A Professor Warns the Internet 'is Not What You Think It Is'

Justin E. H. Smith is a professor of the history and philosophy of science. Princeton University Press has just published his new book — titled The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is. (Definite internet as "the part that we are glued to for most hours of our waking lives" which in its current usage "hinders the exercise of attention, which, indeed, in the book I try to argue is crucial to a thriving human life.")

Smith answered questions from the science editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. There is a crisis moment when the intrinsically neither-good-nor-bad algorithm comes to be applied for the resolution of problems, for logistical solutions, and so on in many new domains of human social life. The crisis starts when that happens. You identify as one of the factors contributing to the crisis on the internet. How do computers play a role in addiction? The reason why they abandoned the fire hose and started nudging us this way is because the social media companies are private for-profit companies, and the more money they can get from us, the better. That is not a problem of philosophy. It is a concerted effort to maximize our screen time. It seems that verything is geared toward exploiting attention on the designers parts, rather than cultivating attention on the user's part. Are you really talking on social media? Are you actually talking? The answer is almost always no, because what is happening on social media is a simulation of discussion and debate. Grand Theft Auto is a video game that is a debate-themed video game. cial media is more like a perversion of the thing it pretends to be. There is no other game in town. If you have any hope for deliberative democracy, you need to find a neutral public space to pursue it in, and online is the only possible setting. If you want to print pamphlets in your basement, that is not going to get you far. We only have one choice as a public space, and that is spurious. It is not a public space because its purpose is different. In different systems throughout the world, including the United States, we are seeing one and the same thing slowly emerge, again, under very different legal systems with different historical legacies. The system in which we are constrained and limit our identities is what it is.

The interview (and the book) re-visit 17th-century German philosopher/early modern polymath Gottfried Leibniz — who built a gear-and-wheel-driven "reckoning engine" — as the first incarnation for the tech utopian dream of outsourcing our reasoning. "[I]t goes from the mid-1670s to precisely the mid-2010s, by which point it became painfully obvious that such outsourcing of reason was actually causing problems even as it was solving old problems. It was certainly not the path to world peace and stability that one might have hoped for in an earlier generation."