Justin Smith is not too happy with the state of the current internet. Hell, who is? He sees the problems, and how the promises of what the internet was meant to bring have not come to fruition.
So what is a philosopher meant to do? In Smith’s case, he does a deep dive into how many of the issues we have with the modern internet by exploring some of the philosophical underpinnings of the internet, and how much of it goes back further than we think.
I was pretty excited about the promise of this book, and the opening chapters got me into it pretty deeply. But the author managed to lose me pretty quickly. Sure, I don’t like the what the corporations are doing, but there is only so much of what Leibniz thought about problems of his days that I can stomach in a book about a 21st century problem. And there was just a lot here I could not buy. Something about the comparisons he made reminded me of all the biosemiotics classes that tried to convince me that what was happening with animal and plant life compares significantly to human communication. Sorry, but I just don’t see it, and for that matter I don’t see any significant point in comparing the internet to anything we see in the natural world.
This was not a DNF on the strength of the writer, and the brevity of the book. But it was neither very good not very convincing.
Failures in Polymathy 