The Web of Narcissus

REVIEW ESSAY
A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation
by Anton Barba-Kay
Cambridge University Press, 2023, 368 pages

For years, it seemed, digital technology was the ultimate one-way ratchet. There was no going back—only onward and upward (for the optimist), or onward and downward (for the doomer). Not only was digital technology here to stay (where else could it be?), but it seemed destined to inexorably colonize every corner of our lives and our attention, from cradle to grave. The average age of first smartphone fell steadily (it now stands at ten), and for younger children, there was always the tablet (those born after 2010 have been dubbed “the iPad generation” after the one object they saw more during their earliest years than their mother’s face.) Smartphones and smartwatches were soon augmented with smart refrigerators and smart homes.

There were a number of naysayers along the way, to be sure. Facebook (now Meta) and Google (now Alphabet) and Twitter (now X) weathered any number of scandals and whistleblowers, any number of flash-in-the-pan public outcries over censorship or surveillance or dirty little algorithms designed to send preteen girls into death spirals of suicidal depression. Nicholas Carr and Sherry Turkle and Jean Twenge published their bestsellers courageously telling us what our own eyes could see well enough about “what the internet is doing to our brains” (the subtitle of Carr’s 2008 The Shallows), but most of us, after sagely nodding along, went out and purchased the newest iPhone or Pixel, with triple rear-facing cameras and automatic Night Sight.

The year 2020 might have seemed a turning point: Shoshana Zuboff published her seven-hundred-page tome The Age of Surveillance Capi­talism, a ponderously self-important and yet genuinely insightful polem­ic. The Netflix exposé later that year, The Social Dilemma, became perhaps the most talked-about documentary of the year, connecting the dots between teen depression, political polarization, and the algorithms that rule our lives. But in 2020, we were all too online to really care—where else could we be? The Social Dilemma just became more lockdown binge-watching fodder. Perhaps, like peak oil, peak digital will prove an ever-receding horizon.

If future historians identify an inflection point in the linear growth of digitization, however, they are likely to find it in the year 2023. On the one hand, 2023 might turn out to mark an acceleration point—certainly that was the trajectory signaled by the launch of ChatGPT at the start of the year and the subsequent explosion of generative AI into every corner of industry and public discussion. The wildest predictions of techno-optimists or at least techno-fatalists seemed justified: after more than two decades translating ourselves into disembodied digital avatars, our embodied selves might now be obsolete. And yet the widespread apprehension provoked by generative AI—however misplaced or sensationalist much of it might be—seemed to at last awaken a generation of digital natives from their dopamine slumber.

Covid too had surely played a part, especially when we realized that temporary lockdown expedients seemed here to stay. Zoom fatigue, QR‑code fatigue, and the hunger for human faces combined to start making smartphones uncool for the first time since their introduction in 2007. Instead of greeting the occasional Light Phone user with an expression of bewildered pity, we leaned in for a closer look, envying his freedom.

Parents, too, horrified by what they had seen screen-based education do to their children during the Covid years (and horrified to discover what their children got up to on their own screen time), began to question the entire premise of the screen-based childhood. Dozens of states began passing laws to start limiting internet access for the first time, requiring age-verification for adult websites and social media accounts, and banning phones bell-to-bell during the school day. By the time Jonathan Haidt’s long-awaited bombshell The Anxious Generation appeared in early 2024, it felt almost conservative in its recommendations, and found itself riding a tsunami rather than making waves. Since then, legal challenges have piled up for Big Tech, as circuit courts decided that you can’t show either gang-rape videos or self-asphyxiation how-to videos to twelve-year-olds. Meta, tripping over itself in its haste to avoid regulation, rushed out “Instagram for Teens” to reassure consumers that, on further consideration, it had concluded that it should not be in the business of helping sex predators groom young girls.

Still, American democracy is known for its occasional paroxysms of self-doubt and improvised self-regulation. These rarely amount to new forms of political economy without the reinforcement of substantial works of social theory. If 2023 does turn out to mark a turning point in our thinking about technology, then the 2023 publication of Anton Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation will deserve a prominent place in the narrative.

Keeping Faith with the Time

Although it would be patronizing to label him a doomer, Barba-Kay is certainly no optimist when it comes to our technological predicament. At the outset of his book, he writes of the “absolute and comprehensive social harrowing” that digital culture represents, a crisis that is not a matter of a few wrong turns in the road of innovation or policy, but which is “intrinsic to the structure and logic of digital technology itself.” We must therefore “take better care not to be betrayed by our own desires for reassurance. Easy hope is itself a temptation, a false meliorism that clouds our ability to take stock of what is wholesale happening.” And yet Barba-Kay’s purpose is not to stand athwart history, shouting Cassandra-like mantras of doom; that would, in any case, not require 250 densely-printed—and still more densely-written—pages of analysis. His purpose is, quite simply, “to take stock of what is happening.” After all, “we are the last generation who (barring apocalypse) will remember what things were like without the internet. And so . . . the best way I know to keep faith with the time is still to insist on noticing just what is taking place.”

The great gift of this book, however else one may judge it, is this relentless commitment to taking notice, this vivid and profound attention to the meaning of our own acts—an attention which digital culture seems to have too often stripped from us. Indeed, Barba-Kay warns us that the direst result of our digital submersion is our inability to think or speak clearly about it. Whether optimist or pessimist, activist or laissez-faire, prescription and policy cannot get underway without evaluation, and evaluation must begin with description. But digital technology, sleek and frictionless by design, seems to defy our every attempt to come to grips with it. “Questions that should make us pause for silence have become rhetorical. Words are not working as they should.”

This is in part a function of the breakneck speed of technological development: “it is all taking place at an electric speed that, by falsifying anything one can put into print before the ink can dry, admits no maturity of reflection.” Indeed, Barba-Kay later observes that the digital is but the latest of a string of technologies that have succeeded one another more rapidly than society has known what to do with them. “Over the last two hundred years, as steam and electricity have sped labor up beyond the natural limits set by our bodies and the elements, we have also added new technology more quickly than we have known what to do with, than we have been able [to] incorporate. Changes that were once incremental must be swallowed whole without much chewing.” The rate of change, however, seems still to be accelerating, and with it, the rate of social dislocation.

In part it is a function of how rapidly the medium has absorbed all the structures of communication within which it might otherwise be discussed, debated, and evaluated. “There is nothing so commonplace,” observes Barba-Kay, “as taking to the internet to deplore it. Where else are we supposed to go?” And he certainly has a point. I type this review now in a word processor, will communicate with the editor via email, and odds are that many of you will read it—and hopefully discuss and share it—online. Even the epochal transformation of the printing press was limited by comparison; most ordinary communication remained oral or handwritten for centuries after it made its appearance. For all its sweeping impacts on the Western world, it remained one medium among others, whose benefits and drawbacks could be assessed with a certain detachment by those who wished to do so. Not so the digital, which, Barba-Kay observes, aspires to be a universal medium and at the same time a universal tool. There has never before been a technology so all-encompassing, and thus so difficult to come to grips with.

Finally, it is a function of the fact that there is something about the digital that tempts us to trivialize it—“it’s just another silly Twitter drama; can we get back to real life?” Never mind that we all know by now that “Twitter dramas” can wreck real jobs, real marriages, and real lives, and that for many of us, what is online has become our dominant reality. Still, we cannot help reflexively contrasting the “virtual” with “real life,” and since the “virtual” is merely simulated, we imagine that nothing of substance is at stake there. At the same time, it is the nature of digital experience to be punctiliar, divided into discrete tasks or episodes that, Barba-Kay observes, “take little or no time; you only need a second or two to glance at your notifications, to ping someone, to check up on what’s new.” The effect is to lull us into the sense that nothing much is at stake in this particular digital diversion, pornographic binge, or social media shouting match, even as we deplore the cumulative impact: “while no single thing we ever do online seems momentous, dire effects emerge from aggregates of our collective use. The internet is only ever other people: a permanent elsewhere. . . . To an unprecedented and dismaying extent, it really is true that no one is responsible for what is happening. (Everyone else is.)”

In any case, what all this means is that, as Hannah Arendt observed with regard to the scientists of the Manhattan Project, we “move in a world where speech has lost its power,”¹ where acting and knowing have parted company. “These disparities between what we can think and say and do,” observes Barba-Kay, “are the paralysis of those who have lost the way toward meaning, that is, those without a future. And it is impossible to understand what we can do nothing about, when it is all happening before we know it.” Thus, the essential task of his book is to begin to put into words—rich, evocative, and often haunting words—the transformation of our humanity in which we have all conspired, so that we can step back and judge what we have wrought.

I should note at this point that that we is essential to Barba-Kay’s argument: the protagonists of his book are, quite simply, all of us—as the title, A Web of Our Own Making, suggests. Pessimistic though it may be, this book is refreshingly devoid of polemical screeds against the “tyranny of Big Tech” or moralistic denunciations of algorithmic manipulation. Barba-Kay understands that, while certainly not above profiteering and exploitation, most technology firms are indeed re­sponding to a kind of consumer demand. To be sure, they have become very good at creating many of the particular demands that they then go on to satisfy—which of us ever thought we wanted or needed fifteen-second #FoodTok videos? But in a larger sense, digital technology is responding to a set of cultural imperatives, to a vision of what it means to be human—or perhaps rather, more precisely, a quest to define and create what it means to be human. Barba-Kay observes that our modern condition is indeed defined by an uncertainty about this all-important question; thus, “We are looking to find ourselves and we are continually failing to, while all the while remaking ourselves for the purpose.” Digital technology, then, is an attempt to make visible what otherwise remains hidden—to publicly manifest our desires, hopes, fears, and aspirations, “to put an image of ourselves on screen” and perform our too-liquid identities before they slip away from us. This is true, Barba-Kay persuasively argues, at the level of each individual’s social media avatar, and at the collective level of digital technology as a comprehensive projection of modern culture writ large.

A Web of Our Own Making, then, in line with the best traditions of technology criticism, avoids the traps of both materialism and idealism. It is too simple to say that ideas simply have consequences, with invention and production representing merely the inevitable incarnations of our preexisting philosophies. But nor is it the case that our technologies simply arise as random experiments in rent-seeking, subsequently transforming culture in radical and unpredictable ways. Both are true in some measure, as idea and artifact, telos and tool, react upon one another in an ever-deepening feedback loop. So it is with digital technology: it is unintelligible except as the manifestation of a prior ideal of freedom as limitless self-creation, and yet, by transforming such aspirations into modes of being and acting, at blinding speed, it stupefies us into an inability to see or think what else freedom might conceivably be.

Digital Technology as “Natural Technology”

At the core of Barba-Kay’s argument is the intriguing claim that “Digital technology is our first natural technology.” This is a crucial claim throughout the book, but a somewhat elusive one, so it is worth pausing over. At its heart, the idea is that as a “natural technology,” digital technology is the first technology we can’t get a handle on as something outside of ourselves, because it has become an extension of ourselves. “Aristotle called the hand the ‘tool of tools’ (meaning: the tool by means of which all tools can come to be of service). But the hand is now getting a run for its money.” We have, in short, already crossed the bionic frontier endlessly imagined by science-fiction writers, but without quite realizing it. We think that Neuralink, the implantation of digital chips into our brains, would mark a decisive threshold, but we have already implanted the digital in our minds: “There is more to human nature than biology.” “If we are spending most of our waking hours on digital devices, if we reach for them upon waking and only set them down for sleeping, if this technology is our single most important means for connecting to others and understanding what we do, if it is recasting our notions of what human beings are for, then it makes no decisive difference whether the devices are physically implanted in our retina or cortex.”

All of our technologies are in some sense a response to our desires, a making-visible in the world of what we already aspire to or dream for. To be sure, plenty may begin as serendipitous discoveries—as with Fleming’s discovery of antibiotics—but they would remain mere curiosities or laboratory accidents if they did not in some way answer to our hopes for humanity. And yet there has always been a clunky, awkward, otherness to them: however streamlined and well-designed, they remained clearly and stubbornly “out there” in the world, the product of mind but permanently severed from it. No man ever mistook his dishwasher for himself. And yet a man might well mistake his X profile for himself—indeed, many already do.

There is, indeed, perhaps only one technology in human history that can provide a precedent for digital media: the mirror. It is a metaphor for which Barba-Kay constantly reaches, and indeed more than metaphor. The first thing I see when I look into the smooth black mirror of my smartphone is indeed my own face—though only for a fleeting instant. It too sees my face and responds by manifesting not an image of my body but of my mind, a neatly arranged, bright and colorful schema of my thoughts, desires, and preoccupations. Like the mirror, though, the smartphone is self-effacing—as is all digital technology. It does not draw attention to itself, but through itself; “just as mirrors are themselves invisible, digital technology sinks in by covering its own tracks.”

Like the mirror, the smartphone purports to be a perfectly passive and neutral medium, a vessel that simply shows us whatever is there to be seen or known. And yet the mirror was never so neutral as that; while it claims to show us ourselves as others see us, of course, it does not—not simply in the trivial sense that it reverses right and left, but in the more profound sense that I never see others merely in their superficial physicality, but as embodied souls. The technology of the mirror helped cultivate a culture of vanity and fixation on outward appearance, tricking us into imagining that the self-representation in glass was the true self. Just so, of course, the smartphone with the front-facing camera, which created the culture of the selfie. More than a mirror of our bodies, however, this new mirror was to be above all a mirror of our desires, a mirror of myself as I wished it to be and wished to present it; “digital responsiveness is a mirror of your intention.” Thus, the filtered selfie became a means of curating the self, of transforming the aspirational self into social reality.

Above all, the digital realm represents a mirror of our intention to transcend the limits of our embodied nature; it expresses the quest at the heart of the modern ideal of freedom to bend the world to our whims. The technologies of the industrial revolution both expressed this desire and stoked it, holding out the promise of total mastery. Yet the basic laws of nature, by the later twentieth century, proved more stubborn that we had hoped. Despairing of flying cars, we settled for 140 characters. If we could not subdue our world, we would build our own and enter into it, like the protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s parable of digital technology, Inception. “As a ‘natural’ technology,” writes Barba-Kay, digital technology “discloses the utmost aspirations implicit in modern technology as such: It aims to remake or re-create our given reality in order to surmount it.” And yet it offers a devil’s bargain, for the digital simulacrum of reality can only ever be an approximation; and so we must, like Alice entering Wonderland, shrink ourselves down to size if we are to fit within it, reconceiving our natures in increasingly digitized terms. As Barba-Kay summarizes in a critical concluding pas­sage: “When we cannot bend the natural world to the wishes embodied in our awesome technical capacities, we will end by suiting ourselves to suit the digital terms we have at hand. This is the risk of wish-fulfillment: that we warp what’s best in us to suit the medium precisely because it feels close enough. We leap to the conclusion, close the gap to make it so, so seeking our salvation in coveting what we must continually fail to possess.”

Longing for the freedom to authentically express ourselves, we primp in front of the digital mirror, bedecking ourselves in the image filters, gifs, and sick burns that are the currency of digital competence. Longing for affirmation, we transpose ourselves into the digital key of X or Instagram, accepting its likes and reposts as a substitute for gestures of love and appreciation. “Each time I reach for my phone, I’m only ever waiting for it to be you. Each time, it’s only ever me again, self-consuming and consumed by the device.”

Digital Anti-Politics

But the effect of the digital mirror is evident not merely on Instagram, but in Excel. It is perhaps above all in its penchant for quantification that digital technology is most seductive: “data is the mirror that, seeming only to reflect, changes our assessment of what we see.” Data is the universal currency of the new political economy, the means not merely by which businesses make their money, but by which bureaucrats set policy, and executive pastors plot church-growth strategies. Data promises us complete objectivity, the mirror within which we can behold the world free from bias or distortion. Yet, even as we know that “numbers do not tell the story . . . there is nonetheless an irresistible temptation not to know this, and therefore to continue to quantify as possible, because data is straightforwardly actionable as the complexities of the world are not.”

This tyranny of numbers has important consequences for our politics, as we are tempted to short-circuit the always difficult but essential political tasks of building trust, assessing contexts, deliberating upon courses of action, and forging compromises by allowing data to do our work for us. Indeed, Barba-Kay’s extended discussion of the political ramifications of digital technology is among the most important sections of the book.

For years, we have been inundated by laments about the polarization and warping of our political discourse that social media has unleashed. The Left blames the Right for sowing rampant disinformation on digital platforms, while the Right blames the Left for censorship and algorithmic distortion of the discourse. But more sober commentators have recognized that something deeper is going on, which cannot be captured in partisan caricatures. What we have witnessed, increasingly, is the breakdown of the possibility of political discourse as such—that is to say, deliberation about the best practical path for the political community to take from within a framework of shared assumptions and facts. Of course, we should not look at the past through rose-colored spectacles: democratic politics has always been a fractious business, rife with conspiracy theories, wild rumors, and gratuitous abuse of the opposition. Nonetheless, our current breakdown into mutual incomprehension and policy paralysis seems to be qualitatively different from anything we have previously experienced, and Barba-Kay suggests some reasons why.

Speech, as linguists and exegetes will tell you, is all a matter of con­text. Words carry rich and delicate shades of meaning within contexts of shared experience and mutual understanding. The persuasive speech of politics requires context above all, the context not merely of the speech but of the speaker. In classical rhetoric, concerned principally with political deliberation, speakers had to be mindful not merely of logos (the logical rigor of their words) and pathos (the emotional force of their appeals), but of ethos—a difficult-to-translate word that concerns above all the credibility of the speaker with his hearers. Such credibility, of course, cannot simply be conjured out of thin air in the moment of speaking, but grows organically out of the matrix of social relationships within which the speaker acquires authority. Deprived of the contexts of life experienced together that are a prerequisite of authentic political speech, our words in the modern world, and above all in the digital world, have been increasingly bifurcated either into the hyper-objective logos of mere “facts” or the hyper-subjective pathos of emotionally manipulative “identity politics.”

His remarks on the former trend are particularly illuminating in the wake of the cascading epistemic ruptures of 2020, in which the wrenching crises of Covid-19, racial injustice and unrest, and a contested election all eluded genuine political debate because no one seemed able to settle on a shared framework of facts within which to debate reasonable responses. Ironically, however, this is because we insisted on constructing “alternative facts” as the subject matter of our disagreement. For to acknowledge that our disagreements arose from our different social locations, different prudential valuations, or different probabilistic judgments of low-resolution phenomena would require us to throw up our hands in resigned agnosticism, since the ethos that might have once helped resolve such intractable uncertainties was no longer available. Better to rewrite our disagreements about pandemic policy responses as fundamental disagreements over the epidemiological facts:

Disagreements that might once have been about values and relative goods are therefore now about the profession of facts themselves, about matters true or false in principle. . . . Such differences about facts (rather than values) are more emotionally satisfying because they have the guise of empirical objectivity, because they feel more stable than disagreements about the good (which may not admit of conclusive resolution), and because most of us are not in the position to resolve them and are therefore not even accountable for them. . . . But facts are our new values; allegiance to facts is coming to define our collective identity more than the nation itself. Differences of opinion thereby become unintelligible to each other, since it is more exciting to think that the other side is engaged in a conspiracy of factual lies than it is to think that they see things otherwise; not only do we not speak the same language, we do not even speak about the same things.

This has happened in large part because the very experience of online life—which for most of us has become perhaps our dominant form of social existence—militates against the commitments of a polity. “Political life takes place in bonds and bounds. . . . The internet, in contrast, is at basic odds with the attachments of bounded political life. It is a medium of the mind or the unsettled imagination. . . . Where there is nowhere between here and everywhere, political speech cannot take place.” The current crazes for various (Right and Left) brands of identity politics, displacing one another in rapid succession before any can solidify into a stable political vision, reflect the anxieties of a people who have lost their peoplehood, and have no idea where they might begin to find it again. Politics must take place within shared horizons and reflect the common action of those who recognize themselves as a collective subject, however fierce their internal disagreements may be. This collective subject, however, as Burke argued against the French revolutionaries, cannot be a mere aggregate or mass; it must be the summing-up of myriad lower spheres of common life, “the little platoons” of church, guild, club, or neighborhood.

While promising to invigorate all these spheres of common life, and indeed multiply them with new possibilities for virtual community, digital experience has in fact relentlessly dissolved them. “Online community,” suggests Barba-Kay, is simply a contradiction in terms, and the eagerness with which we lap up the saccharine marketing slogans of virtual belonging betrays just how much we have lost touch with the real thing. The reason is simply that online life, by its nature, cannot create the conditions for actual life together, which requires “a setting in which we must inescapably work out our differences about shared concerns.” Every form of social media allows you to opt out almost as effortlessly as you opt in, and indeed to do so with a selectivity that is impossible in the real world. If I can’t stand half the people at my church, I will probably choose another church; on X, however, I can always keep on participating in just as much of the conversation as I want, selectively blocking and muting those whom I find tiresome, or at least scrolling past with an eye roll. Worries of retreats into online “echo chambers” may be exaggerated, since it certainly requires a good deal of diligence to curate one’s feed quite that tidily. But the fact remains that however much we may find ourselves inundated with disagreement online, we need never genuinely wrestle through it or resolve it; at most, we may retort with a #sickburn, and go our merry way.

Love without Friction

In human affairs, as in physics, friction provides stickiness; only by bearing each other’s burdens, and bearing the burden of each other’s presence, do we genuinely come to depend on one another. The digital, however, is designed as a frictionless medium, with every element of user interface engineered to provide the minimal resistance to the stream of consciousness and desire; inasmuch as I use the medium to encounter other minds and wills, they will of course push back, but I can almost effortlessly steer around them and block them out if they’re too hard to deal with. Increasingly, AI holds out the prospect of removing even the remaining friction of a foreign will. Consider the rapidly growing market for “AI girlfriends,” who, unlike real-world women, are always available, always responsive, and will never derail a would-be romantic encounter with a heated argument. Toward the end of A Web of Our Own Making, Barba-Kay offers some fascinating and profound reflections on this phenomenon, which was only beginning to emerge at the time of his writing but has exploded since. A recent IFS study suggested that 25 percent of young adults believed that AI chatbots had the potential to replace real-life romantic relationships.² Perhaps not unsurprisingly, the study found that heavy porn users (having already substituted virtual simulacra of sex for real-life relationships) were the most enthusiastic about AI relationships. Indeed, evidence suggests that, while some people use AI companions just to have someone to talk to, most users are men, looking for a sexual experience.

This is, on Barba-Kay’s account, no accident. Why is it, he asks, that every digital assistant—Siri, Alexa, Cortana—seems to be female? In their reassuring, soothing solicitousness, always there but never control­ling, they simultaneously represent the male ideal of a mother who is never over-mothering, and of the mistress who is up for anything. There is indeed something of the male fantasy that is intrinsic in the architecture of digital technology, he suggests: “a desire for absence of constraint, for the frictionless independence of the mind emancipated, for freedom from place or body or root. . . . It is not implausible, by extension, to understand this dream of overcoming natural limits through technology as the misogynistic dream of overcoming the biological need for women altogether.” To Barba-Kay, this suggests that the hyperrealism of AI is as much wishful projection as it is an accomplished technical feat. If we are honest with ourselves, we recognize how stilted and unconvincing even the best chatbots generally are compared to a real human being, but we imbue AI with a sense of personality because we want to—we want the perks of personality without the friction of a foreign will:

We continue personalizing them because we want to, and we want to because it is fun to play master to our tools, showing them who’s boss by telling them what to do. . . . Our technical aim is, in this restricted sense, a quasi-divine one: to make another person in our image so that we can then control them. It is the headiest (as well as the saddest) of temptations to be master of yourself in such terms, to be able to talk down to your own Echo.”

Indeed, the very disembodiment of AI personality, he suggests, is part of what makes it more attractive, reflecting as in a mirror our own late modern desire to transcend our bodies and become untrammeled minds and wills. The pursuit of any body has an end; the romantic quest ends in an embrace. Disembodied, though, the object of desire continues to elude and arouse; the coin of the digital realm is dopamine, not oxytocin.³ And yet bodies, in their stubborn otherness, resist complete domination; only spiders devour their mates. Digital simulacra, how­ever, may be rendered utterly pliant to our wishes, and we may carry them with us wherever we go.

Although Barba-Kay’s reflections on AI chatbots and the penumbra of pornography that lies behind them occupy only a few pages of this wide-ranging work, they are worth lingering over. For as much as we may continue to avoid the topic in polite company, pornography remains more than anything the business of the internet, accounting for a vast proportion of its traffic and revenues, and providing the titillating unspoken subtext behind more respectable forms of media, from webcams to Instagram. Consider how many new digital breakthroughs, greeted with high hopes and dark fears for the future of humanity, have found instead their primary application in pornography. The e-book did not transform or destroy print literature, but it did provide a vast new market for erotica, which people had previously been sheepish about reading in public. The advent of deepfake technology, which would, we were told, be deployed against the world’s great political leaders to change elections and start wars, instead became the weapon of choice for high school boys fantasizing about their classmates. And the omniscient chatbot, although certainly wreaking havoc on homework standards across America, may well leave as its greatest legacy a generation of young men content to flirt on Replika rather than dare a date with a real woman. Given the centrality of sexuality to our humanity—and indeed our dependence upon it for the survival of the species—the rapid digital deformation of our sexuality is a matter of grave concern for policymakers, not merely of handwringing moralists.

More profoundly, though, the pornographic subtext of the internet is no accident, for, as Barba-Kay insists, it simply discloses the inner logic of digital experience.

We are seduced by the virtual because it is a confusion of self and other, of mastery and subservience—at once uncanny and erotic. It is an extension of the allure of pornography, broadly understood. . . . So it is we numb the edges of reality to feast our eyes on a world of [our] own self-mirrored making—a world in which I touch and know myself alone, anothered. What’s not to love?”

The digital mirror offers us the ultimate fulfillment of Narcissus’s delusion: to discover an image of ourselves that we can fall for. The digital mirror is always a deceptive one, though. While pretending to show us the world as it is, it offers us instead the world as we want it to be, or think we want it to be, and systematically blurs the line between image and reality. To filter the world without seeming to—that is the godlike power the digital holds out to us, and through which Instagram rakes in its billions. But the worst thing that can happen to us is not that we will be tricked by the image into believing it really is the real thing (we are not so foolish as Narcissus!) but that, wishing to make it real, we will, with increasing desperation, reconfigure our real world to make it conform to the digital, and forget how to live within it. Again, “we warp what’s best in us to suit the medium precisely because it feels close enough. We leap to the conclusion, close the gap to make it so, so seeking our salvation in coveting what we must continually fail to possess.”

While writing this essay, I took my family skating at the Sculpture Garden in DC, hoping to join a slice of humanity in the joyful abandon of gliding across the ice. Instead, throughout our one-hour skate, we found ourselves forced to treacherously navigate a gaggle of young women posing all over the rink for glamour shots of one another, women for whom the ice had become a mere Instagram backdrop. Never did they skate more than a few paces, and then only to find a better camera angle. “We are looking to find ourselves and we are continually failing to, while all the while remaking ourselves for the purpose,” observes Barba-Kay. The greatest danger of the digital, he warns, is not that it will wholly replace the world of embodied experience—the wild dreams of transhumanists or VR goggle designers have, thus far, continued to break on the rocks of humanity’s stubborn attachment to physicality. The danger is that, while continuing to live in our bodies and their surroundings, we will continue to subconsciously remold them in imitation of our digital ideals-cum-idols. “Unlike clocks, which are only ever getting better at keeping time, computers are only ever getting better at acting as human beings. In doing so, they are also getting better at getting human beings to act like computers, thereby becoming inseparable from and, at the limit, interchangeable with us.”

Taming the Whirlwind

To all these worries, it would be easy enough for the skeptic to retort that there is nothing new under the sun: that many of these problems have appeared long since in earlier stages of the continuous technological revolution that the Western world has experienced since the eighteenth century; that digital technology simply represents an acceleration of existing trends; or even that it merely satisfies age-old human longings, for better and for worse, and we should blame ourselves, not our devices.

These objections, however, miss the mark. To the last, Barba-Kay would surely respond that this is part of the point he himself is making: the digital represents our own dreams made visible. But this should hardly reassure us: in C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the sailors are eager to visit an island that purports to turn dreams into reality—until they realize that this includes their nightmares. Moreover, technology’s function as a feedback loop means that our devices don’t just provide outlets for our vices, but amplify them.

To the claims that the trends of the internet age were present already in the television, the radio, or the car, we should remind ourselves that in technology, as in politics, the most important four words are “up to a point.” A plant that is nourished by four inches of water may be drowned in four feet. Moreover, even if it is mere technological acceleration that is our greatest challenge, there is nothing “mere” about it—a man searching for an escape from already unstable ground will be justly alarmed if he finds it turning into quicksand. When it comes to technology’s impact upon human nature, it is not merely the direction of change that matters, but the degree and the rate.

Barba-Kay’s greatest concern, however, is not digital technology itself but the deficient anthropology that has accompanied it; it has arisen within a world that has lost confidence in its own judgments about the meaning of human nature. It is certainly not inconceivable that the vast technical advances of our era could be harnessed to serve the flourishing of our species and our characteristic ways of life, but that is hardly likely when they are the products of a mindset that views humanity itself as an obstacle to be overcome, with its clumsy and unimaginative biology and its chronically biased decision-making. Perhaps we will only discover how to make our technologies humane when we have rediscovered how to love the human.

All that said, however, the most insistent retort of all remains: “Now what?” Surely if Barba-Kay is going to burden us with so many doubts and fears, he owes it to us to provide an answer. The critic cannot critique forever. Barba-Kay, however, does not see it as any part of his vocation to provide practical prescriptions, much less a policy program. It is a great enough task, he thinks, and a great enough service, to “keep faith with the time,” disclosing to us the hidden logic of all our thoughtless doings. He begins the book by warning, “The only advice I will give in these pages is therefore so simple as to be the wisdom of fools: If you’ve started, stop; if you haven’t, don’t; and if you can’t, then keep trying to think what you are doing.” And he ends by declaring that “the only truly ethical use of digital technology is to disobey it, to walk away.”

These words should not be dismissed as cheap Ludditism; nor should Barba-Kay’s own lifestyle of digital renunciation at Deep Springs College be scorned. There is a true vocation of negation. The monks of early Christendom who renounced the empty pomp of dying Rome did civilization an incalculable service in the end. Yet, granted that most of the world will remain worldlings, there are two forms of monasticism: one seeks a higher holiness and leaves the world to rot or burn in its vices; the other offers a witness to fire the imagination, leaving the world in order to renew it. For better or for worse, most of us are condemned to remain digital natives, and if indeed our humanity is at stake, we cannot evade the demand for practical policy responses.

What, then, might a constructive response to Barba-Kay’s deconstruction of digital culture look like?⁵ It might begin with attempting to distinguish more precisely between platforms and practices that are genuinely deformative, and digital tools that are, in fact, mere tools—and very useful ones at that. I have said above that the impact of the digital mirror is evident not merely in Instagram, but in Excel. And yet, it would be strange to insist that these two technologies present the same challenges or should provoke the same anxieties. While there are real problems with our fetishization of data, our attempt to quantify and thus risk-manage every aspect of reality, these problems are different in kind as well as different in scale from, say, the epidemic of mental health disorders afflicting young people who have been invited to construct their identities in the glare of the digital stage lights. A close reading of A Web of Our Own Making suggests that Barba-Kay’s greatest concern is with the social uses of digital technology, with our attempt to use it as a canvas on which to project ourselves. And this only makes sense; while there may be dangers lurking in any attempt to dissect and reconstruct the world in digital terms, there are surely far graver dangers in any attempt to do so to ourselves, as C. S. Lewis observed eight decades ago in The Abolition of Man.

Beginning from such an insight, we might then make use of Joshua Mitchell’s illuminating distinction between “supplements” and “substitutes.”⁴ Many technologies, he observes, begin as supplements, often intended to remedy a deficiency in those who, through no fault of their own, lack an ordinary human function; but since profits depend on mass production, they are marketed as consumer products for everyone, promising to offer cheaper and easier fulfillment of our desires than our natural functions can. The rapid arc of IVF from rare infertility treatment to mail-order surrogacy is a case in point. Hardly anyone, I would wager, is so Luddite as to deplore the creation of devices enabling the mute to speak or the blind to read.

That said, I think we can follow this line of thought further than merely permitting digital technology for the disabled. For if the digital is in its essence a technology of simulation, it is up to us just how we use this simulation. A flight simulator program may be used to train A380 pilots or to entertain would-be X-wing pilots. The digital may be constructed in close imitation of the real world, reminding us of its fine-grained contours and equipping us to return to it with well-honed reflexes; or else it may be constructed as an alternative world to numb and dull our senses to the pain of experience. Some of the best uses of digital technology have been those that cater to our embodiment, rather than transcending it; the ReMarkable digital notebook, for instance, has gained an enormous following for its creative synthesis of the benefits of pen and paper with the benefits of digital storage. The massive popularity of Audible has tapped into our timeless desire for the spoken word, long suppressed by the dominance of print culture. Unlike so many digital technologies which work to fragment our attention, the audiobook and the longform podcast have, if anything, worked to reinvigorate them. There is also a world of difference between social media platforms—which create a highly unnatural space populated by a cacophony of open-air speakers competing for an audience of everyone—and the increasingly popular group-chat, which seeks to simulate real-life conversation and relationality, with its natural ebb and flow, its tense exchanges broken by inside jokes, among a limited circle of familiar friends or colleagues.

We might thus suggest verisimilitude as an important design principle for digital technology: does it use the awesome power of bits and bytes to reproduce the world that has been given to us, or to replace it? After all, it was not so much the advent of the smartphone camera which created a youth mental health epidemic, as the advent of the filter: an Instagram restricted to #nofilter photos, one suspects, would be far less toxic than the beauty arms-race of mutual assured destruction that now prevails.

That said, it would also, of course, be far less profitable. Verisimilitude may make for a great design principle, but it makes for a lousy business plan. The reality is that the greatest challenges we face from digital culture are not the products of technique run amok, but problems of political economy—a subject about which Barba-Kay has very little to say in A Web of Our Own Making. To be sure, the internet has emerged and flourished during the four-decade reign of an ideology of deregulation and free-speech absolutism that has allowed technology companies to quite literally get away with murder (thanks to Section 230 protections), and which has anathematized any industrial policy that would dare to direct “good” technological innovation. Within such an environment, it is easy to be fatalistic about digital culture, such that Barba-Kay can dismiss policy prescriptions as “anemic and self-helpful advice about how to civilize the internet’s world-rending id. As if one could tame the whirlwind by politely requesting that it shift its trajectory a little to the left.”

And yet, have our politicians even tried politely requesting that it shift its trajectory a little to the left? Not often; and when they have, the courts have been quick to slap them down. Witness, for instance, the case Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, currently before the Supreme Court.⁶ At stake is the question of whether hardcore pornography websites, purveying thousands of high-resolution videos of gang rape and bestiality, should be required to use routine, secure, anonymous age verification to protect minors from their content. In no other domain is the principle of verisimilitude violated with such abandon. In the real world, of course, women do not behave as they do on such websites; and in the real world, anyone wanting to indulge far more modest fantasies would have to show their ID to a bouncer. Simply bringing the digital world into some kind of conformity with the physical on this front would be a comparatively simple technical tweak; and yet it would remake the internet as we know it. Congress tried to do so in 1998, five black-robed judges wagged their fingers at them in 2004, and almost no one has attempted it since. The world-rending id of online pornography thrives because our judges and legislators have allowed it to; it’s that simple.

Many similar examples could be multiplied: the digital landscape is littered with low-hanging legislative fruit, places where we could re­establish a humane dominion over our technologies if we could but conjure the will to do so. Inasmuch as Barba-Kay offers us a powerful account of just why and how we have failed to conjure that will, and just how urgent is the need to recover it, A Web of Our Own Making is a masterpiece of contemporary social criticism. To make the most of it, however, we must still have the confidence to move beyond criticism to action; by all means, let us take the full measure of the challenges we face, rather than comforting ourselves with nostrums about “all things in moderation.” For all our society’s apocalyptic worries about how the by‑products of the industrial revolution might wreak havoc on the natural world, it is fast becoming apparent that while we wrung our hands about climate change, the by-products of the digital revolution were wreaking havoc on our psychical and social world. A new political vision for our technology is assuredly needed. But we may take hope for the task, knowing that the tools of policy have not been tried and found wanting; rather, till now unwanted, have scarcely been tried.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 1 (Spring 2025): 194–212.

Notes