>>56578Smith is a philosopher of science at the University of Paris, an occasional Damage contributor, and one of the most interesting public intellectuals of our age. He’s one of the few people writing on the internet who manages to avoid writing like the internet. Online writing might be about birds or Proust or the Kuiper Belt, but always in a way that’s optimized for the endless, tedious war being fought on social media. Occasionally, Smith will even write about cancel culture or wokeness or Trump, but always in a way that points away from the squabbles of the day, and towards a more genuine fascination with the things and the history of the world.
In this book, he shows us prototypes for the internet in some unexpected places. Like me, Smith finds demons at the origin of the digital age: here, it’s in the Brazen Head, a magical contraption supposedly built by the thirteenth-century scholar Roger Bacon. Like a “medieval Siri,” this head could answer any yes or no question it was given; it was a thing with a mind, but without a soul. Bacon’s contemporaries were convinced that the head was real, and that he had created it with the help of the Devil. Seven hundred years ago, we were already worried about the possibility of an artificial general intelligence.
If it’s possible to build a machine that has a mind, or at least acts in a mind-like way, what does that say about our own minds? Leibniz, a pioneer of early AI, insisted that his gear-driven mechanical calculator did not think, because the purely rational and technical operations of the mind—adding, subtracting—are not real thought. “It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation;” a calculating machine would allow us to spend more time fully inhabiting our own minds. Today, of course, it’s gone the other way: computerized systems form our opinions for us and decide what music we enjoy; dating-app algorithms choose our sexual partners. Meanwhile, the pressures of capitalism force us to act as rational agents, always calculating our individual interests, condemned to live like machines. It has all, Smith admits, gone very badly wrong. But it could have gone otherwise.
After all, there have already been many different versions of the internet; go back far enough, and the internet is simply part of nature. An elephant’s stomping foot, the clicking of a sperm whale, the chemical signals released into the air by sagebrush, all of which send meaningful messages over a long distance. “Throughout the living world, telecommunication is more likely the norm than the exception.” Mystics understood this; they have always assumed that something like the internet already existed, in their vision of a “system of hidden filaments or threads that bind all things.” Ancient philosophers, from the Stoics to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, saw creation as a kind of cosmic textile. “How intertwined in the fabric is the thread and how closely woven the web.” Maybe, Smith suggests, it is not a coincidence that the first fully programmable computer was the Jacquard loom, a machine for entangling threads. Our digital computer network is just the latest iteration of something that permeates the entire world. The internet is happening wherever birds sing in the morning; the internet is furiously coursing through the soil beneath a small patch of grass.
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