PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksThis is Infinite Detail’s deceptively simple, high-concept premise: if the internet isn’t an unmitigated good—as it so clearly isn’t—what would happen if we just turned it off? And what if it happened without any warning? In less capable hands, these questions might serve as an excuse for Hunger Games–style apocalypse porn. Perhaps even worse, they might prompt an uncritical fantasy of a post-technological turn to a prelapsarian ideal ... Maughan is interested less in the bleakness of the pre- or post-apocalypse and more in a deep exploration of both the unwitting consequences of our contemporary regimes of datafication and surveillance and the conditions of possibility for life, art, and culture in their wake ... Infinite Detail is kaleidoscopic in its attention to life and culture before, during, and after the internet ... Infinite Detail resists easy answers, preferring instead to linger in the questions themselves. I take this as proof of Maughan’s rigor as a thinker about technology and its cultures. In a growing ecosystem of vapid thought leaders, it’s refreshing to have a voice able to do the hard and necessary work of imagining what new ways of being actually look like in practice.
