The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is

by Justin E. H. Smith

The Internet is Not What You Think It Is a History, a Philosophy, a Warning has strong TEDX vibes. This is not a good thing.

I will be direct: the first half of this book infuriated me. It pulled from me thousands of words of refutation. I wrote whole screeds against isolated excerpts and viciously mocked cross-referenced inconsistencies in the text. The whole thing really riled me up.

Lucky for you, you will not be reading (all) of my unhinged responses. The beauty of “slow internet”— my own website that doesn’t support me financially and so doesn’t require constant content grist for an ceaseless and ever-churning mill—is that I can spend a week editing out my old-fashioned (lol) messageboard-style flamewar posts before anyone sees them. I won’t take the bait—and bait I do believe it is—that the book presented before it got to the switch. And switch it did! The second half is a warm core, a simple argument that the internet is a continuation of the storytelling birthright of humanity:

Just as we know that the neurological activity associated with immersive cinema or virtual reality is not very different from what goes on in the brain of, say, a Paleolithic child listening to a story told in the depths of a cave before a flickering fire, so too in the case of books and the internet does the common substrate of imagination ensure that the experience is substantially the same no matter what the level of technology that is aiding us in exercising the imagination. Here we have occasion to correct a basic fallacy in the way we often think about technological progress. It is perhaps not that our new inventions provide us a new sort of experience, but rather that we come up with ever new ways of activating the sort of experience we as human beings have always had. No one would have thought to put the physics of light to use for cinematic storytelling, if we did not already know intimately the sort of experience that such storytelling provides.

The end of the first chapter left us (me) frothing at the purposefully bleak selection of internet anecdotes and gerrymandered fears. It tried to force us down the path of what the author calls “the basic fallacy in the way we think about technology.” The whole thing emphasized edge-case problems of the internet simply to make the proffered solutions seem more palatable. What is doubly damning, after finishing the book entire, is that the “glimmer[s] of hope” dotted throughout the second half don’t need to be backlit by the depravity of the intro and chapter one. Rip the frustrating bits out and you aren’t left with treacly optimism but a text both approachable and informative. Leave them in and you have to disinfect each interesting concept of the cesspool from which it emerged.

There are hints, available in hindsight, that there will be this bifurcation. The epigraphs follow the well-worn “two on-point philosophical musings (Leibniz, Lovelace) and one modern fiction quote (Oyler from Fake Accounts) that slices into the topic at an angle” that I admit appeals to me as literary flâneur. It’s getting a little hack—I have had a nod to the power of juxtaposed quotes on my facebook “about me” page for fifteen years—but I am still a sucker for the impact of extracted text and repurposed context.

Prior to the epigraph, concern with the clickbait-mystique of the book’s title—read aloud The Internet is Not What You Think it Is and tell me how the cadence differs from Six Tips the Medical Community Doesn’t Want You to Know—quickly bears fruit; merely the second page of the introduction and already we are offered an apologia for the online cancelled:

“Tremble before the online rage addicts who daily band together in search of new targets: someone caught on video in a moment of indiscretion…some young adult on the cusp of success who is brought low when shown to have used hateful language as a teenager…some clueless normie ruthlessly ridiculed for not yet having adopted the terminology for a given identity group that was ratified by social-media vanguards only a short time before.”

Any subtitle containing “a Warning” is itself a warning that the book will act as scold: there will be tsk-tsking to something, and in this case, it is modern compassion. The hand-wringing over “a moment’s indiscretion” or the loss for a young person “on the cusp of (likely career-oriented) success,” or the vague insinuation that the fickle masses of online “vanguards” are arbitrarily handing down sentencing to the out-of-touch who, say, purposefully misgender someone, revolt me. Those with the finances or connections to get published—to be heard—didn’t have to worry about “the masses” shouting them down. These are the “anti-cancel” creeds of those entrenched in power, of people unable to accept that their “growing pains” are someone else’s real pain.

I don’t excuse those classmates during my pre-teen years the youthful indiscretion that led to them calling me “dina-jew.” Their “hateful language” didn’t derail their nice white kid “promising futures,” but it certainly derailed my desire to express, accept, or admit any part of my Jewish heritage. I imagine that extends to many white- (or cis- or het-) passing American people that hid away a part of themselves after being failed by a system that forgives casual cruelty in the name of ethnic consistency. I don’t forgive those mistakes because they take more than they give. No one needs to live with being someone else’s life lesson.

I do not know how the book can present such deep and interesting thoughts while constructing so many hurdles to reaching basic human decency. There is an oblique description of a comics artist that allegedly took advantage of young women—I assumed it was John K but following the footnotes shows it was Warren Ellis—and these heinous acts are reduced to a data points, examples about the gamification of all things; “user retention” through abuse. Purposefully distortive and needlessly repulsive. How am I supposed to ignore that? How am I supposed to keep reading after, “The feeling of loss of something profound and venerable, when we see that today young people spend hours on end scrolling through Instagram and do not seem to even consider the idea of picking up a book and reading it from cover to cover….”? Beyond the nebulous “young people” concept, how is this even accurate? The world is made of text more so than ever. The internet is Borges’ Infinite Library made real. You know it. You talk about it later in the book! Why is this dig even here, if not to infuriate (me)?! It is plain to see the bait-and-switch in action: how it forces the reader to internalize that the internet is simply bad; how it stokes the generational antipathy against “young people”; how it valorizes reading, but only what it considers worthy of being put down in text. At the close of the book, in an attempt to soft-coup the reader into recognizing that “the internet is good, actually,” all the prior disgust is treated as the internet’s own “moment of indiscretion.” It is forgiven as growing pains of an adolescent medium. Except the victory becomes hollow because the trash piled up in the reader’s head was placed there by the text in the first place. You don’t get to profit from solving your own crime.

I want to continue to go hard at this book as a sort of personal catharsis. I will rein it in, though, because there is a lot of value in the text outside of being the subject of an AVGN reaction video. I like the general concept of the book a lot. It’s sort of like a smarmy version of Jenny Odell’s How to do Nothing, though its tone is so…abrasive…that picking at the text is like scratching an itch—I know it actually makes things worse, but it just feels so good in the moment. The first chapter and intro are, as I’ve said, preachy and out of touch. I’ve rarely had a text that is so basic in its thesis—that of the general zeitgeist of the internet in the last decade is “dumpster fire”—talk down to me so viciously.

Enough examples have been given to show that the opening must be purposeful cringe, meant to rile up—the classic website “this is so wrong, I must comment on it” engagement gambit—and I don’t want all of my energy directed at this rhetorical trick when there is so much substance with which to engage. What we shall see now is where it excels.

Is Not What You Think does a worthy job creating a platform for its argument that the internet is a continuation of humanity’s storytelling history. It runs through prior communication tech—both real and fanciful—which feels like the correct foundation for discussing the internet in context. For actually realizing that the internet has context. And it does so in a way that is digressive while remaining interesting!

On its gamboling route down the path that led to the internet, neat bits of fact crop up: Digby’s stabbed-dog “weapon salve” was not something I was familiar with, and Allix with his snails made me do a double-take:

In the middle of the nineteenth century a French anarchist and con made by the name of Jules Allix managed to convince a least a handful of Parisians that he had invented a “snail telegraph,” that is, a device that would communicate with another paired device at a great distance thanks to the power of what Allix called “escargotic commotion.” The idea was simple, if completely fabricated.

It sets out that truth that the idea of constant contact has been floating around in humanity’s consciousness for a while...but more importantly, it also reveals what has to have been an inspiration of the sea-voyaging epic One Piece.

I love the little snail-phones in the world of One Piece, but knowing they’re not just wacky bits of fanciful background but “real” references to historical flimflammery is a true delight. Likely not what the author of Is Not What You Think had in mind or wanted me to take away from this very serious text, but tough tooties. :P

Another treat for me, personally, is a bit more profound. I have been in search of an explanation for why, partway through a video game, my desire would shift from creating my own story to I must have the best outcome for my little guys running around on screen. It’s led me to really like games I don’t actually like that much—Mass Effect 1, Fallout 3—because, since I don’t really care about the world, I let the main character have flaws. I live with my mistakes rather than reloading to make sure things “go well.” I miss content, but keep going through the plot. I do what I think my character would do rather than exhaust every option in-game. Basically, I just run through the game, letting its story sweep me along rather than poking my nose into every little crevice to make sure I gruffle up the maximum amount of gaming goodness. Like the One Piece snails revelation, I truly did not expect to have the answer to why I get bogged down in the “work” of finishing all the sidequests in something like Final Fantasy 7 Remake when I actually just want to see how the story goes:

Thus, I skim the first volume of In Search of Lost Time and it seems as if the narrator has his priorities all wrong, that he is self-absorbed and long-winded. I start to imagine ways I might correct the work, as if it were a strong of code and I were a programmer looking to make it “run” more optimally. Then I read on and I begin to feel myself committing morally to the narrator, which means, among other things, opening myself up to receiving the world as he apprehends it. As this process continues, and I sink deeper into the work, I find that that world is not at all as it first appeared to me. It is not that I now think the narrator is “good” or “correct” or “praiseworthy,” whereas at the beginning the opposite appellations applied. It is that the moral commitment that I have taken on toward him, the commitment of attention, has infused his world into mine. Neither the novel nor the reader is any longer the same.

This is it. This is it. This is it. “As this process continues, and I sink deeper into the work…the moral commitment that I have taken on toward him, the commitment of attention, has infused his world into mine.” All the rest of the book, take it or leave it. It’s pretty good, I think, even with the trash-soaked old-man-yells-at-cloud.jpg reactionalism off the jump. The arguments presented aren’t novel—the insight the internet warps us is applied to nearly every cultural artifact and technological facet of life: More Work for Mother and the standards of cleanliness; the roving fleet of poison-breathed steel behemoths ruining American cities in Death and Life of American Cities—but the book creates a strong foundation for it in philosophical history. You can arrive at this book’s conclusion better ways, cleaner ways.

But you can’t get, “Then I read on and I begin to feel myself committing morally to the narrator, which means, among other things, opening myself up to receiving the world as he apprehends it.” The admittance of interiority—the importance of self-projection onto and into stories, rather than expecting the text itself to do all the heavy lifting—isn’t coming up in any other book about the internet I’ve ever read. The internet isn’t an abstract entity in Is Not What You Think, untethered from both historical context and the user’s experiences. It is a storytelling device, different mostly in attentional volume but still fundamentally the same as any other literary artifact in structure, if not in practice. I would recommend this book a thousand-thousand times over, if only for this moment of beautiful clarity.

Buried under all my lauds, let’s not forget the book opened with pages and pages of wasted time, repeating stories of how the ad-driven surveillance-state internet as used today lacks the opportunity for moral engagement:

“I myself have spent far more time over the past year scrolling through Twitter than I have spent reading literature, but I do not recall consciously making any such attentional commitment. It is in part for this reason that my scrolling strikes me as a moral failure on my part, and at the same time a moral wrong against me on the part of those who contrived to reduce me to this condition for profit.”

I don’t have any frustration left in the tank. There’s no rant against this. If you’re mad at “the kids” for not reading Proust (which, you are, because I got into a snitfit about it but cut those paragraphs) but can’t find an infinite amount of pleasure elsewhere on the internet….my dude, you know as well as I do that all the thinkers, writers, and philosophers you have quoted or cited have been aristocrats, writing for other aristocrats. Who do you think had time to publish? Time to read? The ability to read? Do we forget that Ada Lovelace is LORD BYRON’S DAUGHTER? Perhaps remember that the historical context of storytelling—while a wonderful place to append the internet—is the purview of an extremely small subset of humanity.

You can get invested into other voices online; voices that have never had a bully pulpit, admittance into the canon, the prestige or wealth to be heard. You should. Speaking as one of the voices coming to you through your computer or phone or laptop, we’re as real as Marcel or Charles Swann (fyi Proust’s father was a “prominent pathologist” and mother was “from a wealthy family”). Commit your moral attention to me, or to your favorite vtuber, twitter personality, let’s-player, tiktoker. We haven’t been vetted by social stratification, but we’re still worth it.