The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning
- Length: 208 pages
- Edition: 1
- Language: English
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication Date: 2022-03-22
- ISBN-10: 0691212325
- ISBN-13: 9780691212326
- Sales Rank: #11615 (See Top 100 Books)
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.
Cover Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. “Let us calculate!” 1. A Sudden Acceleration Our Critical Moment Paying Attention Gadget Being The Tragicomedy of the Private Commons 2. The Ecology of the Internet Signals “All things conspire” Nature’s Technique Cetacean Clicking and Human Clicking; or, the Late-Adopter Problem “I see a vestige of man” 3. The Reckoning Engine and the Thinking Machine Aboutness “They don’t give a damn” Dark Conjurations “The ruling principles of the day” 4. “How closely woven the web”: The Internet as Loom Warp and Woof Algebraic Weaving Why Do Metaphors Matter? Threads 5. A Window on the World Unconfined Thoughts The World Book Do We See through the Internet? The Infinite Book Wheel Notes General Bibliography Index Blank Page
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