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

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.)