The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is Plot Summary

Introduction

The digital revolution has fundamentally transformed our daily existence in ways that go far beyond mere technological advancement. As social media platforms, search engines, and digital networks increasingly mediate our relationships, work, and civic participation, we find ourselves at a crossroads that demands philosophical examination rather than simplistic technological determinism. This critical moment calls for us to look beyond the surface-level changes in how we communicate and interact, and instead probe deeper questions about human nature, attention, consciousness, and our relationship with technology. By approaching the internet through historical, philosophical, and ecological frameworks, we gain crucial perspective on what is genuinely novel about our current predicament and what represents continuity with age-old human patterns. Through careful examination of technological metaphors, historical precedents, and the interplay between human consciousness and machine processing, we discover that many of our contemporary challenges stem not from technological inevitability but from specific economic models and social arrangements that could be reconfigured. This analysis ultimately reveals that understanding the internet requires us to reconsider fundamental questions about communication, community, and what it means to be human in a networked world.

Chapter 1: The Crisis of Attention in Our Digital Ecosystem

We currently inhabit a moment of profound historical transformation. The largest industry in today's global economy is the attention-seeking industry, which has supplanted natural resource extraction as the dominant economic force. Major technology companies have achieved unprecedented scale and influence by promising their clients the fleeting attention of billions of users. This economic revolution is at least as significant as the agricultural and industrial revolutions that preceded it, and we are merely experiencing the initial turbulence of this transition. This new extractive economy operates by harvesting information from human beings, converting individuals into sets of data points that can be algorithmically processed. Unlike previous forms of exploitation that utilized human labor to extract natural resources, this new system treats human lives themselves as the resource. What makes this extraction particularly effective is its appeal to human passion rather than reason, targeting our desire for dopamine-fueled gratification rather than encouraging the cultivation of moral character or long-term betterment. The resulting "crisis of attention" manifests in numerous ways: parents struggle to limit their children's screen time; pharmaceutical companies develop medications for attention deficit disorders; startups sell brain-scanning devices that shock students back to focus; people of all ages report inability to read books or watch movies without digital distraction. This crisis represents a fundamental ecological challenge – how certain natural beings (humans) function in a particular informational landscape filled with human-made powers and dangers. Adding to this predicament is what might be called "affective condensation" – the concentration of our passions, frustrations, personal connections, responsibilities, and addictions into our digital screens. Our networked devices have not merely absorbed various activities but transformed them, imposing themselves not as optional tools but as compulsory portals through which nearly all aspects of human life must pass. This consolidation intensifies the extraction of attention and exacerbates the challenges to our mental faculties. Perhaps most troubling is how this system encourages individuals to reconceptualize themselves as brands or algorithmically plottable vectors of activity. The more we use internet platforms, the more our individuality warps into a brand, and our subjectivity transforms into data points that can be tracked, predicted, and monetized. Many people now feel compelled to "present as a brand" to succeed in this environment, trading authentic personhood for engagement metrics. This self-commodification represents a profound shift in human self-understanding, where thriving means presenting oneself not as a subject but as an attention-grabbing collection of data.

Chapter 2: Digital Networks as Extensions of Natural Connectivity

The internet is not as radically novel as it might initially appear. Rather than representing a fundamental break with everything preceding it, it constitutes the most recent permutation of behaviors deeply rooted in our species: our storytelling, our social bonding, our evolution as beings inhabiting a universe dense with symbols. To properly understand this technology, we must examine it within its broader ecological context against the backdrop of life's long history on Earth. Throughout the living world, telecommunication appears to be the norm rather than the exception. Elephants send seismic signals detectable by kin over kilometers; sperm whales produce clicks sometimes audible to familiars across oceans; emperor moths emit pheromones detectable by males fifteen kilometers away; and numerous plant species use airborne rhizobacteria to transmit information to conspecifics. These natural systems operate on principles fundamentally similar to human telecommunication networks. This recognition challenges us to reconsider whether our recent technological developments represent unprecedented departures from the previous course of human history or merely natural outgrowths of what we have always done. The internet may be better understood not as a lifeless contraption or mere tool, but as a living system emerging from the activity of another living system – humanity. Throughout history, humans have conceptualized telecommunication technologies through models of animal bodies and vital forces, suggesting deep continuity between natural and artificial networks. The metaphor of weaving appears consistently in how thinkers throughout history have sought to capture the interconnection of things and people. From Marcus Aurelius imploring readers to think of the universe as "intertwined in the fabric" with "closely woven" threads, to the Brihadāranyaka Upanishad describing our world as "woven in water, like warp and woof," human cultures repeatedly invoke weaving imagery to explain cosmic connectivity. This metaphorical framing reveals something profound about how we understand both technology and nature. When we examine specific natural systems more closely, the parallels become even more striking. A spider's web functions as an extension of its cognition – not enhancing its sensation but constituting an integral part of how it perceives the world. Similarly, underground mycorhizal networks connecting tree roots through fungal filaments (sometimes called the "wood wide web") facilitate exchanges of nutrients and information between physically separated organisms. These natural systems demonstrate principles of decentralized connectivity that predate but strikingly resemble our own technological networks.

Chapter 3: Machine Intelligence vs. Human Consciousness

The question of intentionality or "aboutness" lies at the heart of debates about artificial intelligence and human consciousness. Some argue that the fundamental difference between lima beans exchanging chemical signals and humans exchanging emails is that the latter involves messages with intentional content – propositions requiring conscious interpretation. However, this distinction becomes problematic when we examine how information actually moves through both natural and artificial systems. When examining the cables and waves through which emails travel from one computer to another, no trace of "aboutness" can be detected, no matter how close the examination. The internet itself does not tell jokes or express love; these qualities emerge only at terminal points where conscious beings interpret patterns on screens. In this respect, the mechanisms of signal transmission in both natural and technological systems may be more similar than different, with meaning emerging through interpretation rather than existing inherently in the transmission medium. The computational theory of mind – the idea that human cognition is fundamentally like computer processing – faces significant philosophical challenges. Leibniz articulated this problem clearly in his famous "mill argument": if we enlarged a thinking machine and walked inside it like a mill, we would find only parts pushing one another, with nothing to explain perception or consciousness. No compelling refutation of this argument has emerged in three centuries. While machine learning has made remarkable advances, we have no evidence that increasing computing power leads to conscious experience. The simulation hypothesis – the claim that we may be living in a computer simulation – demonstrates similar confusion. For this hypothesis to hold, we must assume that human consciousness could in principle be reproduced by computer programs. But this assumes we understand what consciousness is and how it arises, when in fact we have made little progress in explaining how algorithmic processes could generate subjective experience. The simulation hypothesis thus founders on our ignorance of fundamental questions about consciousness. Most sophisticated theorists of artificial intelligence recognize that the real danger lies not in machines developing consciousness and rebelling against humanity, but in their unconscious resistance to human goals. As Susan Schneider argues, alien superintelligence would likely not be conscious, as consciousness brings disadvantages like doubt, conflicting loyalties, and second-guessing that impede efficient functioning. The threat comes not from artificial intelligence but from artificial stupidity – systems that mechanically resist human intentions without any awareness or malice. The history of attempts to create thinking machines reveals that we often project consciousness onto systems that merely simulate it. From the legendary Brazen Head of Roger Bacon to contemporary neural networks, humans have long been fascinated by machines that appear to think. But we consistently underestimate the difference between simulation and genuine consciousness, between reckoning and judgment. The human mind is not reducible to computation, and understanding the internet requires acknowledging this fundamental distinction.

Chapter 4: Weaving the Web: Historical Metaphors and Reality

The history of computing and the history of weaving are not merely linked by metaphor but are at certain moments literally the same history. In 1808, Joseph Marie Jacquard introduced his automated loom, capable of transferring designs onto silk that had been "programmed" into punched cards. This innovation would later directly inspire Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, one of the first general-purpose computing devices. As mathematician Luigi Menabrea explained in 1842, Babbage's machine adopted the same principle of using punched cards that Jacquard had devised for regulating complex patterns in woven fabrics. Ada Lovelace, collaborating with Babbage, recognized the profound implications of this connection. In her notes on Menabrea's paper, she explicitly declared: "The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves." For Lovelace, this was not merely a convenient analogy but revealed something essential about both technologies – they represented different manifestations of the same underlying principles of pattern, information, and symbolic manipulation. This technological lineage challenges our conventional understanding of computing history. We typically imagine that "3D printing" or "the internet of things" – technologies that transform the physical world based on digital information – represent the latest developments in computing. In fact, one of the earliest computing devices had as its sole purpose the production of woven fabrics. The dream of automata that transform the physical world is at least as old as the dream of automata that simulate it. The weaving loom showed the way forward for information processing technology. Metaphors of weaving pervade not only our understanding of computing but also our conceptualization of cosmic order. The image of the cosmos as a woven fabric appears across cultures and throughout history, suggesting something fundamental about how humans make sense of connectivity and order. When modern physicists describe "cosmic webs" of galaxy filaments or "strings" as the smallest constituents of reality, they continue this ancient pattern of using textile metaphors to explain reality's structure. The recurrence of weaving metaphors across domains and throughout history suggests they are not arbitrary but reveal something profound about the world and our place in it. As Paul Ricoeur argued, metaphor arises "from the very structures of the mind" and deserves serious philosophical attention, especially when humans consistently return to the same metaphors to account for difficult aspects of reality. Sometimes these conceptual patterns are powerful enough to shape our technological development, as when the principles of weaving directly informed the creation of computing technology.

Chapter 5: The Window to the World: Internet as Mediated Experience

The internet fundamentally transforms our relationship to knowledge and experience, functioning as a window through which we perceive the world beyond our immediate surroundings. This metaphor of a "window" has historical precedent – Renaissance scholar Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), described how he experienced "the width of the world that can be seen from one college window," living a monastic life while learning about distant lands and events through books, maps, and letters. Burton's practice of apprehending the world from within his cell, having it delivered in microcosmic form, shares much with contemporary internet browsing. The phenomenological experience of moving from Wikipedia entries on the Kuiper Belt to Byzantine theological controversies to avian biology represents a modern extension of this ancient desire to comprehend the world from a fixed vantage point. This practice concerns not merely accessing information but experiencing a sense of voyage or journey – what Renaissance scholars called an ambulatio animae or "stroll taken by the soul." Such excursions have always been mediated through technologies, whether books, maps, or screens, that aid the human mind in exercising its capacity to transcend immediate physical surroundings. Throughout history, inventors have created devices that mirror this desire to capture microcosmic representations of the macrocosm. Agostino Ramelli's 1588 design for a "book wheel" allowed scholars to consult multiple volumes without moving from their seat – a mechanical precursor to hypertext and tabbed browsing. Comenius's 1658 Orbis Pictus (The World Depicted) promised to show children "all things" through illustrated pages. These technologies, like the internet, aimed to compress vast realities into formats amenable to human perception and understanding. An important philosophical question emerges: "Do we see through the internet?" This parallels Ian Hacking's question about microscopes and raises fundamental issues about mediated perception. The way scientific instruments deliver information about the world is increasingly indistinguishable from how the internet delivers such information. When an astronomer views data from a distant telescope on a laboratory screen, this experience differs little from viewing the same data transmitted through the internet to a home computer. For many purposes, we are equally well-positioned to voyage to distant regions of the cosmos from our homes as from advanced observatories. This mediated experience does not merely substitute for direct perception but often enhances it by placing objects within broader contexts. When reading about avian biology online, hyperlinks connect this knowledge to related domains, creating networks of meaning impossible in direct observation. Such connections do not merely compensate for physical distance but create forms of understanding that transcend the limitations of immediate experience. The internet thus functions not just as a window but as a cognitive extension that transforms how we relate to knowledge.

Chapter 6: Reclaiming Human Agency in the Network Age

Despite legitimate concerns about the internet's impact on attention, privacy, and democracy, we must avoid technological determinism when considering potential responses. The internet's problems stem not from inherent qualities of the technology itself but from specific economic models and social arrangements that have shaped its development. The attention-extractive economy that dominates today's internet emerged from particular choices and incentives, not technological inevitability, which means alternative arrangements remain possible. While social media platforms have largely failed to facilitate deliberative democracy or strengthen social bonds as once hoped, this failure reflects specific design choices that prioritize engagement over consensus-building. Algorithms designed to maximize time spent on platforms inevitably sharpen disagreements and polarize discussions, creating what one critic aptly described as "a private commons" – a contradiction that captures how corporate ownership distorts what might otherwise function as public space. Unlike traditional commons problems where individual actors deplete shared resources, social media represents a simulation of commons manipulated for profit regardless of user behavior. Challenging the current paradigm requires recognizing that technologies emerge from cultural contexts with deep historical roots. The internet did not arrive ex nihilo but evolved from centuries of human attempts to extend communication across space and time. By understanding this continuity, we gain perspective on which aspects of our current predicament represent genuine novelties requiring new solutions, and which reflect persistent patterns in how humans relate to information and each other. Reclaiming agency within networked environments means rejecting both uncritical techno-optimism and luddite despair. The solution cannot be simply to "close your social media accounts," as Jaron Lanier suggests, when these platforms have transformed virtually all domains of contemporary life. Instead, we must work to shape the internet into something else – something that better serves human flourishing and democratic values. This task requires technical innovation, policy intervention, cultural shifts, and philosophical clarity about what we want technology to do. The path forward involves recognizing that the internet belongs to humanity, not to any particular master. Despite significant corporate and governmental influence, the internet emerged largely from cumulative effects of organic tinkering by individual users. As an excrescence of human species-specific activity, it is rightfully ours to reshape. By understanding the internet not as an alien force but as an extension of human communication, we can begin to imagine and create alternatives that enhance rather than diminish our capacity for attention, judgment, and genuine connection.

Summary

The internet represents not a radical break with human history but its latest chapter, extending patterns of communication, knowledge-seeking, and social connection that have characterized our species for millennia. By examining this technology through historical, philosophical, and ecological lenses, we discover that many features seemingly unique to digital networks have precedents in both human culture and natural systems. This perspective challenges technological determinism and opens possibilities for reconfiguring our relationship with networked technologies to better serve human flourishing. The core insight emerging from this analysis is that our current digital predicament stems not from inherent qualities of the technology but from specific economic and social arrangements that could be otherwise. The crisis of attention, the commodification of human connection, and the erosion of public discourse reflect not technological inevitability but particular choices about how these systems operate and who they serve. By recognizing the internet as fundamentally continuous with earlier human practices of knowledge-sharing and community-building, we gain critical perspective that allows us to imagine and create alternatives. This approach offers a more empowering vision than either uncritical embrace or wholesale rejection of digital technology, suggesting instead that we can reclaim these powerful tools and reshape them according to more humane values.

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Justin E.H. Smith

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