Skeptics of contemporary technologies will appreciate [Smith's] descriptions of the way the internet is 'addictive and is thus incompatible with our freedom,' and how it 'shapes human lives algorithmically' in a way that can lead to “warped and impoverished” ways of living ... On the whole, however, Mr. Smith sees technology, past and present, for its possibilities, and in this way his philosophy is a useful corrective for the often-despairing tone of much technology criticism ... The second half of the book is a non-linear, eclectic romp through the early history of technology, and readers will have to surrender to Mr. Smith’s often-discursive writing style. He has a capacious mind and myriad interests but is not always successful in his attempts to draw a clear line from, say, a 19th-century fraudster’s claims about telepathic snails to the meaning of the modern-day internet. His wildly enthusiastic claims on behalf of the early modern German philosopher Leibniz stretch credulity ... Yet Mr. Smith’s indictment of the way we understand the internet is not wrong: In our haste to see the history of technology as an always-improving story of progress, one largely divorced from the natural world, we are missing out on much-needed insights. In particular, his argument that contemporary research on artificial intelligence would benefit from better grounding in the complicated history of technology deserves greater amplification ... Mr. Smith has given readers a fresh interpretation of the history of technology; a creative, if sometimes mystifying, philosophy of the internet; and a keen sense that we don’t always know what the internet is doing to us.
The title of Smith’s book is ungainly but cunning in asking not what the internet is but what it isn’t, pushing against our certainties about its very nature. For all the jeremiads, this is a book of nots. The internet age is still in its infancy, and forms of engagement may yet appear that reconfigure how we interact with our digital selves and the mediated world. If we feel that information overload is at the root of our sapped capacities for attention, Smith is quick to note that the same crisis of attention was sounded in the century and a half following Gutenberg’s innovation in printing technology ... One of the pleasures of Smith’s philosophical tour is to note how frequently the implementation of ideas and their consequences jump domains ... The vision that inspired Lovelace has become much more complex as its implications have disclosed themselves. One of the great achievements of Smith’s book is to permit us to honor her legacy, ambition, and achievement—and that of many others both before and after her—while buttressing a healthy and necessary skepticism toward the claims of tech transcendence and the uniqueness of our moment.
... erudite ... affords an opportunity to reflect deeply on what [Smith] calls the 'addictive power of the internet,' and to consider its implications for our individual and collective lives ... There's no shortage of journalistic jeremiads raising concerns of this nature, bemoaning the Internet's impact on modern life. What distinguishes Smith's exploration is that he writes from the vantage point of a professor of history and philosophy of science, the subjects he teaches at the University of Paris, and his insights are deeply informed by these disciplines ... Unlike similar works, Smith stops short of offering any broad individual or societal prescriptions for solving the problems he identifies. But in simply raising readers' awareness of the rising threat from the ways in which they are being manipulated in the service of 'attention-extractive profit-seeking,' by forces that are 'making us less free and less capable of achieving human thriving,' he may sound enough of an alarm to move some of them to action.
... has a subtitle that reads A History, a Philosophy, a Warning. Which is a bit puzzling, since the book, slimmed down to well below 200 pages for its summer weight, contains neither a history of the Internet nor a philosophy of the Internet nor any kind of warning about the Internet. Unless the “warning” part refers to the book itself, since any time a professor of anything labels one of their books 'philosophy,' you know you’re probably in for a transcript of largely unconnected quasi-coherent meanderings the professor has had on some subject late at night over bourbon. Such transcripts tend to feel baggy even if they’re only a few pages long; they tend to infuriate with their entitled laziness; and most of all they tend to disappoint by being rain-puddle shallow ... And most of all, there’ll be the pomposity — and it doesn’t take more than a dozen pages for Smith to indulge ... Aside from the generally repellant tweed jacket/leather elbow patch tone of such nonsense, which would be bad enough for the asking price, there’s also the sloppy, imprecise thinking and phrasing that always comes standard-issue in works pretending to philosophy. The whole ponderous pronouncement is intended to sound impressively thoughtful, but each individual component of it is fairly idiotic (call it the Jordan Peterson affect). Worse, by reducing the Internet’s role in modern society to such Deep Thought 101 binaries, Smith sets opening terms that make it virtually impossible to discuss that role in anything but Chicken Little terms. And worst of all, as noted, our author’s framing of the issue positions himself as that modern-day Savior, the Thought Leader ... But the book manages to be annoying in small ways as well as big ones, foremost being Smith’s persistent Twitterisms ... This kind of slippery posturing happens throughout the book, which ends up being a bunch of half-thoughts about a genuinely important subject. Long, long after Smith should have starting getting down the cases, he’s still nattering on.
Smith is not quite so doctrinaire about print, but he makes a good case that the computer of Gottfried Leibniz’s dreams more than 300 years ago was not the personality-shaping machine of today ... The best parts of this thoughtful book-length essay link those algorithms to the 'gamification of social reality,' of which a strong example is the down-the-rabbit-hole entity called QAnon ... A worthy critique of a technology in need of rethinking—and human control that seeks to free and not enchain.