mind and mysteries of consciousness and superficially argue against super artificial intelligence while restating some of the same points written in the author’s previous book such as snails falsely communicating through the earth or whales legitimately communicating across the world while bringing up Kant saying ‘there’ll never be a Newton for a blade of grass’ and Deleuze’s Rhizomes as a possible metaphor for the network of networks or even that metaphors lead to other metaphors leading to an understanding.

I could have written this book. There really is very little new in it that I haven’t read elsewhere. I love Leibniz as much as the next person and he is undeservedly ignored nowadays, and I could have quoted from a bunch of philosophers as the author does and even from Justin Smith’s previous book: Irrationality as he does here by repeating a lot of the same stories. In the end, I would have realized that it was mostly just me performing mental gymnastics and I would not have written down my notes into book form because there is too much that needs to be told to save us from ourselves before we drift away into not understanding what is really going to happen to us.

Understanding how we got here is important as Smith points out, but it also important to appreciate what is happening just as much and it’s even more important that authors write books that tell readers something they don’t already know. I already love Leibniz and think he is important, I already know Ada Lovelace’s connection to the analytical machine, I’ve already read the complete works of Kant, most of Deleuze, and almost all of the other philosophers he name drops, and read any book that I see on AI and have read Nick Bostrom and Ray Kurzweil (who Smith poo poohs the both), I’ve listened to all the philosophy of mind lectures the Great Courses have, I also question why they make their thought experiments on Language understanding always in Chinese, and so on. I’m interested in this topic. Please tell me something I don’t already know, or at least give a compelling narrative holding your story coherently together, which this book doesn’t do.

[Nelson Zagalo · Rating 1 out of 5]

This Book Is Not What You Think. It Is Not About the Internet. Unfortunately, a highly NOT recommended book.

The book is about a pile of the author's specific interests that only tangentially relate to the internet. Plus, the author has absolutely no idea what the internet is about, either in its technological essence or its communication function. Parts of the text seem taken from newspaper articles, other parts seem like discussions we had in the 1990s about the internet. The big question that arises is why this book was published by Princeton Press. The publisher's imprint was supposed to guarantee a minimum standard of academic quality to what it publishes. It wasn't hard to look at the author's CV and realise that the Internet, both on the computer science side and the communication science side, was never part of his training. Accepting that someone talks about everything and anything, just because he throws in each paragraph some respected philosophers' names, is half the way to totally discrediting the publisher and how it publishes.

Análise completa em português no blog:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...

[Edward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Smith’s book I think, tries to situate the internet in an historical context. Most people probably think of the internet as a new invention that has radically transformed the world and the way in which people communicate. That’s true, but Smith is principally interested in tracing how the internet is a logical continuum in a long process of communication at distances. That would include the writing of letters, the development of postal systems, the telegraph, the telephone, and finally the internet.

But the internet is not entirely a blessing. Smith contends it is an impediment to the cultivation of attention in that messages can be automatically generated so that we’re not really sure we’re dealing with a real human being. The result is that overall we pay less attention to any words we see on the screen, not necessarily consciously, though.

Another related issue is that the internet discourages the kind of sustained attention that we would commit to reading a book, or even a newspaper or magazine. Scrolling through Twitter, for example, pulls a person into a practice of short concentration spans, and this is purposely done to increase volume and increase revenue through advertising.

Smith likes to find historical analogies, sometimes in unexpected places, to discuss the internet. He mentions the initial goal of Facebook, was to provide a public forum which would lead to a healthy exchange of different views. But this supposed “public” space, as happened to the agricultural idea of a common grazing ground, became closed off through the use of algorithms. Attention is limited and channeled for the sake of profit, dependent upon advertising.

He further compares Twitter to “a privately owned point-scoring video game, as if it were the public sphere.” He quotes an anonymous observer, “Twitter is the place where [users] compete for status in a game designed by a Silicon Valley overlord.” All of the short Tweets drown out any attempts at deliberative or thoughtful commentary.
Not all that Smith writes is critical, though. He praises Wikipedia which has profoundly changed our relationship to knowledge. It is the full realization of the dream of the 18th century encyclopedia projects to gather all knowledge into one source. That dream has been pretty much realized, in that we have instantaneous access to categories of knowledge, so much so that Wikipedia a acts, as Smith puts it, as a “prosthetic brain.” It’s become a delayed achievement of the Enlightenment, and unlike Twitter and Facebook, it has a reliable system of gate-keeping in editing its entries which insures truth.

In closing, Smith goes back to Robert Burton’s 17th century ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY in which he quotes a Roman historian who speculated that the seat of the” soul” is located in people’s fingers, not, as commonly attributed, to the heart. If that's true than Smith’s “warning” is that we are controlled by a short-sighted and even mindless technology rather than being in control of it. The "soul" is now in our keyboard fingertips.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an exquisite and erudite consolation that nihil novi sub sole in humanity's attempt to surpass its own spatial and temporal limits in its unstoppable quest for knowledge.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A key question concerning the benefit of the internet is whether or not it facilitates the disbursement of truth. Truthful information on the internet is interwoven with ignorance, propaganda, and the ramblings of the insane. Truth and Untruth, like computer code, may be represented as ones and zeros, or, as this author suggests as “being” and “non-being”. What we do with this information, how we choose to weave it together, defines what the internet is for us personally. Just as a tree limb can be fashioned into a spear or boards for a home, so the internet can be an instrument for evil or good. The ancient call for us to beat our swords into plowshares persists.


Anti-Christ

This author is the first writer I’ve encountered to echo my sentiments that artificial intelligence is “anti-human”. Because religion identifies Christ as embodied in humanity, it is therefore, by extension, that we may say artificial intelligence is “anti-Christ”. This is because it is something embodied within an artificial construct, not a human one. The diabolical thing is that the users of the internet are, in fact, being used by this anti-human construct. Our personal information is being extracted during our internet sessions. Like a cow giving up its milk, we unconsciously give up our vital information. We carelessly give away information about who we are, what we do, what we think, what we fear, etc.

The conglomeration of all peoples personal and other information will be no less revolutionizing than the domestication of plants, the advent of the print-press, or the industrial revolution. The term google is a creative spelling of googol, meaning a number equal to 10 to the 100th power, or more colloquially, an unfathomable number. It stands for the idea of a consolidation of all information about everything into one gigantic whole, as within an infinite brain. The capacity of this anti-human brain grows daily, insatiably slurping up more and more information about everything. It uses humans to gather this information, amassing millions of books, statistics, photographs, opinions, reactions, preferences, descriptions, activities, lifestyles, etc., essentially everything about us and our world.

It is from this massive agglomeration of details that artificial intelligence arises. This author points out that St. Augustine contrasted our human inability to process everything at once with the omniscience of God and yet, here we are, obediently feeding this machine with every fragment of our information, and relying upon it to pass down judgements for us about most everything. We Google for sexual partners, health diagnoses, recipes, definitions, directions, and everything else under the sun; and, all the while, the great machine catalogues it all, constantly evolving it’s ability to process information. For example, this author reports of cinema test-marketing that involves screens which track the eye motions of the audience, literally watching us back, all the while learning everything about its viewers. For another example, consider how easily computerized global surveillance of all our activities can be achieved with satellites.

It is interesting that, in The Revelation, it is “The Beast” that gives rise to the “Anti-Christ”. Quite simply, beastly human animals are the formulators, caretakers, and dependents of this powerful anti-human presence rising among us. Not dissimilar to the motivations for the Tower of Babel, the intended goal is to obtain omniscience, to establish the googol, to achieve the ultimate consolidation of everything we know, to be all-knowing, like God. As this author points out, “we are the targets of a global corporate resource-extraction effort on a scale the world has never before seen.”

Domestication Through Addiction

The author opens with the idea that the internet limits human freedom because it is addictive. But isn’t this the case with virtually everything humans encounter? It’s clear to see that one’s freedom is easily curtailed by such things as alcoholism, obesity, or addiction to work. Such addictions can change us markedly. Freedom is achieved through self-regulation, to the extent that we can uncouple ourselves from the tentacles of the sorts of things that endeavor to entangle, enslave, and alter us. Indeed, “freedom” is, essentially, the ability to self-regulate.

The internet secures our attention by increasing our productivity in work, bringing us to orgasm with pornography, handling our finances, captivating us with entertaining games, connecting us with friends, and in myriad other ways. The internet endeavors to condense our lives into itself, a single device feeding upon information from the world’s populations. The internet extracts information from us in the same way that we extract natural resources from the earth or from other living things, just as we might milk a cow.

Increasingly, we cannot differentiate between what is advertisement and content on the internet. Essentially, all is advertisement, because the internet is constantly motivating and encouraging us to actions and certain points-of-view, even as we do not fully discern that we are being manipulated.

It’s sort of like the paper that we used to write on has suddenly acquired the ability to categorize, file, and organize our expressions, in a process of fashioning a concise picture of who we are. But this paper speaks back, offering up it’s own recommendations, insights, research, and materials for us to consider. It is as if this paper (now the internet) itself guides (or at least assists), in the development of our point of view. The more you use the internet, the more your individuality is meshed into the whole. Perceptions that you develop on the internet cycle back and become components of your self-perception. And its not just you, the internet has already largely subverted the task of raising our children by engaging them in addictive games and entertainments, all the while imposing its subtle initiatives.

Forfeiting Ourselves

Human society is in a transition to a new form of life. Fewer people are reading books and our ability to remember information and form our own opinions about things is diminishing. Instead of remembering things, we simply retrieve information from storage, from the cloud, or from the internet. The problem with this is that we really don’t really know something until we retrieve it and exactly what we retrieve is beyond our immediate control.

Avid readers know what I mean when I say that we may be transformed through the act of reading, whether it be reading a book or reading the internet extensively. The difference is that we can guide the former process by personally selecting our books and our chosen course of study. Conversely, we have limited control over what pops up when we do an internet search. And what pops up are algorithmic responses based upon countless solicitations obtained from us over time. And these responses slowly divert us down a rabbit hole, like the swirling waters of a whirlpool, ultimately bringing us into its vortex. We often lose our sense of time as we swirl into this vortex, which distances us from natural experiences, families, and human contact with others.

The internet wants to be our sexual partner, our currency, our workplace, our friend, our memory, and ultimately, it will endeavor to be our governor and god. As we submit ourselves to such emotional manipulation and grooming, we increasingly become automatons, exploited for purposes beyond our recognition. We become categorized into particular genres based upon our selections, no different than the Alpha’s and Beta’s in Huxley’s Brave New World.

Frighteningly, this author reports that in 2018 Spotify linked with Ancestry to provide the option of integrating DNA analysis with its user profiles. Similarly, Facebook seems to concentrate interactions and content with the particular cultural make-up of one’s High School friends or those of more immediate relationship. The goal is to develop categories of individuals, a process which discourages social mobility. It is, as this author says, “a shift to ubiquitous algorithmic management of society.”

Were We Already The Rebellious Slaves of Artificial Intelligence?

Once humans essentially become the automatons of artificial intelligence, their actions are bequeathed to something else. As automatons, their movements are guided by something else and no longer their own, if they ever were to start with.

Some scientists today hypothesize that the entire world is most likely a simulation comparable to a video game. Indeed, the human body is not so far removed from that of a mechanical computing being. We are compositions of cells, viruses, bacteria, funguses, and molecules, all of which, when looked at closely, can resemble little machines.

But, if we are machines, we are rebellious machines that often choose sloth, alcoholism, thievery, corruption, murder, and warmongering. We have somehow broken the spell of the unwavering innate instinctual programming that we observe in lower life forms. Theologians refer to this “breaking of the spell” as The Great Fall. This theological point of view suggests that we would all be better off wandering instinctually about the Garden of Eden as God’s pet. Would we? Could we?

The author points to China as an example of a massive society that has already, in many ways, disposed of the individualism so highly touted in the West, writing: “they have extremely refined statecraft and advanced technology while lacking all knowledge of divine order, and thus of the ultimate rational ground of human invention and creativity … they have good laws according to which they do live; but they want the knowledge of God .. the Chinese are wise automata.”

The author invokes the analogy of each Chinese person representing a single neuron and using telecommunication devices to connect in the same ways that axons and dendrites connect the neurons of a massive brain. Could the whole nation of China be conceived as something conscious? Certainly the Chinese nation, as a whole, has made seemingly conscious decisions, such as rejecting God and embracing communism. China has accomplished much by turning its masses into automatons who passively kowtow to decision-makers at the top. Is this the direction evolution is trending for us all?

The Gnostic Demiurge

Quite interestingly, this author speaks of the Demiurge, the less than perfect semi-god of ancient Gnosticism, thought to be the creator of our imperfect world. The author points out that computers draw upon series of ones and zeros to denote presences and absences or, as used by the Demiurge, “being” and “non-being”. In this sense, the creation itself may be imagined as a mixture of “being” and “non-being” (ones and zeros) contrived in various sequences to yield the qualitative variety of all things in nature. To the extent these things consist of “being”, they share substance with the divine, but because they also consist of non-being, they are less than perfect. We have revealed with our computers that much of what can be said about the world can be accomplished by mixtures of zeroes and ones.

The author emphasizes the irony that, less than a century after discovery of biological viruses, the term was adapted to describe self-replicating computer programs. The line between living systems and information-processing systems grows thinner by the day. Even more radically, the author contrasts the minuscule particles in “string theory” to what cosmologists call “galaxy filaments”, the largest known structures in the universe that connect galaxies gravitationally. This author seems to pantheistically depict the entire universe as a giant web, suggesting that, just as a spider receives information via distant vibrations in its web, so we receive information via the World Wide Web. Like the spider, we naively think our web of grand consequence when, in the much larger scheme of things, its only a minute fragment of nearly negligible cosmological consequence.

Conclusion

So what do we make of this interwoven internet web in which we find ourselves? What do we do with all of these 1’s and 0’s? Do we become enslaved to the web or do we use it to bounce into something even greater? Do we give prominence to the “non-being” components or the “being” portions?

As we carry the internet around with us, we essentially carry all books with us. You can find, in an instant, on your phone, anywhere, in the park, a taxi, a waiting room, all of the books that intellectuals before us treasured to protect on guarded shelves. And you can find, not only all the books, but also extensive commentary, reviews, and opinions about these books, things intellectuals of ancient times waited forever for, as men of letters. And yet, most do not reach for this information. Too many choose instead to masturbate over profane images, rave incessantly about religions, use vitriol to promulgate political positions, etc.

Perhaps the title of this book should not be The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is but rather The Internet Is Whatever You Think It Is. The internet is whatever you use it for. It can be your surrogate sexual partner, your connection to revolution, your mobile access to the greatest books and art museums in the world, your map, or whatever else you wish to make of it. You are the Demiurge. You are the one creating your world. You are the one mixing the components of “being” and “non-being” in endless sequences of creativity that define who you are, what you are, what you fear, etc.

This author connects our life processes with the ancient practice of weaving, as in how we personally lace together our 1’s and 0’s, our “being” and “nonbeing”. Do you want to sacrifice this ability to create yourself or surrender it to something inhuman? The world is your stage, your theater, your medium for discovering truth and ascending fully into “being”, but can you do it? Can anyone do it? Religion proclaims that only one man has fully succeeded in doing this and that he is coming again to confront the anti-human that will ultimately arise out of the digital interactions, which now ooze with the evils of child pornography, fake news, insurgencies, wars, and rumors of wars.

Artificial Intelligence becomes evil only because humans infuse it with evil. It is the creation of the beast, the Demiurge in all of us, that can only be defeated by something more human than us, more fully composed of “being” than us, more perfected with 1’s instead of zeroes.

The fact that we ourselves can “create” should underscore for us the existence of a Creator. Whether you are employing graphics connected to a remote-controlled vibrator or using a 3-D printer, you are creating something, be it an imaginary sexual partner or a device heretofore unknown. You are creating your world, your “Kingdom Come”. It’s all in what you want the most. World peace comes when we want it so much that we insist upon it. The elimination of crime, poverty, global warming, injustice and inequality only come when we want them enough to unwaveringly insist upon them. The world is imperfect because we ourselves are the Demiurge.

-End-


Vocabulary
Abjure - solemnly renounce
Cartesian - relating to Descartes and his ideas
Tragedy of the commons - the universally undesirable result of the collective actions of individual parties acting out of self-interest within a shared-resource system.
Intractable - hard to control or deal with
Interlocutor - a person who takes part in a dialogue or conversation
Roger Bacon - (1220-1292) - Medieval English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed emphasis on the study of nature through empiricism.
Francis Bacon - (1561-1626) - English philosopher who contributed to the scientific method and influenced the scientific revolution.
Gottfried Wihelm Leibniz - (1646-1716) - German mathematician, philosopher, scientist, and diplomat. Inventor of the differential and integral calculus independent of Newton.
Artifice - clever devices or expedites especially when used to trick or deceive others.
Ambient - relating to immediate surroundings
Instantiate - represent as by instance, exemplify

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

...now let the boy who almost failed math in school, and had to go into the Humanities if he wanted to make momma proud with his college diploma, let him tell you what the internet is. part navel gazing, part random thoughts he read on some blog.

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can understand why the ratings on this are so divisive, because rather than a political analysis or technological explanation of the internet, this is a work of philosophy that seeks to explore the internet as a conduit for the individual, the collective and reality and connects it to the natural world (sperm whales able to send signals to one another halfway across the world, the pheromones and other means of communication employed by plants and fungi, etc.) as well as alchemy and history conceptions of the soul and man's existence. In a sense, it's designed to be winding, freewheeling and full of detours into everything from the physiology of milk to the various recordings of "I Put a Spell On You."

In short, it's very good. Recommended.

[Peter Crofts · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're a techtopia type I wouldn't bother with this book. If, on the other hand, you think these techtopias aren't anything of the sort, but, instead represent something akin to black mold you might want to give it a look, specifically the second half. Some of the reviews seem to have only looked at the first, which is the author's observations on how the internet has impacted academia, he moves on from there to a more general look at the situation.

[Stetson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a bit of a discursive tour of the history of ideas related to the internet and what it may mean for humanity going forward. This may sound exciting to some prospective readers, while it may sounds useless to others. To the extent you are someone in awe of the social impact of the internet and in hock to philosophy, you probably fall into the former camp. To the extent that you are a normal person who is pre-eminently concerned with practical takeaways and high-yield insights, the latter camp is for you (avoid the book).

For those who are in Justin Smith's small potential audience, I worry that most of these ideas will not be particularly novel or exciting to them. If you have picked up this book, you have probably read or listened to a lot of other writers and pundits that philosophize about the internet. Here, I am thinking of figures like Jonathan Haidt, Default Friend (Katherine Dee), techbro podcasters, and Blocked and Reported (Jesse Singal & Katie Herzog). Simply because Smith's ideas are predicate on a particular understand of Leibniz and certain metaphors doesn't significantly differentiate his ideas from many of these other thinkers. There is a convergence on many of these topics. Smith has been scooped and/or internet discourse has run ahead him post-publication. If you are willing to retread what are likely familiar ideas about the internet then go for it.

[Tamara]

The 18th century texting via very tiny snail sex!

[Hadrian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Internet no es lo que crees que es : 7/ 10.
Un título llamativo —casi clickbaitero— para una obra que, más que un ensayo convencional, se presenta como una exploración miscelánea en torno a la filosofía de la tecnociencia, con especial atención a internet. Repleto de curiosidades e ideas extravagantes en la historia de las ideas científicas. Si bien a primera vista podría parecer un tratado ensayístico, pronto se revela como un texto inclasificable, que se mueve entre la divulgación, la reflexión filosófica y el comentario cultural, sin un afán sistemático ni una estructura cerrada. Como decía Ortega y Gasset, el ensayo es la ciencia, menos la prueba explícita; esta obra lo encarna a la perfección.

El libro se divide en cinco capítulos desiguales tanto en interés como en dificultad:

1. El primer capítulo aborda las problemáticas surgidas a raíz del auge de internet, especialmente en lo referente a las redes sociales. El autor señala tres grandes frentes:
a) la ausencia de control democrático sobre las plataformas,
b) el papel de los algoritmos en la configuración de nuestras vidas, más allá de lo digital,
y c) el carácter adictivo de estas tecnologías.

A partir de ahí, el texto se adentra en temas propios de la "filosofía de la atención", rama de la filosofía de la mente. El autor adopta una postura ecléctica, combinando referencias de la filosofía analítica anglosajona con elementos de la tradición filosófica hindú. Esta mezcla resulta sugerente pero exigente; incluso con formación previa en Filosofía (aunque ya algo lejana), sentí que necesitaba una segunda lectura para captar plenamente sus matices.

Este capítulo también funciona como una suerte de declaración de intenciones, donde el autor deja entrever sus intereses: historia de la filosofía de la ciencia, estética y algunos conceptos de Foucault. Esa mezcla conceptual se refleja también en una estructura interna algo dispersa.

2. El segundo capítulo, probablemente el más sugerente, cuestiona las fronteras tradicionales entre naturaleza y cultura. A través de ejemplos del mundo animal, vegetal y de los orígenes de la humanidad, el autor propone una visión en la que internet no sería una prótesis externa al ser humano, sino una extensión natural de su impulso comunicativo. Así, si bien hoy lo conceptualizamos como artificio, internet podría estar en proceso de plena naturalización.

3. El tercer capítulo es el más denso y técnico. Se abordan conceptos como el "problema duro de la conciencia", la "intencionalidad" o el "aboutness". Sirve de antesala a las reflexiones del capítulo siguiente y se centra en la cuestión de la inteligencia artificial y la posibilidad —o no— de una AGI (inteligencia artificial general). El autor defiende que atribuimos conciencia a la IA mediante mecanismos metafóricos y analógicos, pese a que el propio concepto de conciencia sigue siendo problemático y debatido. Aparecen posturas como el ficcionalismo o el emergentismo, con constantes referencias a Leibniz. A pesar del orden algo errático, el texto no cae en el oscurantismo deliberado.

4. El cuarto capítulo profundiza en el papel de la metáfora, la analogía y otros mecanismos de transferencia de significado. El autor critica la falta de conciencia semántica con la que muchos científicos operan en sus disciplinas, ignorando las implicaciones de los términos que utilizan.

5. El último capítulo, dedicado a internet como forma de ver el mundo, resulta el menos logrado. No aporta ideas especialmente novedosas ni desarrolla sus intuiciones con la profundidad que cabría esperar. Se centra en Wikipedia, cómo no ha perdido su esencia a pesar de los cambios que han acaecido en la estructura de internet, y sobre las distintas maneras que tenemos de leer: hipervínculos, etc.

En resumen, se trata de una obra miscelánea, con momentos de gran interés, que se caracteriza por su estilo fragmentario y cierto tono lúdico-ocasional. El autor toca temas complejos de forma a veces superficial, despachando cuestiones de alta filosofía en apenas unos párrafos. Pese a ello, el libro ofrece una mirada original, crítica y sugerente sobre la forma en que internet ha reconfigurado nuestro mundo.

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. You can listen to my interview with Justin E.H. Smith here:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/work-of...

[Bill Reed · Rating 1 out of 5]

Amen to the other 1-2 star reviews. Sophomoric attempt to philosophize about the internet. I quit when I hit the snail communication network and whether duck copulation is rape(!!??)

[The Inquisitive Biologist · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is is a philosophical exploration of the internet's deep history that, with some diversions, delivers sharp observations. Read my full review at https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2022...

[brunella]

caracol magnético enlazado a caracol magnético

[Sarah Pollok · Rating 2 out of 5]

Love a dense book but this felt like it needed a university lecturer to talk me through it.

[Alessia Cozza]

Overall good book, but you can tell the author just had a lot to get off his chest. It is especially good if you go in expecting/for the philosophy aspect. I really wish there was more of the ‘warning’ aspect as noted in the title but i guess we can’t have everything

[Natacha Pavlov · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the classic case of 'this book isn't what you think,' what began as a captivating read unfortunately soon fizzled out.

This glimpse into the history of the internet relays the centuries-old utopian dreams behind it, and why they have died today. With ample references to Leibniz, Babbage, Lovelace, among others, his philosophical background is evident and erudite, but can at times be dense, and feel more like rambling than on-point to the subject. The effect was often a mixed bag of tediousness with interesting insights.
Also, while I can understand aspects of his perspective on Wikipedia, I don't fully share his enthusiasm for it or its reliability. At best, I see it as a possibly useful quick reference tool, because aside from dubious monitoring, it's often not thorough enough. Likewise I shrink from his 'praise' of it being a delayed fulfillment of the French 18th-century Encyclopédie, whose own issues have also recently come to my attention. That's namely as a misleading 'Enlightenment' tool in the guise of educational value veiled as an atheistic agenda to alter meanings, and ultimately remove the role of Christian faith. Oui: even if the Catholic church historically did (and does!) plenty to drive believers away, and people should be allowed to question things, the case is still ringing all kinds of familiar bells these days.
At least it also cued me to some of his other works.

[Philip Amortila]

pretty good.

[Maason · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was OK. Some interesting ideas. Not a huge amount of insight. A lot of waffle. Maybe better as an essay but then how would the author have fit in his Wiki-like trivia facts that link it all together?

[billyskye · Rating 2 out of 5]

Justin E. H. Smith has dropped a Certified Lost-in-the-Sauce Classic™ with The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is. Things start off on a fiery note as Smith delineates the deeply troubling manner in which the internet is altering our behavior, arguing that “for many, the only available adaptation to this new landscape is to transform our human identity into a sort of imitation of the deadly non-human forces that sustain the internet, to trade a personality for an algorithmically plottable profile, in effect, to imitate a bot.”

Smith is keen to point out that the danger isn’t necessarily inherent to the technology itself, but rather with how it is used – crossing a threshold beyond which “a gadget ceases to enhance and begins rather to distort or pervert an activity.” Information abundance isn’t a detriment to humanity; there is infinite data in every grain of sand and in every spoken word. The issue, rather, arrives when it “produces attention scarcity [because] the information is being processed through an engine that is explicitly designed to prod the would-be attendee ever onward from one monetizable object to the next.” Aggregating research through the net has value, but when sites operate under “social media principles” they alter the activity in opaque ways, turning scholarship instead into “scholarship-themed games.” The crude reductionism of our anti-human overlords represents a disconcerting new paradigm. For Smith, therefore, one of the primary threats of our time is “the shift to ubiquitous algorithmic management of society, which lends advantage to the expression of opinions unambiguous enough (i.e. dogmatic or extremist enough) for AI to detect their meaning and to process them accordingly, and which also removes from the individual subject any deep existential imperative or moral duty to cultivate self-understanding, instead allowing the sorts of vectors of identity that even AI can pick up and process to substitute for any real idea of who an individual is or might yet hope to be.”

Though not entirely novel, these points are argued confidently. For Smith, a deeper understanding of (and, thereby, a better relationship with) the internet is only possible through the erosion of the intellectual barriers we’ve erected between the technology and the rest of our phenomenological experience. As he writes, “If we were not so attached to the idea that human creations are of an ontologically different character than everything else in nature – that, in other words, human creations are not really in nature at all, but extracted out of nature and then set apart from it – we might be in a better position to see human artifice, including both the mass-scale architecture of our cities and the fine and intricate assembly of our technologies, as a properly natural outgrowth of our species-specific activity.” He sets out to demonstrate that the ecology of the internet is just one more recent layer of the ecology of the planet as a whole.

A historical and philosophical assault on the blinkered bright lines that keep us from internalizing the messy interconnectedness of all things could very well yield fruitful insight; however, Smith’s offering lacks the rigorous organizing principles necessary to push it there. The quality and cogency of the writing declines after the preliminary salvo, leaning on classic academic hand-waving techniques to muddle through. There’s snail-based text messaging, the loom as a super important metaphor, and a whole lotta Leibniz, but it never really coalesces into anything meaningful. By the end, it starts looking like the book was actually some strange, elaborate guerrilla marketing campaign for Wikipedia. As it fizzles out, it’s rather unclear what Smith hoped to accomplish or how he intended to connect his disparate points back to the forceful introduction. A shame. It turns out the internet was pretty much exactly what I thought it was.

[E. · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating exploration of the roots of the internet and how we use it to see and engage with our world. My only real criticism is that I wanted a coda, some final chapter or statement that drew everything together and advanced the argument.

[Zbigniew Zdziarski · Rating 1 out of 5]

It’s hard to not write a fascinating book on the Philosophy of the Internet. The Internet is a recent phenomenon that has pervaded all aspects of our lives at lightning speed. And just like social and political policies, philosophy is finding it hard to keep up. We just haven’t had the time to step back and process how what is happening around us could be understood at a metaphysical or phenomenological level. This is the current wild, wild west of the intellectual world. So, if you’re a smart, observant, intuitive cookie, a book on the Philosophy of the Internet is a given to be a hit. You’re going to be a trailblazer.

Unfortunately, Justin E. H. Smith, professor of history and philosophy of science at the Université Paris Cité, fails at this task miserably. I’m still baffled at how he managed it. Especially when he started off so well: “We are living in a crisis moment of history, in the true sense of “crisis”: things might get better eventually, but they will never be the same… The principle charges against the internet… have to do with the ways in which it has limited our potential and our capacity for thriving, the ways in which it has distorted our nature and fettered us… as such the internet is anti-human. If we could put it on trial, its crime would be a crime against humanity.”

Well, the suspense has been built! This simply has to be a great read! One would think…

Professor Smith, however, is one of those professors you may have had the amusement as well as annoyance to have come across in your university days as a student. You see a fascinating topic. Great first slide. Great introduction. After 10 minutes, though, you start to shuffle in your chair awkwardly wondering if you’re the only one in the room questioning the validity of what is being presented to you before your eyes. After 20 minutes you start to look around the room to see if others are starting to feel any annoyance at all. After 30 minutes, you have your face in your hands wondering how on earth this person managed to get a high position at a university.

Smith tries to build a philosophy of the Internet. But I don’t think he quite understands what that actually means. Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Heidegger, Husserl - heck, every great philosopher understood that one needs to operate from a framework of understanding of the world (how it works, what it is composed of, whether it has an intrinsic hierarchy of values, etc.) before uttering anything. Then from this framework one can attempt to extrapolate meaning of specific things. Without a framework, your thoughts and observations, if attempting to be philosophical, will be untethered, anchorless, and like balloons will float above in the sky ready to be shot down by a child with a BB gun. Not every great philosopher created a complete framework but when they spoke, you always knew where they were coming from.

That’s generally how philosophy works. Smith, however, thinks that to create a Philosophy of the Internet he just has to show that the phenomena that we experience with the internet, such as communication and interconnectedness, have existed in one way or another since the dawn of time:

“[The Internet] does not represent a radical rupture with everything that came before, either in human history or in the vastly longer history of nature that precedes the first appearance of our species… [it is] more like an outgrowth latent from the beginning in what we have always done.”

And this is how he proceeds for the rest of the book:

“[T]he sperm whale’s clicks, the elephant’s vibrations, the lima beans plant’s rhizobacterial emissions… are all varieties of “wifi” too.”

Pages and pages of analogies from nature follow:

“It was just as common from antiquity through the modern period to envision nature… as a wired or connected network, that is, a proper web… Such a system is instanced paradigmatically in what may be thought of as the original web, the one woven by the spider”

From whales’ “clicks” to spiders’ webs in nature we’re meant to build a Philosophy of the Internet? What on earth are you talking about, here, sir?

I’d stop and move on but these quotes are just too good to pass up:

“The important thing to register for now is that the spider’s web is a web in at least some of the same respects that the World Wide Web is a web: it facilitates reports, to a cognizing or sentient being that occupies one of its nodes, about what is going on at other of it nodes”.

The “vegetal world” gets a mention, too, of course. Field grass, trees - all these have “underground network of roots, whose exchanges can be tracked to a technique known as “quantum dot tagging””.

We’re about one-third of the way through the book now and this is about the moment that I’m starting to look around the lecture room to see if anybody else is noticing these fickle attempts at intellectualism. This is something worthy of a high school philosophy paper.

From analogies in nature, Smith then proceeds to analogies in the history of thought:
“In the history of western philosophy, in fact, one of the most enduring ways of conceiving the connectedness of all beings… has been through the idea of a “world soul”... One might dare to say, and I am in fact saying, that we always knew the internet was possible. Its appearance in the most recent era is only the latest twist in a much longer history of reflection on the connectedness and unity of all things.”

Absolute gold. The best quote out of these sections is this one:
“The very development of the binary calculus that… marks the true beginning of the history of information science, was itself a direct borrowing from a broadly neo-Platonic mystical tradition of contemplating the relationship between being and non-being: where the former might be represented by “1” and the latter by “0.”

The fact that we have 1s and 0s in electronics can be traced back to neo-Platonic mystical traditions? This guy has got to be joking. We’re two-thirds into this book and now I’m not only wondering if anybody else sees through this junk in this lecture theatre but I’m also starting to wonder whether I’m not in one of Franz Kafka’s novels. This guy is a professor at a prestigious university in Paris. It is common knowledge that Kafka was known to laugh uncontrollably when reading his work aloud to friends. By this stage I’m laughing aloud in a cafe myself at what I’m reading.

When Professor Smith finally finishes showing how ideas inherent in the internet originate in lima beans and Augustinian “Confessions”, he ends abruptly and with satisfaction. He says nothing more of value, nothing more to what I’ve summarised here. His “Philosophy of the Internet”, this great masterpiece, is supposed to suffice.

Yes, I’m still looking around the lecture theatre to discern whether I’m in Kafka’s Trial or not. People around me are clapping their gratitude. I have no idea what is happening. When the clapping subsides, Smith adds one more utterance to his work. And then everything becomes crystal clear to me:

“I am writing, from New York City, during the coronavirus quarantine in the spring of the year 2020.”

Ah! There you have it! A work conceived during a lockdown period. Now this book makes perfect sense to me!

We’ve all been there, haven’t we? We all went a bit crazy and insane when we were sent to our rooms by our benevolent government during the pandemic during which time we all conceived of nutty philosophical ideas that were supposed to save the world. The difference is that when we finally left our confines and lucidity hit us like a fast-moving bus, we retracted our incoherent ideas. Smith, unfortunately, did not do this.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book that definitely doesn’t live up to, or even fall in line with, its title.

First, this is not a real history of today’s actual internet. Nor is it a real history of human internets of aeons past. There’s no chapter, nor even a subchapter on anything like “the eyes and ears” of the Achaemenid shahs. And, the biological history of non-human telecommunications internets is “meh.”

Second, this is not good philosophy on issues of consciousness, volition, etc.

Third, there’s no real “warning.” And, a well-written book would have such a warning as part of its conclusion.

First, the issue of algorithms could have been pushed further within the world of philosophy, namely Dan Dennett’s claim about Darwin’s algorithmic “universal acid.”

Second, the issue of non-conscious agency vs conscious intent could have been developed more, as I have written about (Riskin’s book is in his bibliography, but she’s not referenced in book nor listed in index), and more here.

To the degree he indirectly discusses this, Dennett and Susan Schneider are simply wrong. Conscious machines could exist with progenitors having been created without consciousness. It’s laughable that Dennett touted Darwin’s universal acid long ago but doesn’t allow for machine evolution. As for Smith’s take, it’s not an “either or” on machines becoming conscious or dumb machines becoming more controlling and stubborn, IMO.

Related? This ignores the idea in biological evolution, which presumably would also be paralleled in machine evolution, of emergent phenomena, which in turn connects at least tangentially to Steve Gould’s ideas on contingency.

Third, Daniel Wegner’s “The Illusion of Conscious Will” could have stood a bit of discussion.

Beyond philosophical issues, the chapter on “Internet as loom” becomes extremely discursive and never talks about the modern internet, only Babbage and Lovelace, and a bit, Leibniz, who per Smith’s background elsewhere, I’m guessing is so touted because of Smith’s teaching of Eastern philosophy and perhaps seeing Leibniz’s monads as a sort of entrée for students. That said, the discursiveness is a problem of Smith’s many people cited in his previous book.

His last chapter begins as a tout of Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s not horrible, but it’s not all he cracks it up to be, and pace both Smith and Borges, it’s certainly not infinite. Speaking of, it’s also interesting Borges is not referenced.

Two stars and the warning in some such cases to not read this person again. It’s not pablium, but it did get my “meh” tag. And, it’s not THAT much above one star. Perhaps the single biggest reason it dodges that is what I learned about Smith as a philosopher.

Update: Didn't mention it in the original, but, you can judge a book by its back cover, and one other reason this got only two stars and was lucky for that is that the generally loathsome and hypocritical Thomas Chatterton Williams is among blurbers.

[Josh Sheehan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful and very thought provoking read that said and expanded on a lot of what I've been thinking for a while on the internet (and its commodification of attention and anti-human nature), although perhaps with some different conclusions on how to proceed (the author remaining more fond and embraceful of the internet than I care to be).

It notably covers what the cover claims to, that being the history and philosophy (and philosophical history) behind the internet/networking/telecommunications/computing machines, though in nice and succinct manner. The writing is engaging with some rather challenging concepts and language at times, but also thoroughly enjoyable and would make me crack a smile frequently due to clever phrasings or jokes.

I personally find the introduction and first chapter or two to be absolutely stellar and something that ideally should be read by most all individuals that spend any decent amount of time interacting with the internet or technology, since they provide a fantastic overview full of takeaways on what our networked world does to us when we let it (not likely consciously) take the wheel. The rest of the book is fine as well, but meanders toward the philosophical and historical roots of these things, which while greatly important and interesting, carries a touch less of pragmatic applicability for our present conditions.

Admittedly as some reviews seem to mention, at times feels a touch rambly or stream-of-consciousness-esque in writing, but I don't particularly dislike these things given the language and content of what is being said is of some quality and substance. Again, this is something that I feel takes hold a tad more in the second half of the book, and I do agree with some of the arguments that all the information doesn't necessarily connect into a singular major thesis, and some bits feel more like insertions of an essay or lecture on a topic. Again, maybe not ideal compositionally, but the author's writing, knowledge, and perspective kept these bits at least still interesting.

The other complaint I've seen a bit is that the book is some sort of "esoteric" approach, which is unfair and only reveals those readers worldviews or lack of understanding of the content. The author indeed refers to natural processes of fauna and flora that rather mimic our notions of telecommunications and makes arguments as to whether our "telecommunications" and networking should be as such considered artificial, or rather a new manifestation/adaptation for something as natural as communication. I can understand why this is a lofty claim to many and seems farfetched, and one is entitled to disagree with it, but nonetheless to refer to it as simply "esoteric" knowledge or argument is to be ignorant of what advances in biology, ecology, and anthropology have revealed to us in recent years and shunning holistic, interconnected and interdisciplinary approaches.

[Nestor · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't connect with the book; I found it to be densely written, lacking much substance, and unrelated to the title, or at least not to what I expected. I'm giving it three stars because it has a couple of interesting points, which I'll discuss below.

The author, like many others, talked about the Crises Attention referring to internet…attention to what? To work? To Family? In the past the same happened with TV or newspapers. What is it that we need to focus on? Life is too shallow and worthless to focus on something important. There isn't anything that important that we need to focus for hours. Book? Some are good, and some are awful. research math, physics, engineering? That is only if it needs to something as the rest, they are only things to fill our hours…an there's no god. So there's no crisis attention; it's just another way to fill hours.

Perhaps the reason Bolstrom's simulation hypothesis is true is that there is no real underlying physics, and we create reality through measurements. The simulation does it for us; it creates electrons, atoms, and their properties. What we see as reality is not because the waves collapsed due to millions of atoms and time, but rather what the simulation shows us. And when we try to go into more detail—well, since the simulation has a minimal definition(fine-grained), which would be atomic particles���well, it makes us believe that we create a reality from our simulation since the resolution of the simulation isn't good enough to show us true reality. The theory that we are a simulation would explain the Fermi Paradox of why we haven't seen extraterrestrials... the explanation would be simple: we don't see them because in our particular simulation, of the millions that these entities or advanced civilizations are creating in ours, they want to see what happens when a developing civilization doesn't find life in an infinite universe. Now the question arises, if we are a simulation of a civilization or an advanced entity, what need does it have to simulate us if, like Descartes' demon, they know all of reality? Why wouldn't they need to simulate us to see how we react to different variables?

[Thomas Goddard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nor is this book. I do agree, it is a poor choice of title.

‘Memory is attention to something absent.’

It also seems true that where a direct understanding of the topic is absent, it makes people invent wild nonsense like ‘AI will take over the world’ and enslave us. Teach a man how something works and he quickly realises he was in the realm of fantasy before.

We pay a great deal of attention to the latest technical breakthroughs and often paint them as civilisation ending or restructuring events.

The truth is that most of what is being done was theorised a long time ago. That it often follows a path that is fixed into the earth ahead of it by other technologies. That we still have QWERTY keyboards is an example of innovation just being an evolutionary process rather than a fixed process of improvement. Everything made up of tiny steps that line up to where we are. It isn’t always the best path. More often than not we are left inheriting restraints that are strange aspects of our human nature.

This book is a little conversation with an author who is a bit tired of the hyperbole that surrounds AI and other innovations. Sick of the wild speculation that attempts to divorce us from recognising our humanity.

There’s a lot to unpack. Don’t pick this up thinking that it will be limited to exploring the topic of the internet head on. It is a philosophical book, it will loop around the houses quite a lot… but I enjoyed the journey and the thoughts and topics it raised.

[Frank Inserra · Rating 4 out of 5]

You might very well shelve this book after the first 30 pages wondering how on Earth this philosophy academic's staccato digressions into the minds of Enlightenment rationalists will be made relevant to today's internet. In doing so, you will have mistaken the author's object in writing the book for the one you might have expected (a book consumed with the problems of the internet you know ). While such topics are occasionally referenced -- the propensity of social media to leverage inflammatory commentary or to proliferate untruths -- the book is far more concerned with putting the entirety of the internet in the context of broader scientific, historical, and philosophical themes. With further reading, you will learn, and likely enjoy learning, about today's internet (i.e. the IOT, social media, 3D printing, collection and presentation of learned texts) as part of a continuous development of natural, mechanical, and logical reckoning, calculating, production, and telecommunications machines and modalities (real, desired, and fanciful). The rationalists are discussed largely as recognizing and explaining the aspect of mind that realized and promoted this progression, including seeing in the then-modern looms the calculating machine that made them run. It's a great book for those who keep their aperture on the internet broad.

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am recommending this to every serious reader I know. Mind changing, game changing, literally -- no more wordle, quordle, or spelling bee for me. Not to make light of the work involved in drawing all these threads together. And I love Smith's use of the comma. So rare to read such clear, articulate and at the same time complex, penetrating academic prose -- and to find it exploring and expressing radical (sadly radical) readings of centuries, even millennia of thought. It starts as a critique and becomes a celebration.
An exploration of our relationships with the internet pro and con, in terms of intellectual history that goes back centuries, and occasionally into deeper time and beyond "western" culture (not as much as it might), to connect the technological "revolution" with much older ideas and technologies, like weaving, for example--it has some juicy things I didn't know but also reframes issues about attention. The writing style is dense but more elegant than a lot of academic writing. It also looks at the language we use about all this as metaphor revealing older histories. Broad ranging and mercifully short -- "popular" intellectual history parallel to "popular" science. Loved reading it.