“The entire book that you are going to read was written under the pressure of a sort of religious terror in the author’s soul, produced by the sight of this irresistible revolution.” These words were written by Alexis de Tocqueville in the introduction to Democracy in America. Reading Antón Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation, one experiences something like Tocqueville’s religious terror at the sight of the digital revolution. What Tocqueville did for the democratic revolution Barba-Kay aims to do for the digital: to record the ongoing digitalization of the modern world as our fundamental, generative fact. In Barba-Kay’s own words: “digital technology is no longer just a product, but our turn of mind—the configuration of our needs, our novel attention to the world’s uses.” In the spirit of Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt, Barba-Kay tries, in the words of the latter, “to think what we are doing.”
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