Great if you want “something about the internet” but does not want another book written by a former Google employee who discovered society last Tuesday.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is by Justin E. H. Smith — philosopher, historian, and professional dampener of techno-utopian nonsense. He has no patience for the TED Talk version of the web as liberation machine, but he also avoids the lazy moral panic version. 

A history of the internet that tracks it as the latest version of an old human fantasy — the dream of connection, total knowledge, disembodied thought, perfect transmission, mind without friction. Smith traces the internet through older technologies, scientific dreams, occult communication, natural networks, encyclopaedias, telegraphy, computation, and the long human desire to escape the meat-sack problem by becoming signal. The argument is less “the internet is bad” than “the internet is older, weirder, and more metaphysically loaded than we admit.” 

Good for readers of media theory, philosophy of technology, digital culture, internet criticism or any fans of cybernetics-adjacent thought. 

Princeton University Press paperback, 2022. Good used condition. Light shelf/handling wear; clean reading copy.