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
by Justin E. H. Smith
Princeton University Press, 2022

Justin Smith is a professor of history and something called the philosophy of science at the University of Paris, and his new book The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is has a subtitle that reads “A History, a Philosophy, a Warning.” Which is a bit puzzling, since the book, slimmed down to well below 200 pages for its summer weight, contains neither a history of the Internet nor a philosophy of the Internet nor any kind of warning about the Internet. Unless the “warning” part refers to the book itself, since any time a professor of anything labels one of their books “philosophy,” you know you’re probably in for a transcript of largely unconnected quasi-coherent meanderings the professor has had on some subject late at night over bourbon. Such transcripts tend to feel baggy even if they’re only a few pages long; they tend to infuriate with their entitled laziness; and most of all they tend to disappoint by being rain-puddle shallow. 

And most of all, there’ll be the pomposity — and it doesn’t take more than a dozen pages for Smith to indulge. “By treating the internet as a short-term problem-solver,” he writes, “we created for ourselves some new, very big problems; 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.” Until he came along, that is.

Aside from the generally repellant tweed jacket/leather elbow patch tone of such nonsense, which would be bad enough for the asking price, there’s also the sloppy, imprecise thinking and phrasing that always comes standard-issue in works pretending to philosophy. The whole ponderous pronouncement is intended to sound impressively thoughtful, but each individual component of it is fairly idiotic (call it the Jordan Peterson affect). Worse, by reducing the Internet’s role in modern society to such Deep Thought 101 binaries, Smith sets opening terms that make it virtually impossible to discuss that role in anything but Chicken Little terms. And worst of all, as noted, our author’s framing of the issue positions himself as that modern-day Savior, the Thought Leader.

But the book manages to be annoying in small ways as well as big ones, foremost being Smith’s persistent Twitterisms. In a sense this shouldn’t be surprising, since the whole book smacks of Twitter. But in execution it’s nevertheless irritating. Take his glancing allusion to a brief flap in the world of, of all things, comic books:

To invoke one striking example, while also avoiding a needless account of the particular issue that occasioned it, a recent controversy was triggered by the behavior of a well-known comic-book artist accused by numerous younger women, most of them fans of his work and aspiring comic-book authors, of sexually in appropriate behavior, emotional manipulation, and what is known as 'grooming,' in which a person in a position of power shows personal interest and attention to a person of less power, only in the aim of lowering the latter's defenses for the purposes of exploitation.

The well-known comic book artist being slandered here is Warren Ellis, and if you’re asking why on Earth Smith wouldn’t actually name him, it’s simple: it’s a standard procedure among cowards on Twitter to avoid actually naming the people they’re defaming so that they can’t search for their names and find the defamation. 

It shouldn’t be necessary to point out that Smith is here writing a book, not a Twitter-thread. When a coward on Twitter avoids naming what they’re talking about, they’re trying to facilitate high school rumor-network name-blackening. When an alleged scholar avoids naming what they’re talking about, they’re trying to prevent their readers from checking their accuracy. In Twitter-speak, it’s not a good look.

This kind of slippery posturing happens throughout the book, which ends up being a bunch of half-thoughts about a genuinely important subject. Long, long after Smith should have starting getting down the cases, he’s still nattering on:

Difficulty arises when we are still in the course of inquiring into the nature of a given thing – as we are doing here regarding the nature of the internet – for it assumes too much at the outset to suppose that we already know what can or cannot be carried over in the course of an explanation. It assumes too much, that is, to suppose that we already have a clear understanding of where the boundary between analogy and metaphor lies.

So on page 146 of a 174-page book, he’s still trying to figure out the difference between an analogy and a metaphor … about a football field away from even beginning to “inquire” into the nature of the Internet. So the book is certainly a warning — but the warning’s got a lot more to do with your valuable time and money than it does with the Internet.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.