Christopher Schroeder

Tag: digital culture

  • An Internet For All

    Tim Berners-Lee’s (2025) recent memoir, which he co-wrote with Stephen Witt, is an invaluable account of the invention of the internet and useful counterbalance to mainstream accounts of it.

    Berners-Lee recounts his experiences from imagining a world-wide web, convincing CERN administrators in 1989 to support his proposal, and its stunning evolution since then into the backbone for contemporary digital life. He also considers other central concerns, such as content moderation, platform monopolies, and artificial intelligence, along the way.

    Central to this account are the central principles in Berners-Lee’s original vision. This vision was, and still is, an open network as a positive tool for human connections that is available to everyone, and not controlled by any single institution or individual.

    I was elated to learn that the internet inventor is still promoting an open and accessible space. He touts for example open-source software and federated platforms, such as LibreOffice and Mastodon, and he is developing personal data pods or wallets, and in so doing promoting data sovereignty.

    I was particularly interested near its end by his distinction between attention and intention economies, or what we’re currently experience and what he envisions for us. In doing so, Berners-Lee rejects both AI-doomers and AI-boomers — he acknowledge challenges and dangers, and criticizes the profit-driven approaches, but embraces the relative advantages — and advocates for in an AI-era reset.

    I found the rhetorical approach to be too episodic at times. One moment is followed by another and then another, and these are compiled and then offered as significant, and too infrequently connected to larger themes.

    I wanted more interpretation, synthesis, and conclusion from such a visionary and hopeful thinker. That though doesn’t mean he isn’t offering a vision of a different digital world, one that is also evoked by recent antitrust lawsuits against Google for example and Apple and successful verdicts against social media companies.

    Surely the one who imagined a networked world must be proud of his creation, and those who continue to develop it.

  • Like Lukewarm Leftovers

    I needed some time to adjust to Paul Kingsnorth’s (2025) latest book Against the Machine and found it useful but ultimately unsatisfying.

    Kingsnorth in a seeming synthesis of his thinking criticizes what he calls The Machine and offers what he considers ways to retain our humanity. He considers the emergence of this mindset, which he considers synonymous with the West, and specifically its exchange of place, people, the past, and prayer — the four Ps — for science, the self, sex, and screens, or the four Ss, before suggesting how to respond.

    In preparation, he suggests the interrelation of emotion and reason for example and laments the reported loss of a fan’s son to gender reassignment (62-63 and 168-169). He also reports some of his own reactions, such as relocating to the Irish countryside where he plays chess by candlelight and resisting the requirement whereby everyone owns a smartphone (111-113 and 304).

    He recommends near the end that readers resist the left-hemisphere approach of the modern mind and develop the ability to attend with the right-hemisphere, which conceives of the world not as a “mechanism” but rather an “organism” (268, 271). He also recommends technological self-control and “reactionary radicalism,” which rejects The Machine moral economy, and its colonization, and endorses one based upon “community bonds, local economies, and human-scale systems” (280).

    I appreciate the way Kingsnorth offers a larger context with his account of The Machine. He isn’t satisfied to concentrate on the challenges of artificial intelligence although he does offer an alarming one. Rather, he places digital technologies in a continuum of not just Enlightenment mentalities, the Industrial Revolution, or even the eleventh century Fen Tigers but also “a 1,500-year civilization” of “‘Christendom’” (5).

    Such an account is a useful reminder that all technologies emerge and evolve, and that this emergence and evolution are important aspects of understanding their effects and articulating informed responses. Even so, it seems to offer a somewhat selective account that ignores other arguably essential elements of this context.

    Digital technologies could be considered for example part of a larger history of technological development, which incudes the invention of literacy for example or farming, that enhances the abilities of humans to trust others and coordinate efforts (Wright 1999, e.g.). Such accounts needn’t ignore the costs Kingsnorth cites or even negate his recommendations, but these could avoid dismissing these developments as completely detrimental.

    Nonetheless, this book encouraged me to reconsider my perspective and defend these beliefs, which is certainly welcome and undeniably useful. Moreover, its account of the past and present could be correct, in which case humanity might be in much more trouble than I realize, or want to recognize.

    The problem as Kingsnorth admits is that he cannot prove his account although this challenge hasn’t prevented others from attempting to do so (e.g., Pinker 2011 or 2018). At such moments, a better option when offered a range of selections might be opting for a more appealing one, which might not be right but could be more motivating.

    That in the end might be the most useful part of this book. For example, it describes shatter zones, including online spaces where we can use The Machine tech to resist its colonization, and distinguishes between raw and cooked barbarians, or those who resist from outside or in-but-not-of The Machine (Kingsnorth 2025, 290-291 and 304-305).

    Kingsnorth suggests that cooked barbarians might discover one day that their limits cannot keep them from being poisoned. At such moments, they would have to look for sustenance outside The Machine if they want to live to fight another day.

    Such moments could also make some of us wonder whether we’ve been cooked too long.

  • Revolutionary Thinking

    I had been encouraged after a conference session to read Heather Ford’s (2022) Writing the Revolution, and can understand after having done so why this book was recommended.

    Ford in it offers her decade-long digital ethnography of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution Wikipedia entry from its emergence and through its evolution and uses it to challenge conventional ideas about facts in the digital world. To do so, she outlines a framework for facts that includes allies, or those who author or edit Wikipedia content, and companions, or sources that validate and verify these assertions.

    Ford uses these results to challenge conventional Wikipedia principles, such as neutral point of view, verifiability of facts, and prohibitions against primary research. Instead, she argues that facts are contested and change, and as such illustrate the reality that knowledge is not objective but rather situated, especially in a digital world.

    This account systematically examines her observations and consistently supports her claims. Moreover, it establishes context through interviews with central participants, including those who led early efforts to establish this page, and in so doing shaped the narrative around this event, such as whether, and when, to call it a revolution.

    I wanted more synthesis, implications, and even application, especially beyond the Wikipedia world, but I admit that at least the latter wasn’t the ostensible purpose of this book, which is a successful account of academic research. As such, it illustrates a way of bridging the academic and the public, and offers a way of thinking about more relevant research.

    And I found it to be useful in ways I didn’t expect. For me, its engaging style consistently demonstrated a grad school tenet — knowledge as situated — that seemed intuitively true, and yet to have wide-ranging implications, especially for institutionalized practices, which I could never confront.

    I think Ford’s account clearly illustrates an interim step in an effort to transform a grad school stipulation into a useful foundational principle.