PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksMany critics have argued that social media, and the so-called platform capitalism they express, are essentially antihuman. That they are degrading and destroying our ability to attend to things is, at this point, beyond doubt. I have yet to find anyone who demonstrates the validity of this critique as succinctly as Smith does here ... If I have a quibble with The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, it is not with Smith’s condemnation of social media and its extractive logics, nor is it with his method of \'zooming out,\' a sort of historiographic pointillism that, admittedly, can at times produce a somewhat vertiginous effect ... My quibble, rather, is with what seems to be a failure to address the key issue of technology itself ... The internet is akin to a global prosthesis, allowing access to vast reserves of knowledge and near-perfect planetary communication. But it is also ruining us. Justin E. H. Smith has told us in great detail how it got this way; someone else will have to tell us how to fix it.
