The Internet is Not What You Think it is

I recently read The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is. I wouldn’t recommend reading all of it, but it has some interesting ideas.

The book is kind of split into three parts. The first part was an indictment of all the problems with social media; I loved this part. The second part was a philosophical exploration of what the internet “is”. The last part was a history of how humans have used internet-like things in the past and how the internet is a natural extension of our human nature. The last two parts meandered and often lost my interest, but part one had a lot of great quotes that captured my interest and which I share below.

Explosive Intro

“Facebook and other big tech companies are, plainly, tearing the social fabric to threads, and pulling people apart.”

This is the end of the first paragraph of the book and boy is it spicy. I appreciate that the author doesn’t mince words and lets me know exactly where they stand. They go on to explain that:

“The principal charges against the internet… have to do with the ways in which it has limited our potential and our capacity for thriving.”

I like centering the book on the very humanistic concept thriving. All the arguments against social media are constantly put in the framing of whether or not it helps us thrive. There are three main ways that the internet (“internet” in the book means “social media”) keeps us from thriving:

1) “The internet is addictive and is thus incompatible with our freedom.”

2) “the internet runs on algorithms and shapes human lives algorithmically, and human lives under the pressure of algorithms are not enhanced, but rather warped and impoverished.”

3) “There is little or no democratic oversight regarding how social media work.”

I think these are great critiques of what is going wrong with social media. Number two stands out most to me. Given that these platforms are optimizing for attention via algorithms its easy to see how it will prevent us from thriving. Instead it optimizes for keeping our attention as much as possible, for example by showing us images that trigger reactions that make us want to engage with the app more. No where is this more evident than with the political polarization that social media sites are driving.

“It is well known that political polarization and the spread of conspiracy theories in recent years has been greatly exacerbated by the incentives built in to social media, wehere a subtle, nuanced, hesitant observation is likely to get you hundreds of times fewer likes and retweets than a bold declaration of partisanship.”

This has always been a big hang up for me with these platforms. I am happy to see it expressed so succinctly here. I have failed in the past to express this opinion to folks trying to repost unsubstantiated and polarizing stuff before but I don’t think I did a good job. Hopefully quoting this will help in the future.

Ducks

My absolute favorite part of the book is the duck hunting analogy that the author spends a hefty amount of time on. It begins by thinking about what duck hunting is and what is the point of it. This seems like a sharp left turn, but it comes back around I promise. After describing the basics, the book thinks about devices duck hunters have created over the years and whether or not using those devices has distorted the activity of duck hunting.

“To devise an artificial duck call or decoy… is 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… is to leave off from the primordial experience of hunting. At what point a gadget ceases to enhance and begins to distort an activity…”

Already, I think we can see the parallel to how social media is a device that either enhances or distorts other activities. But the wants to spend more time deep on this duck hunting thing. It notes that focusing duck hunting completely on optimizing a metric like kill count can’t capture the entirety what folks get out of the activity.

“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. It is widely recognized that the activity itself is one of its own ends.”

If duck hunting had an app similar to the fitness, communication, etc. apps we have today would it really enhance duck hunting or would it distort it?

“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 the, as well as whatever interlopers feel so inclined, to praise, criticize, or mock us for our ranking. Such a device would obviously not be an enhancement of the activity of duck hunting.”

So too then, must using the internet like we do must not be enhancing the activities we think we are using it for.

“The crisis into which the internet has thrust us is that it has deprived us of this character that reading, writing, and communicating naturally share with philosophy by aggressively metricizing them.”

“Social media are not enhancements of communication.”

Instead, what all this metrification of normal activities like sharing pictures and messages gets us is:

“a farcical imitation of deliberation, in which algorithms are designed by the companies that provide the platforms for discussion in order to maximize engagement, a purpose that is self-evidently at odds with the goal of conflict resolution or consensus-building. 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.”

Thriving

And if this is what the internet really is, there is no way it is helping us thrive. Overall I appreciate the arguments laid out in this book. I think they present a chance to reflect on how we are using social media. Is it actually enhancing anything or helping us to thrive at all? Or has the metrification of our normal activities simply distorted those activities?

Personally, I am leaning toward the camp the author is in. It reminds me of some of the points Cal Newport made in Digital Minimalism about how many new technologies are more distraction than help. Like the Amish, we should deeply evaluate them before we add them to our lives. It brings me back to his suggestion to create a blog instead of trading likes on social media. It is likely no one reads this but at least it is an algorithm free space and if any reads and likes this it wasn’t because I took a “bold partisan stance” but instead hopefully had a half decent idea. I hope in some small way that means I get to thrive a little more.