I have four integrated purposes in Chapter 1. First, it serves as a general introduction to media analysis. I discuss how each medium embodies some set of incentives that systematically select for certain kinds of content. Second, I introduce digital media alongside the other analogous sea changes in the history of communication and culture. I spell out here in new ways the distinctive features that account for the power of digital technology, chiefly that it organizes culture in a new way, that it fuses the functions of medium and tool, that it makes images palpable, that it escapes time and space, that it casts us into the role of customers, and that it occupies our whole field of attention. Third, I am arguing that digital media consequently promotes a certain view of what is worthy of communication and therefore of knowledge and attention. Finally, I make the case that digital technology is in some unprecedented sense “natural.” I mean that it is extraordinarily compelling precisely to the extent that – unlike literacy, which is a hard-earned and laborious achievement – digital technology is arresting and engaging to the exercise of attention as such. It is, as software companies say, “intuitive.”

I situate the notion of “natural technology” within the wider view of technology’s relation to human history and values. I offer a brief (original) theory of technology as such, focusing on two themes. First, I take issue with the claim that “technology” has independent causal force. The progress of technology is not inevitable, but each new tool reconfigures our understanding of possibility and necessity. Nor is technology something external to our nature or to who we “really” are. I show how our modern conceptions of equality and human rights rest on and are enabled by industrialization. Second, I show that we nonetheless have the sense that technology is an independent force because of the disparity between technological time (the time it takes for watershed discoveries to be made) and “normal” or moral time (the time it takes for such discoveries to be widely stabilized within settled norms and practices). Anxiety about the effects of “technology” as such is a longstanding feature of modernity, stemming from the continuing acceleration of technological time with respect to normal time. The development of modern technology entails permanent culture wars and a permanent sense of estrangement between us and our new tools.

I introduce the question of what digital technology is – why it is so powerful, why it is different in kind from other media – by focusing on the convergence of two themes. First: Regarded as a tool, digital technology does not really do anything; it does not straightforwardly act on the material world. Unlike steam engines or wheels, it performs no particular physical task. Its scope of action is unspecified and unrestricted. Second: It is a social technology. Its appeal does not reside only in its instrumental means and uses, but in its power to connect us into a single global nervous system. This is in part because information technology is a technology of intentional responses. By responding to us in terms of information and by making our responses themselves the subject of measurement, digital devices engage us personally and in kind. These features thus represent the twin promises of total effectiveness and total responsiveness; that is, digital technology is both a new tool for measurement and a new medium of being in touch with others. It is this synthesis of measurement with medium – of quantitative analysis with social reality – that is most distinctive and transformative about it.

I pursue the case of natural technology by arguing that it is a technology at odds with political life as such. (1) Community and loneliness. I argue that we wax rosy about “community” online to the extent that we are evoking features of offline communities that we cannot have in online terms. (2) Context and information. By removing speech from social circumstances, the internet produces insoluble problems for the understanding and regulation of speech. (3) Facing and defacing. I discuss how changes in our sense of context make a difference to our conception of who we are and of where our identities are at stake. (4) Equality and authority. I scrutinize what is meant by “democracy” in digital terms and show that it is democratic in name only. (5) Ethnonationalism and cosmopolitanism. Digital communication is tending to polarize citizens throughout the Western world either toward some form of ethnic nationalism or toward cosmopolitanism beyond material borders. I consider China as a candidate for what the internet’s intrinsic “political form” might be. (6) Little men, bigly. I show how many rhetorical features of President Trump’s tenure make sense when understood in light of the imperatives of online communication.

I conclude by discussing the more metaphysical and existential implications of digital media, arguing that it is changing our notions of what is real, of what human connection is, and of what our highest purposes are. I present this in terms of three kinds of “ideals” that I think underlie our uses of digital technology and continue to shape our goals inasmuch as we pursue them online: the ideal of frictionlessness, the ideal of obedience, and the ideal of perfection.

A fictional response to my book, by an imaginary skeptic.