The Internet is not what you think it is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning by Justin E.H. Smith (2022) (read in 2022)

“[…] it is the weaving together of several ideas into a filament thick enough to serve further on as a bright guiding thread through the rest of modern history up to the present day: the idea that natural language can be formalized; the idea that formal language can be processed by machines; the idea that human reason can be outsourced to these machines to make decisions for us; the idea that all things are interconnected”

“To some extent, telecommunication just is amplification: simply to speak to a person in a normal voice is already to telecommunicate, even if at naturally audible distances we have learned to be unimpressed by this most of the time.”

“The principal charges against the internet, deserving of our attention here, instead have to do with the ways in which it has limited our potential and our capacity for thriving, the ways in which it has distorted our nature and fettered us. Let us enumerate them.”

“Private companies have thus moved in to take care of basic functions necessary for civil society, but without assuming any real responsibility to society. This, too, is a diminution of the political freedom of citizens of democracy, understood as the power to contribute to decisions concerning our social life and collective well-being.”

“The great engine that is fed upon countless little nibbles of individual human attention, and that must constantly solicit such attention if it is to get fed, runs much more effectively, and is much better able to indulge its voracious appetite, when it appeals to human passion than to human reason, when it entices our first-order desire for dopamine-fueled gratification, than when it invites us to cultivate moral character or pursue long-term goals of betterment of self or world.”

“This then is the second new problem of the internet era: the way in which the emerging extractive economy threatens our ability to use our mental faculty of attention in a way that is conducive to human thriving.”

“[…] those individuals will thrive most, or believe themselves to thrive most, in this new system who are able convincingly to present themselves not as subjects at all, but as attention-grabbing sets of data points.”

“Corporations will manipulate people into behaving as if they were video-game players, and these same people will adopt an understanding of their own freely chosen pursuits in life as if life were a video game.”

“This leaves many people with a civic education built on realities from the previous century wondering what to do: people who feel the need to “speak up” but are deeply averse to unproductive dialogue, especially when it is being controlled by corporate interests that do not want it to be productive.”

“Civic education has long been based on the idea that public engagement is good, that it is part of our duty as citizens to read the news, to write letters to editors, to talk to people in our social circles about important issues of the day. But the news is now mostly a current within the ocean of social media.”

“[…] what we are seeing for now is a sort of perversion of collective deliberation, as people, some of them with sincere good will, seek to use what is essentially a privately owned point-scoring video game as if it were the public sphere.”

“[…] there is no reason to think we are any closer to understanding how veraciously to simulate canine olfaction, say, than we are to simulating human emotional response to music or reflection on the similarities between love and certain species of flower.”

“Nobody can explain how—according to what laws of nature—machine-run programs are supposed to become conscious of their own activity, any more than they could explain the principles that would have made the Brazen Head work.”

“Since at least the seventeenth century, European observers have imagined Chinese people as being Chinese rooms, processing information and delivering rational and correct responses without any real conscious understanding of what they were doing; and China as a whole has been understood for equally long as a sort of “China brain,” functioning as a whole and as a true unity, rather than, in contrast with European nations, as a collection of individuals.”

“The Chinese are on this view, in effect, wise automata: doing everything rational agents do, but evidently without any true rationality grounding their action. They are like Descartes’s semblance of a man that moves about the street in a cloak and hat, and that so worried him in the second of his Meditations, but now multiplied to the size of a great nation. In sum, China and the specter of automation have long been two sides of the same coin in the history of European thought.”

“On most understandings of the ontology of a musical work, when we hear music streaming through Spotify or YouTube, we are hearing the music itself, and not just a representation of it. And much less or much more mysteriously (depending on your philosophical commitments), when we pay bills online, when we issue such speech acts as promises or threats via Facebook or Twitter, when we tell our loved ones we love them over Skype or Zoom, we are bringing about real transformations in the world, in our financial situation, in our social standing, in our hearts.”

“I type the phrase “Kuiper Belt” as quickly as I can think it, as quickly as I can perceive the desire to absorb the facts of it, and no less quickly do the facts come pouring in from my screen. It is a dream come true, this cosmic window I am perched up again, this microcosmic sliver of all things.”

“What happens with Leibniz is not the proper beginning of anything, but rather—a metaphor to which we will be returning frequently—it is the weaving together of several ideas into a filament thick enough to serve further on as a bright guiding thread through the rest of modern history up to the present day: the idea that natural language can be formalized; the idea that formal language can be processed by machines; the idea that human reason can be outsourced to these machines to make decisions for us; the idea that all things are interconnected”

“While strongly opposed to the “technicist mystification of personal consciousness under conditions of modern industrial civilization” and concerned to salvage “human dignity” under these conditions, I am likewise concerned to show that the greatest problem is not one of unstoppable technological determinism, or of a determinism that can only be countered by “flipping the off switch,” but rather in clarifying the nature of the force with which we are contending, and understanding the limits of thinking that proceeds by analogy between human beings and machines.”

“Animals are a tiny sliver of life on earth, yet they are preeminently what we mean when we talk about life on earth; social media are a tiny sliver of the internet, yet they are what we mean when we speak of the internet, as they are where the life is on the internet.”

“The principal charges against the internet, deserving of our attention here, instead have to do with the ways in which it has limited our potential and our capacity for thriving, the ways in which it has distorted our nature and fettered us. Let us enumerate them.”

“Private companies have thus moved in to take care of basic functions necessary for civil society, but without assuming any real responsibility to society. This, too, is a diminution of the political freedom of citizens of democracy, understood as the power to contribute to decisions concerning our social life and collective well-being. What Michael Walzer said of socialism might be said of democracy too: that “what touches all should be decided by all.” And on this reckoning, the internet is aggressively undemocratic.”

“[…] by allowing the internet to compel us to attend to a constant stream of different, trivial things, we have become unable to focus on the monolithically important thing that it is.”

“This is a revolution at least as massive as the agricultural and industrial revolutions that preceded it. Whatever else happens, it is safe to say that for the rest of all of our lifetimes, we will only be living out the initial turbulence of this entry into a new historical epoch.”

“The great engine that is fed upon countless little nibbles of individual human attention, and that must constantly solicit such attention if it is to get fed, runs much more effectively, and is much better able to indulge its voracious appetite, when it appeals to human passion than to human reason, when it entices our first-order desire for dopamine-fueled gratification, than when it invites us to cultivate moral character or pursue long-term goals of betterment of self or world.”

“This then is the second new problem of the internet era: the way in which the emerging extractive economy threatens our ability to use our mental faculty of attention in a way that is conducive to human thriving.”

“This then is the third feature of our current reality that constitutes a genuine break with the past: the condensation of so much of our lives into a single device, the passage of nearly all that we do through a single technological portal.”

“It gets worse still. In Vladimir Nabokov’s 1957 novel Pnin, the titular character is a lost and hapless White Russian emigré teaching Slavic literature at a university with a striking resemblance to Cornell University. He boards in the home of an American family, the matron of which, Joan, enjoys sitting at the kitchen table with him as she reads the fat Sunday newspaper. When she asks why he will not take a section and read along with her, he replies, sadly: “You know I do not understand what is advertisement and what is not advertisement.””

“But perhaps the greatest change over the past decades has been that individual readers or consumers are themselves now pushed and pressured to operate online according to the same commercial logic as the companies whose products they are using.”

“But there is simply no other choice. You must use the internet in order to do anything at all, including writing and promoting books, and the more you use the internet, the more your individuality warps into a brand, and your subjectivity transforms into an algorithmically plottable vector of activity. Under these circumstances, one wants to say: “I do not even understand of myself what is advertisement and what is not advertisement.””

“[…] those individuals will thrive most, or believe themselves to thrive most, in this new system who are able convincingly to present themselves not as subjects at all, but as attention-grabbing sets of data points.”

“Bots can do many things. They can monitor, track, harrass, impress with their ability to generate natural-seeming sentences, and even make jokes. But in the end they are like the cardboard-cow cutouts of a Potemkin village, as they are not themselves capable of conjuring that precious resource the new economy is intent on extracting: to wit, attention.”

“Researchers have found that the use of such dolls has significant effects in curing or reducing depression. It is not that the residents have been tricked, but only that having the dolls there was enough for them to encounter a simulation of empathy that allowed them to experience its positive effects.”

“It has even become a common insult in some corners of the internet to denounce a person with whom you disagree as “a bot.” The implication is that their opinion is so crude that it may as well have been automatically generated. But to level such a denunciation is also a means of evading any threat of proper intersubjectivity, any obligation to display moral commitment to the other.”

“The great difference, however, is that the books in Burton’s library, like the features of the natural world, invite sustained rather than flitting or fleeting attention, as do the features of the natural world, and there are long and venerable traditions that have sprung up to better enable people to cultivate this attention.

“The internet, by contrast, seems to be structured so as positively to forbid such cultivation. This might be simply a condition of infancy. The great masterpieces of early cinema after all, such as the Lumière Brothers’s 1896 L’Arroseur arrosé [The Waterer Watered], lasted no more than a minute. Roughly seventy years later we had Andy Warhol’s Empire of 1964, more than eight hours long, which, if not a masterpiece, at least is an illustration that, among other things, the cinematic art may sometimes solicit us to undertake marathon exercises of attention that would have been inconceivable in the early years of the technology that made the new art possible.”

“In the future there may of course emerge forms of engagement with internet-mediated arts, and other expressions of the human creative and intellectual drive, that will require the sort of conscious commitment we now make when we begin reading a weighty novel.”

“It is not that the technology of writing was unavailable to medieval scholars, but only that, for the most part, until the modern period true knowledge of an object of study involved internalizing that object by committing it to memory.”

“[…] what we tend to ignore in the wake of this shift is that without memorization, without commitment to memory of a body of knowledge by means of an art of memory, all we have left is a distal relationship to that body of knowledge, where it is retrievable from storage (whether in a book or a hard drive or in the “cloud”) should we need it, but which we cannot really be said to know until we retrieve it.”

“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, echoes in important ways these earlier historical instances of loss.”

“To properly attend to something, unlike being mindful of it, is to relinquish control of the meaning it holds for you, to allow it the potential to become something else, something unfamiliar within the context of your prior range of references and expectations.”

“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.”

“To devise an artificial duck call or decoy is not to cheat at duck hunting, but is rather very much a part of duck hunting itself. Yet to become so reliant on such accessories as to lose the ability to attend to ducks, in their behavior, in their nature, is to leave off from the primordial experience of hunting and to begin doing something else altogether. At what point a gadget ceases to enhance and begins rather to distort or pervert, an activity, will differ for different people, and so it is always futile to attempt to distinguish between good and bad gadgets as such.”

“If we agree with Leopold, the true end of duck hunting cannot simply be the accumulation of dead ducks, and so success in duck hunting cannot be determined by a simple consideration of the day’s yield, the “metrics” of the activity.”

“In its current form it is as if we have had imposed on ourselves a gadget that does nothing more than count the number of ducks we have killed, broadcast that number to the entire world, rank us with that number alongside all other duck hunters, and invite all of them, as well as whatever interlopers feel so inclined, to praise, criticize, or mock us for our ranking.”

“[…] bombarding anxious young scholars with spam-like messages pretending to inform them that “a senior scholar” has just downloaded their paper, that their work is being clicked in the top 1 percent on the site, and otherwise nudging them to continue to “build their brand”: these platforms are not enhancements of scholarship, but rather scholarship-themed games, bearing the same relationship to our work as thinkers that, say, Grand Theft Auto bears to driving stolen cars.”

“It is common, now, to read on the internet accounts of human action that model it on artificial systems and that have no other resources for conceiving human motivation than those borrowed from programming, even when what is at issue is human moral failure.”

“Corporations will manipulate people into behaving as if they were video-game players, and these same people will adopt an understanding of their own freely chosen pursuits in life as if life were a video game.”

“[…] outsourcing our decision procedures is really only getting machines to run a simulacrum of thought, one that has everything our own thinking has, except perhaps for the subjectivity, the presence of a conscious mind behind the thinking.”

“Leibniz had anticipated that the more drudging and uninteresting operations of the mind might be outsourced to machines: they’ll do the math and the analysis of arguments, so that we might “think big,” contemplating ideas and synthesizing the results the machines give us into new and original arguments. What has in fact happened, it often appears, is that these drudging and uninteresting operations, as they are fed back to us, are being taken for the highest form of intellectual work possible, and are being used to model, and in turn to constrain, the way we understand our own minds and our own wills.”

“Leibniz thought we should parcel out to machines that part of our intellectual work that they can do, so that we might concentrate on that part that they cannot do. Now, instead, one may fear, we have perilously neglected this remainder, and while the machines were originally modeled after us, we now take what they can do as the ultimate form of intellectual work, and we emulate it, modeling ourselves after them.”

“This is the beauty of popular music, and it is what gives the cultivation of aesthetic appreciation for it a distinct character, distinct especially from appreciation of classical music, where, however much subtle variation there may be from conductor to conductor, from performance to performance, nevertheless fidelity to the original intent of the composer is valued much more highly.”

“If someone had to take a DNA test to learn that she was partially Irish in the first place, then there is simply no meaningful sense in which she has any more truly inborn receptivity to Celtic folk music than anyone else in the world. That is just not how music and culture work.”

“[…] the shift to ubiquitous algorithmic management of society, which lends advantage to the expression of opinions unambigous enough (i.e., dogmatic or extremist enough) for AI to detect their meaning and to process them accordingly, and which also removes from the individual subject any deep existential imperative or moral duty to cultivate self-understanding,”

“Social media are in this respect engines of perpetual disagreement, which sharpen opposing views into stark dichotomies and preclude the possibility of either exploring partial common ground or finding agreement in a dialectical fashion in some higher-order synthesis of what at the first order appear as contradictory positions.”

“This leaves many people with a civic education built on realities from the previous century wondering what to do: people who feel the need to “speak up” but are deeply averse to unproductive dialogue, especially when it is being controlled by corporate interests that do not want it to be productive.”

“Civic education has long been based on the idea that public engagement is good, that it is part of our duty as citizens to read the news, to write letters to editors, to talk to people in our social circles about important issues of the day. But the news is now mostly a current within the ocean of social media.”

“[…] what we are seeing for now is a sort of perversion of collective deliberation, as people, some of them with sincere good will, seek to use what is essentially a privately owned point-scoring video game as if it were the public sphere.”

“Twitter is the place where “socialists show contempt for hierarchy, meritocracy and neoliberal competition by competing for status in a game designed by a Silicon Valley overlord.””

“Every Tweet, no matter what its content, no matter whether true or false, righteous or trolling, adds to the tidal wave that is currently crashing over our public space and submerging our centuries-old aspiration toward a functioning deliberative democracy.”

“Isn’t it possible that the most recent outgrowths of our own species-specific telecommunicative activity—most notably, the internet, but also such systems as telegraphy and telephony, which we take to be extreme departures from the previous course of human history—are in fact something more like an outgrowth latent from the beginning in what we have always done, an ecologically unsurprising and predictable expression of something that was already there?”

“To some extent, telecommunication just is amplification: simply to speak to a person in a normal voice is already to telecommunicate, even if at naturally audible distances we have learned to be unimpressed by this most of the time.”

“[…] anonymous pamphlet drawing on Digby’s work was published in London in 1688, proposing that a stabbed dog might be put on a ship moving across the Atlantic Ocean, while the dagger that stabbed the poor beast might be manipulated every day at the same time, causing the dog to howl in pain. And in this way the precise time at the place of departure could be determined, and from the angle of the sun and other measurements the lines of longitude could be demarcated, and a major navigational hurdle overcome.”

“Allix predicts that at some point it will be possible to make pocket-sized devices using particularly tiny species of snails, and that we will then be able to send messages throughout the day—“texts,” you might call them—to our friends and family as we go about the city. He envisions being able to receive newspapers from the whole world on these devices, and to follow the deliberations of parliament”

“The story of Jules Allix reminds us that a rigorous historian of science may learn just as much from the fakes and frauds as from the genuine article: even when someone is lying, they are nonetheless doing the important work of imagining future possibilities.”

“We tend to suppose that whatever is species-specific or essential to a given biological kind cannot ineliminably involve another species, that what it is to be a panther or an oak ought to be something that could be spelled out without implicating fleas or moss in the description. But the tendency to think this way is mostly our inheritance of an inadequate and un-ecological folk-metaphysics.”

“And if we agree with the commonplace that a domestic pig or goat is an “artificial” being, to the extent that it is nature transformed in the pursuit of human ends, why should we not also agree that the algae farmed by fungus or the fungus enlisted by the tree to pass chemical messages and nutrient packets along its roots (much as the internet is said to facilitate “packet switching”): why should we not agree that this technique is technology too? Or, conversely, and perhaps somewhat more palatably for those who do not wish to rush to collapse the divide between the natural and the artificial: why should we not see our own technology as natural technique?”

“The debate is, again, unresolved, for reasons that Kant could probably have anticipated. We can never fully know what it is like to be a duck, and so we cannot know whether what we are seeing in nature is a mere external appearance of what would be rape if it were occurring among humans, or whether it is truly, properly, duck rape.”

“[…] our own sense of our specialness among creatures requires us to see the appearance of these behaviors in other species as mere appearance, as simulation, counterfeit, or aping.”

“Consequently, in recent years the internet has begun to occupy a position in human life previously reserved for such familiar necessities as food, shelter, and clean water. Yet we know that there was a time—many of us can even remember a time—when there could have been no claim to such a right, while by contrast we have always needed nutrition and hydration. So again, if telecommunication is simply a natural consequence of our species-specific activity, it would seem to be so in a different way than the signaling of sperm whales is among their kind, for evidently we have not always telecommunicated. Cetacean clicking in the ocean, and human clicking on the internet, are categorically different.”

“The French historian Serge Gruzinski intriguingly suggests that no question is more quintessentially modern than “What time is it where you are?,” as it requires a grasp of the simultaneity of different times in different places around the world, and also requires the power to reach across the divide between these places in order to communicate with an interlocutor at a geographical remove.”

“Even if Paleolithic people were not delivering letters across distances, it is certain that the seashell necklaces and other items we know they were delivering were perceived by their recipients to be packed with symbolic meaning, just like a letter, just like a sequence of emojis.”

“The first voice recording was made in the mid-nineteenth century, unless we count writing, in which case we must move the date back several millennia earlier. But writing, in turn, is what enabled people to fantasize about other forms of voice recording, such as the recording sponge, which fantasies in turn may well have played a causal role in the search for the technology that would eventually become the phonautograph or the mp3. In short, there are no firsts, and the past, as St. Augustine said, is always pregnant with the future.”

“We sometimes revert to this way of thinking still today, when for example we look at a nighttime satellite image of the Korean peninsula, with the South blazing in artificial light and the North in near total darkness, and we imagine this to be a measure of the relative political enlightenment and social advancement of the two countries. But at the same time, and much more indicative of changes since White’s day, we also praise countries like Denmark and Finland for reducing energy consumption and for having the maturity and sense to turn off unneeded lights at night.”

“It is not that there are cities and smartphones wherever there are human beings, but cities and smartphones themselves are only the concretions of a certain kind of natural activity in which human beings have been engaging all along.”

“The internet does not tell jokes; people tell jokes, and these only appear at some of the terminal points of the network, on the screens visited by attentive eyes possessed by conscious beings. It is only at these scattered points that aboutness enters into the network at all, and we may ask whether it is so much entering the network as rather extracting something from it and translating that extraction into a form of which the human mind can make good use.”

“There is no quality of aboutness in the slime mold’s motions; it is not thinking about eating, or choosing to eat, any more than the iron bar is thinking about rusting or choosing to rust.”

“Although its supporters accuse its deniers of attachment to a premodern worldview, simulation theory itself has evident historical parallels to medieval angelology. Like the theologians of old, the new class of experts maintains that there are infinite hierarchies of celestial intelligences (though the terminology is of course adapted to contemporary sensibilities), of which only the wise have knowledge, while the foolish masses continue to suppose that earthly life is “reality.” Knowledge of the hidden truth becomes a sort of credential and confirmation of elite status.”

“Now, it is not certain that such deferential engagement can only be instantiated in a non-mechanical mind, and it is possible that if reckoning just keeps getting streamlined and quicker, eventually it will cross over into judgment. But mere possibility, as opposed to concrete evidence, is not a very strong foundation for speculation about the inevitable emergence of strong AI, that is, of AI that matches or surpasses human beings in its power of judgment.”

“[…] there is no reason to think we are any closer to understanding how veraciously to simulate canine olfaction, say, than we are to simulating human emotional response to music or reflection on the similarities between love and certain species of flower.”

“Alongside the history of computer science narrowly understood, we should perhaps chart a parallel history, an imaginary museum of all the machines that only existed as fantasy, as rumor, as mere items on a wish list alongside so many other things that the alchemists and conjurers knew how to envision but had no idea how to bring about: perpetual motion machines, universal solvents, artificial life.”

“Nobody can explain how—according to what laws of nature—machine-run programs are supposed to become conscious of their own activity, any more than they could explain the principles that would have made the Brazen Head work.”

“Since at least the seventeenth century, European observers have imagined Chinese people as being Chinese rooms, processing information and delivering rational and correct responses without any real conscious understanding of what they were doing; and China as a whole has been understood for equally long as a sort of “China brain,” functioning as a whole and as a true unity, rather than, in contrast with European nations, as a collection of individuals.”

“The Chinese are on this view, in effect, wise automata: doing everything rational agents do, but evidently without any true rationality grounding their action. They are like Descartes’s semblance of a man that moves about the street in a cloak and hat, and that so worried him in the second of his Meditations, but now multiplied to the size of a great nation. In sum, China and the specter of automation have long been two sides of the same coin in the history of European thought.”

“We have no evidence that conscious experience emerges as a rule when computing power is increased. Correlatively, we have no evidence that the human brain is a computing device instantiated in a carbon-based material substratum but that might just as well have been instantiated in a silicon-based or dials-and-marbles-based one.”

“A machine such as Vaucanson’s digesting duck (invented after Leibniz’s death, but certainly not beyond the bounds of conceivability during his lifetime) differs from a true duck in that the machine can be broken down in a short number of steps into parts that are not themselves machines, whereas in Leibniz’s view a duck’s or any other animal’s body remains a machine in its least parts ad infinitum.”

“The imminent arrival of strong AI is in many respects a neo-alchemist idea, of no more real interest in our efforts to understand the promises and threats of technology than any of the other forces medieval conjurers sought to awaken, and charlatans pretended to awaken, and chiliasts warned against awakening. Technology poses plenty of real existential threats to humanity and to life on earth. Automated technology in particular poses plenty of real threats to human thriving and to political equality and justice. Lucid scientists and risk analysts will address these threats undistracted by science fictions.”

“Social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are, in the end, video games, and so is LinkedIn, and so is ResearchGate.”

“The principal difference is that the destruction of the applied arts and crafts by industrialization began to make its effects felt generations before the (currently ongoing) destruction of the fine arts and the belles lettres by the automation of information-processing and “content” production.”

“The words we have been liberally quoting were written in French by an Italian scientist. But the translation here is not ours: the text was Englished by Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, and published in 1843. Though she is credited only as “A.A.L.” (and once, erroneously, as “A.L.L.”), Lovelace nonetheless inserts her own expert voice into the text in the form of lengthy endnotes, some of which elaborate considerably further on conceptual and technical matters than the author himself had done in the original French text.”

“We have been returning again and again over the last chapters to the problem and the potential of metaphorical language: where its boundaries are, and what it has to offer us in our effort to understand the actual world in which we live.”

“In fact, however, the history of science is often largely a history of metaphors. What is discovered as a new explanation or theoretical account of how the world works is, often, a new way to “carry over” (the etymological meaning of the word “metaphor”) from one domain habits or even fashions of thinking and understanding into another domain where these habits and fashions were not originally intended to go.”

“It assumes too much, that is, to suppose that we already have a clear understanding of where the boundary between analogy and metaphor lies. And this is precisely our predicament when we attempt to comprehend computers, networked and otherwise, in their relationship to other things: to living nature, to human minds, or to looms.”

“Scientists license such metaphors, and science journalists run with them, shaping the way ordinary people understand the world around them. Thus a recent newspaper article describes galaxy clusters as being “connected by spidery filaments in what’s known as the cosmic web.”27 From the smallest to the largest scales, the stuff of this world is still said to be bound together by threads.”

“Thus a recent newspaper article describes galaxy clusters as being “connected by spidery filaments in what’s known as the cosmic web.” From the smallest to the largest scales, the stuff of this world is still said to be bound together by threads. The metaphor holds the fabric of our explanations together, at least when we move out of the pure mathematics that is in important respects the true language of theoretical physics,”

“To say that Burton “loved the world” is to say that he sought to include as much as he could on his imaginary stage, to give it order, and to allow it to matter to him. The result is a deeply personal, subjective, and often histrionic approach to science, whether of the human body, or the celestial bodies, or of anything else on which he feels inclined to digress. This is Burton’s “world,” and he knows it and loves it from within the security and comfort of his cramped and book-laden cell.”

“This tour often tapers off imperceptibly into sleep, and the rhythm begins again the following day, which under this new regime of confinement will almost certainly be nearly identical to the day that preceded it. I am already fearing and mourning my eventual release back into the “world” in the vulgar sense: the bare physical reality of commutes, meetings, dinner parties, activities.”

“Twenty years ago I could easily have found myself sitting around doing nothing, when the question might suddenly come to me: “What is a quasar, anyway?” It is almost certain that at that time I would have quickly abandoned my curiosity, hoping perhaps that I might some day happen upon an answer, but not being quite interested enough, typically, to seek one out. Today it is second nature for me to immediately turn to Jimmy Wales’s infinite encyclopedia. The consequences of this reflexive habit for my general knowledge of the world are profound. I am convinced that I know vastly more than I would have had this resource not been available to me.”

“As Jonathan Zittrain has observed, inverting the old line about Marxism, Wikipedia works well in practice, but not in theory. One of the keys to its success is that the openness of Wikipedia’s entries to editing, deletion, and expansion is not a free-for-all. There are at least minimal gatekeeping requirements, as well as the possibility of reversal of new edits by experienced editors, that help to avoid the sort of degeneration, signal loss, digression into irrelevance, and outright vandalism that are so common in comment threads and in public responses to media posts on Facebook and Twitter. The structure of Wikipedia’s gatekeeping procedures, combined perhaps with the very nature of the project, sustains something approaching a community spirit, a sincere and non-dogmatic concern to adhere to the truth.”

“On most understandings of the ontology of a musical work, when we hear music streaming through Spotify or YouTube, we are hearing the music itself, and not just a representation of it. And much less or much more mysteriously (depending on your philosophical commitments), when we pay bills online, when we issue such speech acts as promises or threats via Facebook or Twitter, when we tell our loved ones we love them over Skype or Zoom, we are bringing about real transformations in the world, in our financial situation, in our social standing, in our hearts.”

“To revive the philosopher of science Ian Hacking’s famous question in his article, “Do We See through a Microscope?” we may also ask: “Do we see through the internet?” And the most appropriate answer seems to be: “At least as much as we do through a microscope.””

“There is a sense in reading about these latter things that if we come to be deeply interested in them, we must put down the books a some point and go have a look at the real thing, which, unlike the Kuiper Belt objects and the stars beyond them, we are in fact capable of studying up close. And yet the book is not simply a consolation for the inaccessibility of the thing that interests us. Sometimes it is a supplement, giving us a different sort of access to the thing that we might also study up close.”

“On the Wikipedia page about avian crop milk, I click the link to the page about the Symphysodon genus, also knows as “discus fish,” some species of which “nurse” their young on a secretion through the skin that has molecular properties similar to milk. And, as I read, I begin to wonder: just what is milk anyhow? And how widely is it distributed throughout living nature? I I am not cautious, I will soon find myself reading about the Milky Way and the metaphors that fist associated this star system with milk, but I restrain myself and I think about animal secretions only, and even here, under these constraints, I am aware of a rising sensation in me of the sublime.”

“When I type, the motion, the flow from my thoughts to the tips of my fingers through the keyboard and into the document on the screen, is as fluid and easy as if I were speaking. As I am typing at this very moment, I am not looking at the computer at all, but out the window at the leaves on the trees. That is how intimately I know my machine, and how natural it is for me to think and to produce traces of my thoughts by means of it. If we must find a seat for the soul, surely the tips of the fingers are as attractive a location for the noble role as any other.”

“I type the phrase “Kuiper Belt” as quickly as I can think it, as quickly as I can perceive the desire to absorb the facts of it, and no less quickly do the facts come pouring in from my screen. It is a dream come true, this cosmic window I am perched up again, this microcosmic sliver of all things.”

“processs”