A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Antón Barba-Kay (review)

Reviewed by: A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Antón Barba-Kay Matthew Stripling BARBA-KAY, Antón. A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. x + 295 pp. Cloth, 29. 99 This is a truly remarkable book, brimming with extensive research, penetrating insight, and poetic beauty. The book's main theme is the cultural revolution caused by digital technology. As the book shows, we have always been shaped by our tools. With new ways of doing come new ways of being human. In this way, the digital revolution is continuous with previous technological revolutions. But Barba-Kay argues that digital technology also represents a new, perhaps even final, stage in the history of technology. What makes digital technology so powerful—and so dangerous—is that it is a natural technology. By calling digital technology a "natural technology, " Barba-Kay means several things. (1) Digital technology is immediate. Its interface is intuitive and self-evident such that even toddlers can use it. No other technology comes so naturally to us. (2) Digital technology is (or seems to be) an immediate extension of our will. One click of a button can send an email, buy groceries, or launch a missile. (3) This immediacy is achieved in part by the fact that digital technology tends to hide its material conditions. We interact with a smooth, frictionless interface without any concern for or inkling of the complicated hardware, towers, fiber optic cables, and satellites supporting it all. (4) In using digital technology, we are also used by it. Through data collection, we are simultaneously both consumer and product. Everything we say or see online can be measured, analyzed, and stored. In this way, digital technology blurs the distinction between saying and doing, medium and tool. As a result, digital technology (and the companies that make it) can anticipate us, cater to our will even as it shapes our will to its own purposes. (5) Digital technology ultimately succeeds by working directly on our minds, our conscious attention. Its intuitiveness stems from the fact that it mimics our own thinking. It does not alter the world so much as our perception of the world. By translating the entire world into digital terms as immediate objects of attention and manipulation, it gives us the illusion of total control. (6) In this way, digital technology comes to define our thinking. It becomes the paradigm for neutral, objective thought. It presents itself as a perfect mirroring of ourselves and our world, as the ultimate arbiter of truth. The book is divided into five chapters. The introduction lays out the main thesis and anticipates the book's key arguments. Chapter 1 shows how digital technology fits into a history of technology and media. There are several ways in which digital technology is distinct. One aspect that is particularly developed is the way that digital technology fuses medium with tool, communicating with acting. This happens primarily through data collection. The result is that the more we use technology, the more it uses and shapes us. Chapter 2 contains a general theory of technology. Barba-Kay shows how technology that is developed for ease or efficiency ends up bringing about an entirely new way of doing things. For example, cars are invented for ease of travel, but they end up completely redefining space, urban life, and so forth, such that now we cannot imagine life without them. The End Page 537 problem with modern technology, and digital technology in particular, is that it moves too fast for us to appropriate or digest. We thus suffer from "cultural indigestion, " since tools now change faster than habits. Chapter 3 examines the social and political effects of digital technology. Barba-Kay argues that the basic tendency of digital technology, especially the internet, is to surpass all limits and thus to erase context and shared meaning. These, however, are essential to political life. Barba-Kay argues that digital technology is basically a force of political destabilization. Chapter 4 considers the metaphysical implications of digital technology, that is, how digital technology changes our view of our own thinking and of what counts as real. . .