sourceType:: book author:: Justin E Smith sourcePublication:: book ref:: noteTitle:: The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is; Justin E Smith. (book)

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is; Justin E Smith. (book)

#refs

for any moment in the supposed history of computers (Leibniz, Llull, etc.), you can always find another predecessor with whom they were in conversation

“The Internet” in this book is defined as basically social media and other algorithmically-manipulated, wide-scale content.

• Four Charges against the internet (because they limit capacity for thriving and distort our nature)

  • The internet is addictive, therefore incompatible with freedom (as power to cultivate meaning long - rather than short - term)
  • Algorithms warp, rather than enrich human lives
  • Little democratic oversight over social media. Private companies have stepped in (as arbiters of public utilities) but without a commensurate responsibility to society (“what touches all should be decided by all”)
  • Universal surveillance - incompatible with political freedom.

• Novelties / unprecedented acceleration / disruptions

  • New sort of exploitation - just just labor - lives themselves are a resource to be exploited.
  • Extractive economy threatens our ability to use out attention for human thriving.
  • Consolidation of so much of our lives into and through a single device (this intensifies the above two effects)
  • No part of our important tech is safe from commercial interests of their owning entities (urbit fixes this!)
  • The new ad landscape is bidirectional - it reads you back. newspaper ads are only ink on paper. ability to draw attention is unprecedented
  • extraction == humans as data points. then, this feeds back: those individuals who “thrive” most in this environment will be those who excel at presenting themselves as data points, rather than as subjects.

• Attention

  • attention is special: it is a moral state. paying attention to a loved one. “to attend” to.
  • bots cannot truly pay attention.
  • Attention is a selection process of taking certain objects rather than others into consciousness.
  • mental prioritization is essential for perception, but not for consciousness or action (this is Dicey Jennings)
  • Attention provides the frame of experience/agency. the ongoing structuring of experience and agency
  • special power of attention: bidirectionally generate the experience of subjecthood. attention opens you up to the object, bringing the attender into a changed state and allowing the attended to go to work on them. (normally this is only restricted to other agents)
  • digital avatars and algorithms make “second person encounters” and other “I“s difficult to achieve. Impedes cultivation of true attention. the subjecthood we do attribute in online interaction is weak, fleeting, misdirected.
  • bots: someday, your moral character may be judged by the behavior of an army of bots that act on your behalf, trained on your digital input.
  • deep, prolonged attention to a long-form (written) work has a moral character for at least this reason: the time you spend on it necessarily can’t be spent on other people or on yourself. the commitment is a big deal.
  • prolonged attention is against the economic interests of social media feeds.
  • people felt that Guttenberg had ushered in an attention crisis, inundating people with too much easily-accessible information.
  • true knowledge was considered to be Memorization. [and nowadays, some might consider having a very well-interlinked zettelkasten to be true knowledge.]