Tashroom Ahsan
A Web of Our Own Making by Antón Barba-Kay. Cambridge University Press, 306 pp., $29.99
If I may be permitted your attention for a moment, then I would like you to know—A Web of Our Own Making places your web use under an x-ray and diagnoses your phone addiction. And that's just the start, really.
Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America in 1835 with one foot in aristocracy and another in democracy. By straddling the two sides of this changing world, Tocqueville was able to bear witness to how the world shifted as people attained “increasing equality of conditions.” He spun this idea over and over again to account for each peculiar phenomenon he notices in America. Though he journals about everything from the creation of petty monuments to a change in English language itself, Tocqueville’s threads always tied back into the single ideal of equality. Few of his threads invoked any agents other than the singular American—for Tocqueville, the ideal of emerging equality only took place in each individual who, no longer a member of an aristocracy, combined with others to shape the world. Tocqueville argued that humans, and their actions, in democratic times must always be understood in relation to the pursuit of equality. Barba-Kay argues that humans, now, face the risk of always defining themselves in relation to digital technology.
Barba-Kay writes from an analogous position to Tocqueville. An entirely new phenomenon—the digital transformation—takes place in each individual, causing us to completely recast what it means to be a human being. Barba-Kay got his first phone in his late teens. He witnesses people who, like himself, still have a foothold in what it means to live life without digital technology—but he also sees children with iPads growing up as digital human beings. Us humans eat, sleep, talk, and dance just like every preceding generation. But something about being human breathes the ideological air of our time, coloring our every experience. For Tocqueville, the air was of democracy; for Barba-Kay, the air turned digital. Since this book writes about our ideological atmosphere, it seems to talk about everything. After reading it I sit a little more uncomfortable in my dining room, glitching at the things I hear and see. Why is “mindfulness” a term my friends use for meditation, which is the task of emptying one’s mind? Why do current protest movements, which I so avidly endorse, strike me as apolitical? Why do the news pride themselves on being unbiased? Why do I state that I am “glitching?” In a similar vein, Barba-Kay extends his analysis into the crevices of modern life. He accounts for finstas; trolling; our inclination towards the term “mental health.” Yet even when reaching into the minutiae, Barba-Kay addresses the bigger questions that we ask about digital technology: why the internet precludes political discourse, why we hate our phones yet can’t get off them, why we fear (and lust for) AI, why “neutrality” is our highest expression of rationality, how data makes us feel powerful, our inclination towards identity politics, and other seemingly contemporary problems. And he distills each of these into one primary thesis: we are growing increasingly frictionless by means of digital technology—we are removing ourselves from the parts of time, space, matter, and human beings that we cannot control.
Despite accounting for nearly everything (and doing so in a philosophically robust manner), Barba-Kay never loses himself in outlandish arguments and jargon. This text was written for everyone to read—and so it refrains from relying on anything too far outside of its own terms or what our (typical) media already offers. His launching point (or landing strip) for most arguments is often a very common phenomenon, either a phrase we use or a basic observation, allowing the analysis to rest where our heads are already. He uses our contemporary language for our everyday lives as windows into how our minds have changed in kind. The text reads like a prose poem; there’s frequently a rhythm with which his sentences unfold, beginning with a pithy noun for the phenomenon he describes, ending with a mystical, poetic, and terse line to close his words. His logic follows seamlessly. This text wants everyone to read it and make sense of it. It is a practical philosophy—it begins and ends with life as we know it.
Barba-Kay sacrifices the straightforward clarity of philosophical writing for intuitive clarity. This makes characterizing his argument difficult—at every point, he is both making a small argument about some phenomenon of the digital age, while simultaneously relaying this small argument towards a larger point, diffused throughout the text. The introduction satiates the philosopher’s desire for the synthesis of the mythopoetic and the logical, weaving a complex argument that strings through the conclusions of every section of the book. The form of the full argument is here, embedded in this confusing web. If one had the mental fortitude to apply every principle to every phenomenon, they could deduce the entire book from here. The rest of the book provides the real content for the ideas sketched introduction.
Barba-Kay’s introduction begins with an articulation that the criticisms about digital technology, and whether or not it is good or bad, all feel trite. Everyone who criticizes it is (correctly) weary, but feel as though they must offer contrived positivity to civilize our use. We begin with this problem: why is it that we cannot talk about digital technology? Why is it so different from everything that we’ve done so far that we cannot make judgments about it?
Before we get to this answer, I ought to sketch a handful of the book’s core arguments so we know where it’s coming from. Barba-Kay begins the text with a media analysis, describing how the forms through which we communicate shape the scope of our imagination and lives. To him, technology, or the progression of tools, is a project rooted in the human desire to overcome friction—to do away with the inconveniences of space and time, to efface the corporeal, to enable everyone to do anything whenever they want. Digital technology integrates the tool and the medium in a culmination of frictionlessness: anyone can instantaneously do whatever they want (in the digital realm); communication, too, can occur without the problem of bodies, aimed exclusively at instantaneous attention. With frictionlessness comes the abolition of context and history. Bodies and time no longer need to rub up against each other for us to communicate, and words can be found anywhere for anything. Thus the words we value are those which stand alone and create their own context: atomized, neutral “facts.” Community and politics—two things which rely upon the friction of communication and existence—are effaced in the digital; and when the digital becomes our primary mode of relating to one another, “politics” as we know it grows meaningless.
In precluding us from rubbing against one another, the digital becomes a mirror. You only have to face yourself. Like the mirror, the digital—in particular, the internet—only ever reflects us, while masquerading as coming from without. Unlike the mirror, however, it does not merely reflect our image; it corresponds to our desires. Since it’s a medium, it offers us terms through which we can imagine ourselves—but as a tool, it asks us to act upon ourselves, to try to perfect this imagination through itself. But enacting this perfection requires no action, only power. We feel infinitely free and equal online. The internet never asks us to make a choice. We don’t commit to what our feeds offer us—we can always unsubscribe or log off. The internet offers us infinite choices, all of which are non-commital: you can be one thing one day and another the next. But precisely because we never choose into ceaseless reflection, we suspend ourselves in perpetual possibility, falling for an appearance of objectivity that reinforces subjectivity. We feel more equal and free online than ever before, swimming in all our choices, yet our bodies remain unmoved. Freedom and equality have taken on a frictionless meaning in the digital age. These two examples—the mirror and the abolition of politics—are two highways on the web of observations accounted for by the digital shift.
In synthesizing these large arguments linearly, I lose what I call ‘Barba-Kay logic.’ Barba-Kay refrains from making sweeping value judgments (apart from remarking that digital technology is an “essentially dehumanizing force” once.) His rhetorical strategy makes it more complicated than calling him a standard tech-pessimist. In one section, where he refutes the notion that AI will displace us, Barba-Kay writes: “What is novel about technologies that engage psychologically is not that they will learn to do without us, but that we will unlearn how to be without them — not that they will act like human beings, but that we will act like robots to make them more human, which in turn recoils on what we want ‘human’ to mean for us at all.” This nugget is emblematic of the tone of the whole text. Barba-Kay knows that technology isn’t turning minds into mush (per sé) and robots won’t displace humans. At the same time, data will not bring about happiness, nor will great Reddit arguments solve racism. Asking these questions, he thinks, assumes that digital technology can do something other than what it already does. Instead, he points out something else: the terms of ‘humanity’ are growing inextricable from the terms of digitality. Barba-Kay conclusions are both milder and scarier. Our worst fears are not coming true, but something much deeper is happening to change us. The very terms of ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ are changing by means of the digital—to ask if the digital is one or the other overlooks the fact that we’re now asking a new kind of question. Every argument about it—for or against—each takes certain ideals (like freedom of choice, or equality) and measures digital technology against it, overlooking the fact that these ideals are, themselves, ideals (neutrally) reinforced by digital technology. They are the ideals of choice itself, of technical freedom, of a good that seems so factual that it must be good. To evaluate digital technology is to ask not about whether things are getting better or worse; it is to ask about a change in values.
There can be no ‘solution’ to the digital problem. To be a human being, Barba-Kay argues, is to “know that the strain between [our perfection and imperfection] is just what spells our worth.” Humanity is bound up in living the question of what we are, what makes us good. Modernity shifts this question: he writes, “this is to be modern: to continuously struggle to give definition to ourselves in contrast to new technologies in such a way that the struggle itself comes completely to define us.” Though modernity forces us to distinguish ourselves against technology, we retain the fact of being human in the modern age. We still strive to define ourselves in purely human terms, but the digital threatens us to lose sight of the human question. It assimilates the very terms in which we conceive of the human (the terms of data, neutrality, and facts), such that the question becomes a digital one. All that Barba-Kay asks us to do is to say no. Only a human can say no. But what are we saying no to? Not technology as such, as some suggest—but to blindly understanding ourselves in terms of technology.
It’s entirely fitting that the book ends with a literary section—some have likened it to The Grand Inquisitor, from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and these comparisons are apt; I find it best conceived in the same literary vein as Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. Either/Or is styled as a literary dialogue in which the aesthetic form and content of each argument harmonizes, creating a layered dichotomy between the two. Similarly, Barba-Kay offers us a literary argument about the vitality of salvaging the corporeal, uncontrollable human experience to retain our sense of meaning. He gives us a book ripe with life preaching for meaning. The response is a brief sardonic e-mail, written by an anonymous Big-Tech CEO, arguing that Barba-Kay, too, assimilates into the mass of information and entirely misses that human happiness is actually optimized by technology. The CEO ironically offers him a job in return—they want a critical data point in their team. As one reads the email in isolation, it seems entirely reasonable. Who could argue against the fact that self-driving cars could save lives (if perfected)? Humans, he argues, are quantifiably more satisfied with their lives—and with more data, they will be served better by technology to improve their happiness. They are freer than ever before. Devices liberate them from white collar toil. But you, the reader, only encounter this email after Barba-Kay equips you with every counter-argument to every point the CEO makes. The tech-mongering huckster misses Barba-Kay’s points—that the human being (and its meaning and freedom) are unquantifiable, that the desire for automation is the desire to ascribe responsibility to nobody, not to make things better.
The book predicts and assimilates this kind of argument. It parodies itself in a way that feels inextricable from the argument itself. (I wrote ‘Ha’ 24 times in the margin of the first section alone.) Several sentences in the text seem to be written almost explicitly to grab attention. They’re clickbait. They’re made accessible by being at the beginning or end of paragraphs. Isn’t this apt for a book written about attention to reward it? You could read a series of these clickbait lines and learn something —but you’d be left with a poem far less rich than the prose between the lines. Barba-Kay articulates his point again: the content (and sustenance) of attention is what matters, not the mere acquisition of it. The clickbait is ironic, but its sincerity holds the argument together. Similarly, the internet blurs the lines between irony and sincerity, as Barba-Kay argues, because of the elimination of context from speech. He imitates this ambiguity in his prose, making it innately appealing to those chronically online. I found this action amusing. It kept me listening. And it made clear, in form, why the tech-mongerer was off.
Barba-Kay’s task is to salvage the human from the digital. He takes a method entirely different from most criticism of the internet—he invokes the You, not the We. The We is a category nominated into importance by technological thinking. It is the We who drive data, the We who account for statistical masses, the We who cannot get off of our phones. But it is only the You who can choose to be answerable to yourself as a human being; no policy, practical advice, or self-help will do that for you. This book, more than a work of philosophy, reads like a letter. It’s a letter to what makes us human. The final section of the book feels like a quiz following that letter. If you agree with the job offer email, then the book has failed you. If you can articulate your problem with it, then you’re beginning to understand the task at hand. Either way, after reading this book, you are called to justify your stance towards living in the digital world—a justification that digital life tries to obscure.
Tashroom Ahsan is a conceptual project based inside of a (special) gnome.