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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Digital hyperconnectivity is a defining fact of our time. The Silicon Valley dream of universal connection – the dream of connecting everyone and everything to everyone and everything else, everywhere and all the time – is rapidly becoming a reality. In this wide-ranging and sharply argued book, Rogers Brubaker develops an original interpretive account of the pervasive and unsettling changes brought about by hyperconnectivity. He traces transformations of the self, social relations, culture, economics, and politics, giving special attention to underexplored themes of abundance, miniaturization, convenience, quantification, and discipline. He shows how hyperconnectivity prepared us for the pandemic and how the pandemic, in turn, has prepared us for an even more fully digitally mediated future. Throughout, Brubaker underscores the ambivalence of digital hyperconnectivity, which opens up many new and exciting possibilities, yet at the same time threatens human freedom and flourishing.
Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents will be essential reading for everyone interested in the constellation of socio-technical forces that are profoundly remaking our world.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
Notes
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Notes
1. Selves
Exploring the self
Emancipating the self
Objectifying the self
Quantifying the self
Producing the self
Regulating the self
Conclusion: Governing the self
Notes
2. Interactions
The reorganization of space and time
The proliferation of micro-sociality
The regime of visibility
Programmed sociality
Coda: Losing touch
Notes
3. Culture
When culture becomes “content”: The ambivalence of abundance
Decommodification or recommodification?
Democratization: Participation, creativity, power
Notes
4. Economics
Platforms
Infrastructural power
Labor
Coda: Blockchain utopianism
Notes
5. Politics
Regimes of knowing
Regimes of feeling
Regimes of governing
Coda: Between populism and technocracy
Notes
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dedication
in memory of my mother
Elizabeth Brubaker
Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents
Rogers Brubaker
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Rogers Brubaker 2023
The right of Rogers Brubaker to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5452-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5453-9(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022938892
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface
“The fox,” wrote the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, “knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In the figurative sense popularized by the philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin, this dictum distinguishes writers who “relate everything to a single central vision” or “organizing principle” (the hedgehogs) from those who embrace “a vast variety of experiences and objects” without “seeking to fit them into … [a] unitary inner vision” (the foxes).1 This is the book of a fox. It has no overarching thesis to defend, no single conceptual prism to promote. It aims rather to provide a synoptic account of the sprawling, unruly, many-sided sociotechnical phenomenon I call digital hyperconnectivity, without squeezing it into the conceptual mold of a single big hedgehog-worthy idea. It aims to show how hyperconnectivity has transformed all aspects and spheres of social life, private and public, from the precincts of the self to the architecture of the economy and polity, and how these transformations, which have opened up so many new and exciting possibilities, are in other respects inimical to human freedom and flourishing.
The book grew out of an undergraduate seminar I had been teaching for a number of years in UCLA’s Honors Collegium. The seminar invited students to think critically about the increasingly pervasive digital mediation of their everyday social experience and about the broader cultural, economic, and political transformations that had been set in motion, or accelerated, by digital hyperconnectivity. As I designed and redesigned the course for successive offerings, looking for appropriate readings, I did not find an integrated, encompassing account of digital hyperconnectivity that addressed both everyday experience and underlying structural transformations in a manner at once challenging and accessible. I hope that this is that book.
I began work on the book a year before the novel coronavirus brought normal life on the planet to a standstill. But the pandemic has made the project more opportune than ever. Its confinements, disruptions, and restrictions have sharply accelerated the digitalization of all spheres of life. They occasioned a sudden and massive shift to remote work, education, shopping, medicine, therapy, culture, entertainment, sociability, and more. None of these shifts will be anywhere near fully reversed. In all of these spheres, this abrupt and radical reorganization of social life was possible only because of preexisting digital infrastructures. Hyperconnectivity thus prepared us for the pandemic. Yet the pandemic, in turn, has prepared us for an even more fully digitally mediated future.
Before the pandemic, the immense and unaccountable power of Big Tech and the degradation of the digital public sphere had prompted heightened critical scrutiny. Much of the energy of this incipient “techlash” dissipated temporarily in the face of Covid-19. Big Tech was no longer an urgent problem; it was a keenly appreciated solution, allowing social life to continue online when it was suspended in the flesh. The pandemic was therefore a godsend for the tech giants. It offered a unique opportunity to open up new markets, experiment on a planetary scale, and remake the social world. It also offered an opportunity for redemption: tech firms could present themselves as working for the public good by partnering with governments and public health authorities. Mounting concerns about misinformation, to be sure, have kept platforms under pressure. The tech giants still face a series of antitrust and regulatory initiatives, some with a degree of bipartisan support. But whatever the fate of these initiatives, the power of Big Tech – cultural and political as well as economic – is likely only to increase further. And the “solutionist” ideology of Silicon Valley that Evgeny Morozov so brilliantly skewered a decade ago – the habit of thinking that all social and political problems have technological solutions – seems more firmly entrenched than ever.2
The book’s broad scope and modest length oblige me to be ruthlessly selective as well as brutally concise, and they condemn me in advance to neglecting or at best merely scratching the surface of many important topics. The particular path I have charted through the vast territory I stake out is no doubt informed by my intellectual, moral, and political sensibilities. My account is therefore in some respects a personal and idiosyncratic one. But it is not only or primarily that: it is an effort to grasp the complexity of digital hyperconnectivity as a “total social fact” that powerfully structures the world in which we live.3
A book as wide-ranging as this one is obviously not based on primary research. It is a “quaternary” work, as Abram de Swaan memorably characterized a book of his own; it relies not only on a large body of more or less specialized secondary studies but also on synthetic “tertiary” works.4 The literature on the various aspects of my subject – spanning the social sciences, media and communication studies, and science and technology studies – has become unsurveyably vast. I cannot of course pretend to have read, or even to be aware of, all of the relevant work. But the reader wishing to explore particular topics in greater depth will find abundant pointers to the literature (as well as amplifications and qualifications of the argument) in the endnotes.
Digital hyperconnectivity is a planetary-scale phenomenon, but it is configured very differently in different world regions and among different groups of users. Attentive readers may therefore wonder about my frequent use of first person plural pronouns. Who is this “we,” they may ask, that is so casually invoked? The authorial “we” is a stylistic convenience, but a sociological fiction. “Our” relation to hyperconnectivity is a highly differentiated one, and “we” experience it in many different ways. Generational differences loom especially large, but differences of country, class, education, gender, religion, and race and ethnicity matter as well. It is not my aim to map out these differences, though they will come up from time to time in my discussion.
Yet I would offer a qualified defense of the authorial “we.” Digital hyperconnectivity affects us in different ways, but it increasingly affects all of us. Even the relatively unconnected are drawn ineluctably into its orbit, as anytime-anywhere connectivity – minimally, the possession of a smartphone – becomes, in effect, a requirement of full citizenship. And the still more digitally mediated future that is being constructed by the great tech platforms is one that we will all inhabit. While users can remake platforms in unanticipated ways, increasingly powerful platforms also design, construct, and discipline their users. In certain respects, they can make the sociological fiction into a sociological fact.
Some parts of my argument, especially in parts of the politics chapter, address the American context specifically. But this is not a book about the US. The argument applies, for the most part, throughout the developed West, notwithstanding significant legal and institutional differences between Europe and the US, notably a much more robust data protection framework in Europe. And much of the argument applies beyond the West. I have not, however, been able to give the distinctive configuration of digital hyperconnectivity in China – the central role of the state, the specific characteristics of the giant Chinese tech platforms, and the even greater degree of digital mediation of everyday life – the attention it deserves. In the geopolitics of hyperconnectivity, China represents a major counterweight to the hegemony of the American tech giants elsewhere.5
A broadly critical account of digital hyperconnectivity by a sixty-five-year-old first-world university professor risks caricature as a “declinist” screed that frets dyspeptically about “kids these days,” naïvely idealizes digitally unmediated face-to-face relations, and bathes the pre-digital public sphere in the warm but distorting glow of nostalgia. I hope that nothing in this book warrants such a reading. I readily acknowledge the many ways in which my own life – and the lives of billions of others worldwide – has been enriched by digital connectivity. My stance is indeed critical, but it is not uncritically critical: I have no interest in writing a jeremiad or a disconnectionist manifesto, and I underscore throughout the ambivalence of hyperconnectivity. For better or worse – for better and worse – we live in a world that is shaped and structured on every level and in every sphere of life by hyperconnectivity. The way forward is anything but clear. But there is no turning back.
Notes
1
Berlin 1953: 1.
2
Morozov 2013a. On the ways in which the pandemic strengthened technological “solutionist” ways of thinking, see Morozov 2020.
3
I borrow the notion of a “total social fact” – taken up in the Introduction – from Marcel Mauss 2002 [1925].
4
De Swaan 1988: xviii.
5
In recent years, Russia has also been developing the legal framework and technical infrastructure for greatly enhanced state control over the internet (Epifanova 2020); that control was of course radically intensified after the invasion of Ukraine. Other countries, too, have recently begun to assert their “digital sovereignty”; see McCabe and Satariano 2022.
Acknowledgments
My first thanks go to the students in successive versions of the course on digital hyperconnectivity that I have been teaching since 2015. Discussions with them gave me the chance to work out the ideas for this book before I knew that I was writing it; later, they were the first readers of most of my draft chapters. Talks at Yale University, UC Riverside, the University of Oslo, and the Central European University provided additional forums to test my ideas. For superb research assistance, I thank Morgan Boutilier and Alexander Ferrer. At Polity Press, I am very grateful for the support and encouragement of John Thompson.
I am greatly indebted to the friends, colleagues, students, and family members who discussed the project with me and commented on drafts at various stages. I am especially grateful to Wisam Alshaibi, Ben Brubaker, my sister Elizabeth Brubaker, Liana Grancea, Paul Starr, and Ori Schwarz for their detailed and illuminating comments, substantive and stylistic, on the entire manuscript; to Loïc Wacquant for characteristically sharp comments on two chapters; and to Sherry Turkle for valuable advice on the overall shape of the project. For helpful comments and encouragement I would like to thank Julia Adams, John Bowen, Sarah Boxer, Daniel Brubaker, Michael Cullina, Mitch Duneier, Jacob Foster, Pablo Geraldo, Bill Heffernan, Michael Ignatieff, Christian Joppke, Jaeeun Kim, Gail Kligman, John Laffey, Rebecca Lin, Richard Owens, Katya Rice, Juliane Vogel, Steve Wasserman, Andreas Wimmer, and Kaiting Zhou. Thanks also to Harry Cooper for suggesting the cover image by I. Rice Pereira.
After settling on my title, I discovered that it closely echoes a section heading (“Connectivity and Its Discontents”) in Sherry Turkle’s 2011 book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Since I had read Alone Together years earlier, it’s quite likely that I picked up the phrase on that initial reading (though I was also drawn to the title by my longstanding interest in Freud’s Civilization andIts Discontents). When I mentioned the echo to Turkle, she noted that she had also published a book I did not know called Simulation and Its Discontents. So the echo is a double one.
An earlier version of chapter 1 was published as “Digital Hyperconnectivity and the Self” in Theory and Society 49, nos. 5–6 (2020): 771–801.
Introduction
Digital hyperconnectivity is a defining fact of our time. The Silicon Valley dream of universal connection – the dream of connecting everyone and everything to everyone and everything else, everywhere and all the time – is rapidly becoming a reality. We are connected not only to (almost) everybody else and to an infinite universe of digital content, but also to an ever-denser network of material things. We inhabit not simply the Internet of Things, but the Internet of Everything.
All aspects of everyday experience have come to be mediated by connected devices and connective platforms: our social relationships, from the most casual to the most intimate; our forms of work and play; our ways of knowing the world, knowing others, and knowing ourselves; our experience of space and time; our practices of caring for our bodies, entertaining ourselves, and regulating our moods; our embodied habits and physiological rhythms; our commercial transactions; our interactions with things in our homes; and our engagement with cultural content of all kinds, from the merest ephemera to the most enduring fruits of human creativity. And the pandemic has dramatically intensified the digital mediation of everyday experience.
As more and more of our routine daily activities migrate onto digital platforms, they leave superabundant traces and imprints. These imprints are harvested, assembled, organized, and converted into data that can be commodified, exchanged, and aggregated into databases on hitherto unimaginable scales. Individually, the digital traces are worthless “data exhaust”; but integrated in databases and analyzed through cutting-edge computational techniques, the exhaust can be converted into gold.1 This computational alchemy depends on connecting everything – even the most apparently trivial bits of digital detritus – to everything else. It has made data extraction and data-based surveillance central to social, cultural, economic, and political life; it has powerfully stimulated the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence; and it has generated new modes of algorithmic governance that guide an ever-widening array of consequential decisions – and sometimes make such decisions without any human intervention at all.
Underlying and enabling both our experience of apparently immaterial, frictionless hyperconnectivity and the extraction, analysis, and valorization of digital data is a vast though largely invisible material substrate. This extraordinarily dense and sophisticated material infrastructure comprises the networks of interconnected routes – the fiber-optic freeways and last-mile local routes – along which an ever-growing volume of digital traffic travels; the ancillary machinery – the cell towers, the routers, the exchanges where the great networks meet – that keeps the traffic moving; the protocols that make sure the traffic gets to its destination; the enormous energy-hogging data centers that belie the ethereal imagery of “the cloud”; the vast array of connected end-user devices; and the hundreds of billions of networked sensors and tiny tracking and identifying tags that are embedded in our everyday objects and environments.2
In these experiential, data-extractive, and material dimensions – but also in its cultural, economic, legal, and political dimensions – digital hyperconnectivity is what anthropologist Marcel Mauss, writing about gift exchange in archaic societies, called a “total social fact,” at once a legal, moral, political, domestic, religious, economic, aesthetic, and social structural phenomenon. Hyperconnectivity similarly “involve[s] the totality of society and its institutions.”3 It has colonized the self, reorganizing our attention and reshaping our ways of thinking, seeing, and feeling. It has recast social interactions, stretching them over space and time and channeling them into platform-friendly, surveillance-enhancing forms and formats. It has converted the whole of human culture into an unending stream of digital content, served to us by personalized algorithms. It has revolutionized economic life, giving birth to gigantic oligopolies with unprecedented power over our future. It has upended politics, fragmenting the public sphere; polarizing – and in some ways paralyzing – the citizenry; and strengthening populist challenges to mediating institutions.4
Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents develops an interpretive account of these pervasive and unsettling changes, all of which have dramatically accelerated during the pandemic. The book casts a broad net, addressing transformations of selves, social interactions, culture, economics, and politics. I seek to illuminate the everyday experience of hyperconnectivity in each of these domains through the structural analysis of its underlying dynamics. I aim in this way to grasp hyperconnectivity as a total social fact that is central to late modernity.
* * *
Digital hyperconnectivity is a relatively new phenomenon. Large-scale digital connectivity goes back several decades: the explosive growth in internet use dates from the introduction of the first Web browser in 1993. (Electronic connectivity of course has a much longer history, dating from the mid-nineteenth century development of the telegraph.) But digital hyperconnectivity, as I understand it, emerged only during the first half of the 2010s. In the space of just a few years, smartphone use and anywhere-anytime connectivity became nearly universal in the developed world. In the US, for example, the share of the population over age 14 with a smartphone soared from a mere 11 percent at the end of 2008 to 75 percent just six years later. This is also when social media use became widespread and normatively expected. Regular Facebook users amounted to only 14 percent of the US population at the end of 2008, but just three years later they made up more than half of the population (and a much higher fraction among younger people).5 The extraction, aggregation, and monetization of vast troves of data from the traces of our digitally mediated activities; the great leaps in machine learning and artificial intelligence, trained on these immense data sets; the hypertrophy of digital surveillance; the development of cloud computing and high-speed mobile broadband infrastructure; the pervasive use of algorithmic sorting to govern what content we see online: these are all likewise relatively recent developments, emerging only in the new millennium and acquiring critical mass more recently still.
These transformations are not simply recent; they are ongoing. They are both deepening, as hyperconnectivity intensifies, and broadening, as it infiltrates new domains of life. Hyperconnectivity is a dynamic unfolding, not a static condition.6 The fifth generation (5G) mobile networks presently being deployed, for example, afford much greater bandwidth, higher speeds, and lower latency than their 4G predecessors (themselves introduced to support mobile broadband only a decade earlier); they will greatly enhance augmented and virtual reality capabilities, central to emerging visions of the “metaverse.” The self-expanding, self-transforming dynamism of hyperconnectivity became conspicuously visible during the pandemic, when the “great confinement” gave a massive impetus to the further digitalization of everything and anxieties about contagion accelerated the development and marketing of touchless technologies for a contactless future.7
What does the “hyper” in hyperconnectivity mean? When we think of digital hyperconnectivity, we are likely to think first of connections between people. The scale of such connectivity is indeed staggering. Facebook alone connects nearly 3 billion monthly active users, WhatsApp and Instagram over 2 billion each, Messenger 1.3 billion. (Many people of course use more than one of these apps, all owned by Meta.) YouTube has 2 billion users. China’s WeChat has 1.25 billion, while TikTok, founded only in 2016, had already accumulated a billion by 2021, almost all of them since 2018. A billion – a thousand million – is a very large number. Obviously most people on these social media platforms have only relatively small numbers of friends or followers, and most use messaging platforms to communicate only with small numbers of others. But the immense scale of platform-mediated connectivity matters. Because social media connect not only close friends and family (what sociologists call strong ties) but wider circles of acquaintances (weak ties), and still wider circles of followers (nonreciprocal digital-only ties), content of all kinds – news, gossip, bits of culture, rumors, or misinformation – can spread very quickly to enormous numbers of people. Weak ties and ties of followership tend to branch out much more widely than strong ties, which tend to cluster around a cohesive core. Weak ties create links between different communities and networks; strong ties solidify relationships within communities and networks. Platform-mediated weak ties thus provide a social structural foundation for the viral diffusion of digital content, altering the dynamics of culture, politics, marketing, and amusement.
People are connected not only to other people. They are connected to organizations (social, political, religious, commercial, educational, medical, financial, and so on). They are connected to their “always-on, always-on-them” devices, which require continuous though largely habitual background attention.8 They are connected to a densifying network of things in their environment. And they are connected to a dynamically updated infinity of digital content: information, news, commentary, games, music, video, entertainment, discussions about every imaginable topic, and the entire universe of human culture in the widest sense.
An increasing share of digital connectivity, however, does not directly involve people at all: it involves connections between things, operating through various forms of “machine to machine” communication. Such connections will proliferate even more rapidly under emerging 5G networks, which will support vastly greater numbers and densities of sensor-embedded devices. The consumer-facing “internet of things,” with its connected wearables, thermostats, security systems, lighting systems, and other “smart home” appliances, offers the most familiar examples. But the “industrial internet of things,” enabled by miniaturized sensors and uniquely identified RFID tags, is more profoundly transformative; it furthers the automation of production by allowing components and machines to communicate with one another without the mediation of a human operator.9 Mobile payment systems, automated access to buildings or transit, automated inventory systems, and automated toll roads likewise depend on RFID tags. And wireless sensor networks are used for environmental, infrastructural, agricultural, medical, industrial, and military monitoring.
The “hyper” in hyperconnectivity is not only about the who and what of connectivity; it’s also about the where and when. Anywhere-anytime connectivity has eroded the boundaries between previously distinct spheres of life, which used to have their own times and places. Yet in the future envisioned for us by Silicon Valley, connectivity is not just anywhere and any time; it is everywhere and always. Rearticulating Mark Weiser’s early vision of “ubiquitous computing,” current tech discourse on smart technologies sees connectivity and computing as becoming “ambient,” inscribed in and distributed throughout the environment rather than concentrated in focal devices like smartphones.10
In their planetary scale and scope, widely ramifying pervasiveness, and dizzying speed, the transformations occasioned by digital hyperconnectivity exceed those set in motion by earlier revolutions in media and communication technology. The consequences of the invention and diffusion of print were certainly as pervasive, and they may have been more profound, but they took centuries to unfold. The telegraph and telephone eclipsed distance and knit the world together as never before, but these networks remained bound to particular places for a century and a half.11 Television transformed everyday experience, culture, and politics, but digital hyperconnectivity has done the same, while at the same time penetrating more deeply into the organization of the self, fundamentally reorganizing modalities of social interaction, altering the basic structures of the economy, and engendering new modalities of algorithmic governance.
The revolution in digital connectivity has built on and subsumed previous media and communication revolutions, digitalizing and remediating existing media forms and combining print, photography, recorded sound, film, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, gaming, and computing into a single digitally networked omnimedia ecosystem.12 This has enabled digital hyperconnectivity to develop into a kind of universal infrastructure of contemporary life, an infrastructure of communication, sociability, knowledge, culture, entertainment, news, politics, commerce, governance, and more. Telegraph, telephone, radio, and television, and before them the postal system: all these have been profoundly important infrastructures of communication. But the extraordinary pluripotentiality of the internet has made digital hyperconnectivity meta-infrastructural: it is an infrastructure on which almost all other sociotechnical infrastructures depend, including for example financial, industrial, and transportation infrastructures as well as utilities. It is this deeply infrastructural quality that gives hyperconnectivity its pervasive reach and transformative power.13
To emphasize the transformative power and permeative presence of hyperconnectivity – the ways in which it is ever more densely and intricately woven into every aspect of social life – is not to adopt a technologically determinist stance. My claim that hyperconnectivity has restructured all major domains of social life might seem to suggest otherwise. But this and similar highly abbreviated formulations are simply expository shortcuts, to which I resort so as to avoid cumbersome circumlocution. They stand in for more nuanced analyses. Digital hyperconnectivity is not a “thing”; it is not a “force”; it does not directly cause things to happen. It is an environment, a terrain, an ecology of communication;14 a web of humans, machines, protocols, practices, and data; a complex sociotechnical assemblage comprising communication networks, computational procedures, material artifacts, social practices, embodied habits, organizational forms, economic incentives, and legal frameworks.15 Networked digital technologies do not determine the uses we make of them, though they do have certain “affordances” that open up new possibilities and foreclose others, making some actions easier, others more difficult.16 The social transformations set in motion by digital hyperconnectivity are not preordained by the nature of networked digital technologies themselves; they emerge rather from the ways in which these technologies and the practices that grow up around them are culturally understood, socially organized, legally regulated, and politically contested.17
I analyze these transformations in five domains, beginning with the experience-near territories of the self and social interaction and moving on to consider culture, economics, and politics. Chapter 1 addresses transformations of the self. I begin by reconsidering and reformulating early arguments about the Web as a medium of exploring and experimenting with the self and emancipating the self from social constraints. I then analyze the new modes of knowing and acting on the self that have emerged in an ecology of digital hyperconnectivity. These include new ways of seeing the self as an object, knowing the self through numbers, producing a digital self for others’ consumption, and regulating mood and emotion. I conclude by analyzing the tension between reflexively governing oneself and being governed by sociotechnical systems. While hyperconnectivity has provided new resources for the late modern project of reflexive self-formation, it has also drawn the self into the service of opaque sociotechnical systems that objectify, quantify, produce, regulate, and govern the self from the outside.
Chapter 2 addresses social interactions. I show how digital hyperconnectivity – radicalizing changes introduced by earlier forms of electronically mediated communication – recasts the spatial and temporal frameworks of interaction, weaving the there and then into the here and now in new ways. I trace the proliferation of new forms of micro-sociality and their attendant micro-obligations, in both personal and professional contexts. I analyze the new regime of visibility and the new possibilities for (and conflicts over) the surveillance of friends, partners, and family members. And I consider the new forms of “platformed sociality” that format, channel, and manipulate social interaction, creating new forms of action (such as liking, friending, sharing, and following), steering us toward these actions, habituating us to the gratifications they provide, and inculcating in us the skills and dispositions the platforms need to grow and thrive. A brief coda addresses the accelerated shift towards disembodied interaction and contactless commerce during the pandemic.
Chapter 3 considers three hopeful claims commonly made about the cultural promise of digital hyperconnectivity. The promise of plenitude envisions instant, frictionless access to the entire cultural wealth of humanity. The promise of decommodification envisions the freeing of the production and consumption of culture from market constraints. The promise of democratization envisions broader, more active, and more self-directed popular participation in the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural goods. This threefold promise has been realized in certain respects. But it requires critical scrutiny. The digital cultural cornucopia, while exhilarating, has a flattening and homogenizing effect: culture is converted into “content” that tends to blur together as it flows through the same conduits and across the same interfaces in an endless stream. Many cultural goods have been made freely available, but the more far-reaching promise of decommodified cultural production remains largely unrealized: amateur cultural creativity is increasingly organized and mediated by commercial platforms, and users (even those who do not seek to monetize their content) are drawn into the competitive dynamics of the attention economy. New avenues of popular cultural participation have certainly opened up, and the power of gatekeepers has dramatically eroded, but cultural power remains extraordinarily concentrated, and winner-take-all (or winner-take-most) logics remain entrenched.
Chapter 4 addresses the emergence of the digital platform as a novel and increasingly dominant economic and organizational form, one that has reorganized sector after sector of social life including culture, entertainment, commerce, education, lodging, transportation, manufacturing, finance, medicine, journalism, public discussion, dating, and social interaction. I show how platforms function as rapidly scalable digital intermediaries, facilitating and coordinating frictionless interactions and transactions through carefully designed architectures of interaction and the extraction, control, and analysis of data. I argue that the power of the core platforms differs not just quantitatively but qualitatively from that of other platforms in entailing concentrated control over an array of infrastructural resources that have become indispensable for economic, social, cultural, and political life. I analyze the platform-driven changes in the ways in which digitally mediated labor is organized, carried out, and controlled. I conclude by considering the new techno-utopian vision of a radically decentralized economy built on blockchain technology.
Chapter 5 examines how hyperconnectivity has reshaped political life by transforming ways of knowing, ways of feeling, and ways of governing. It has altered ways of knowing the public world by proliferating channels of public discussion, weakening the authority of institutions that produce and disseminate knowledge, sowing suspicion about public knowledge claims, and eroding the foundations of a shared public world. Hyperconnectivity has altered regimes of public feeling by encouraging the expression and mobilization of moral outrage and thereby deepening partisan antipathy and polarization. And it has altered ways of governing by enabling new modalities of algorithmic regulation, public and private. The chapter concludes by highlighting the tension between the technocratic premises and modalities of algorithmic governance and the populist regimes of digitally mediated knowing and feeling.
The Conclusion shows how hyperconnectivity prepared us for the pandemic and how the pandemic, in turn, powerfully accelerated the digital mediation of every aspect of life, in ways that have not been and will not be reversed. It also reflects more broadly on the significance of digital hyperconnectivity. Taking as points of reference three dystopian visions – two mid-twentieth-century works of fiction and a recent work of social science – I consider how hyperconnectivity has enhanced technologies of control, technologies of distraction, and technologies of manipulation, all premised on the extraction and analysis of data, that is, on surveillance. In so doing, hyperconnectivity has empowered organizations to a much greater extent than individuals, and it has fostered the recentralization and reconcentration of power, reversing the decentralization and dispersion of power in the early years of the internet.
* * *
Cutting across the substantive chapters and linking them to one another are five themes to which I pay special attention throughout the book: abundance, miniaturization, convenience, quantification, and discipline. These are not the only transverse themes that run through these pages; others include surveillance, data and datafication, algorithms, and platforms. But I want to sketch the contours of these five themes here, for they have been much less widely discussed.
Digital hyperconnectivity confronts us with promises and problems of abundance. Social theory, as Andrew Abbott has argued, has long been organized primarily around presumptions of scarcity.18 Visions of technologically enabled material abundance, to be sure, have long been commonplace, and theorizations of new forms of post-scarcity politics have been circulating for half a century.19 Yet abundance – and its normative cousin, excess – remains peripheral to social theory.
Digitally mediated abundance pervasively colors our everyday experience of the world. Observers had already called attention to information overload, communicative abundance, mediated experience, and the saturated self in the last decades of the twentieth century.20 But anywhere-anytime access to everyone and everything has greatly intensified these forms of abundance. In the sphere of social relationships, we experience abundance in the ceaseless flow of messages on multiple channels; in the multiplication of friends and followers on social media platforms; in the unlimited supply of potential partners when we are dating; and in the proliferation of hyper-accessible visual material on social media showing us – and not just telling us about – the lives of others, in relation to which our own lives may seem pallid and unsatisfactory. The abundance of social information about our peers and about other social worlds situates our own experience and our sense of ourselves in a relentlessly comparative frame. The digitally mediated vistas of unlimited possibilities and alternative ways of life unsettle the here and now and heighten our sense of the provisional: the sense, already central to the experience of late modernity, that things could be otherwise.21 What might be casts a perpetual shadow over what is.
Most strikingly, we encounter abundance in the infinity of digital content that is never more than a few clicks away.22 Spotify hosts some 80 million songs, YouTube some 40 million channels, TikTok uncounted billions of videos. The infinite scroll is a key design feature of many social media feeds. We may revel in this exhilarating cornucopia, but we may also feel disoriented, adrift in a vast, flat, and featureless sea. It is not only that we may face the “paradox of choice”: that an increased range of choice may decrease satisfaction.23 It is also that abundance may erode value and meaning. The superabundance of digital memory artifacts, as Michael Sacasas has observed, “will not make us care more about those memories, they will make us care less.”24 The superabundance of music to stream, similarly, may undermine rather than stimulate desire.25 And the superabundance of news, during times of crisis, makes it all too easy to engage in “doomscrolling.”26
The abundance of digital goods – a consequence of the near-zero marginal cost of reproducing and distributing them – seemed to some observers to suspend the basic laws of economics, premised on scarcity. Business models of entire sectors – notably journalism and music – were rendered unviable. Giving things away for free became a key strategy for platform businesses seeking to scale quickly and benefit from network effects. Yet abundance creates its own scarcities. As Herbert Simon famously observed a half-century ago, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”27 The scarcity of the time and attention needed to process, consume, or even notice superabundant information and digital goods is at the core not only of the “attention economy” but also of what could be called the “attention polity.” In every domain, there is too much information, too much culture, and too much communication chasing too little attention and too little time. This generates a fierce competition for attention and visibility in the social, cultural, and political fields as well as the economic sphere. It leaves us feeling chronically short of time and keenly aware of what we are missing. FOMO – the fear of missing out – is not a peculiarity of teenagers who spend too much time on social media; it is the inescapable condition of our time.
The abundance of information and communication has been central to the democratizing promise of digital connectivity. But today that promise seems hopelessly naïve. A cacophonous glut of information and pseudo-information, of claims and counter-claims, clogs the digital public sphere and generates a crisis of public knowledge.28 Cast in the form of machine-analyzable data, however, superabundant information – including the staggering volume of digital traces generated as a byproduct of all digitally mediated activity – underwrites powerful new forms of knowledge and indeed transforms “what counts as knowledge.”29 Superabundant data have been central to advances in machine learning, to the emergence of the digital platform as a dominant economic form, and to ubiquitous and unprecedentedly powerful forms of governmental and commercial surveillance. The contrast between what is known by the public in the fractured public sphere and what is known about the public in the age of superabundant data and machine learning is striking.30
Miniaturization, my second crosscutting theme, is in some ways the flip side of abundance: digital objects and actions proliferate in part through their fragmentation. Insofar as the literature has been concerned with scale, it has focused on things getting bigger: big data, the rapid scalability of digital platforms, network effects that favor enormous size, and the immense power and global reach of the tech giants. But hyperconnectivity also makes things smaller. There is of course a large literature on nanotechnology and other aspects of technical miniaturization. But social miniaturization – the rearticulation of objects and activities into decomposable and recomposable bits – has been neglected.31
Among the affordances of digital objects and digitally mediated activities are their limitless divisibility, easy manipulability, and frictionless distributability. These affordances enable unbundling: items that were previously bound together in packages – newspapers, magazines, books, encyclopedias, record albums, jobs, or college degree programs – now circulate as individual articles, chapters, entries, songs, tasks, or courses. And these individual digital items can be further broken down into fragmentary bits, clips, and extracts that themselves circulate individually (often in remixed or at least recontextualized form). Miniature forms and formats such as memes, tweets, and TikToks gain cultural prominence, while micro-communication and micro-affirmations – the ultra-minimal text, the self-standing emoji, the “like” – proliferate on messaging and social media platforms. Microtask labor platforms allow firms to farm out tasks paying as little as a few cents each. “Micro-learning” initiatives serve up “byte-sized” educational content. Digital divisibility – along with the ease of switching between digitally mediated activities and objects that are all accessed through the same device – allows bits and pieces of news, games, entertainment, sociability, and work to be slotted into even the smallest of interstices between other activities.32 Miniaturization thus contributes to the fragmentation of time and attention and to ubiquitous multitasking; it establishes the glance as the dominant mode of attention.33
Miniaturization is central to the digital economy. Digital platforms are organizational technologies of disaggregation and reaggregation. By breaking down activities or tasks into small units and reducing transaction costs to a minimum, platforms enable and encourage what would otherwise be inefficiently small transactions.34 This holds not only for the microtask platforms mentioned above or for micro-entrepreneurship platforms like Uber and Airbnb. It also holds for noncommercial digitally networked peer production, best exemplified by Wikipedia, which depends on modularity (breaking a project down into smaller modules) and granularity (allowing people to participate with minimal investments of time and energy).35 Digital payment infrastructures, especially those developed by Alibaba and TenCent in China, reduce the transaction costs of payments and enable micro-tipping for digital content. Micro-transactions allow game developers and publishers to make money even from increasingly popular “free-to-play” games by encouraging players to make small in-game payments for various decorative or functional upgrades. New forms of “tokenization” and “fractionalization” allow small investors to own and trade bits and pieces of digital assets. More fundamentally, digital advertising infrastructures use automated nano-auctions to determine nearly instantaneously which users will be shown which ads when searching on Google or scrolling through the Facebook newsfeed.36
Miniaturization also shapes the modalities of politics, governance, and power. Micro-communication platforms like Twitter (and increasingly TikTok), on which shards and fragments of discourse circulate in an often decontextualized manner, have transformed the temporality and the grammar of public discourse and restructured the public sphere. New forms of digital micro-engagement like signing online petitions or joining digital shaming campaigns – derided by some as forms of “clicktivism” – have altered understandings and practices of political participation and transformed the repertoires and trajectories of social movements; they have enabled rapid mobilization but eroded organizational capacities for sustained action.37 Political campaigns enlist paid nano-influencers – seen as more engaged with their followers than mega-influencers are – as a way of tapping into networks defined by trust and familiarity.38 Data-driven micro-targeting has migrated from the realm of commercial to that of political advertising. And governance itself is rendered more granular through data-driven “modulations” and personalized “micronudges.”39
Convenience, my third transverse theme, has likewise been undertheorized. And understandably so: convenience would seem to be a dull subject, at home perhaps in the province of marketing, but distant from the concerns of social theory. Yet the seeming triviality of convenience should not blind us to its power. Convenience resets expectations, forms habits, and insinuates its way into our routines. And these expectations, habits, and routines are unobtrusively but powerfully world-transforming. We may lament the consequences of Amazon’s retail dominance, for example, but the immense convenience it has trained us to expect and desire keeps us coming back for more. Click by convenient click, repeated trillions of times, we have co-constructed the immensely powerful platforms that today organize so much of our lives.40
Convenience reduces friction: it enables us to do quickly and quasi-automatically what would otherwise require time, thought, and effort. In a world of baffling complexity and relentless temporal pressures – complexity and pressures intensified, ironically, by the dynamism of hyperconnectivity itself and the superabundance of digital culture and communication – convenience becomes a cultural touchstone and an economic imperative.41 In this respect as in others, digital technology is called upon to alleviate the very problems that it has itself aggravated.
The gospel of digital convenience celebrates instantaneity and frictionlessness. Milliseconds matter: already at the turn of the millennium, Google discovered that the additional half-second it took to display twenty-five results rather than the standard ten in response to a search query caused traffic to fall by 20 percent after a month.42 Clicks count (and are counted) as well: Amazon’s celebrated one-click technology marked a first major milestone in seamless e-commerce. The pursuit of instantaneity and frictionlessness is self-reinforcing: the expectations of immediacy to which hyperconnectivity has accustomed us sensitize us to even the smallest delays, while expectations of seamlessness magnify the smallest frictions. Next-day or even same-day delivery has been redefined as slow by startups promising low-fee, no-minimum delivery within half an hour. Covid has accelerated the drive toward frictionlessness and instantaneity. Touchless payment systems and contactless delivery have become commonplace. Shuttered retail outlets have been transformed into micro-fulfillment centers for ultra-fast delivery. Staffing shortages have increased the frictions associated with in-person shopping, pushing even the reluctant to shop online.43
The shift from the churning, exhilarating chaos of the open web to the tamed, orderly “walled gardens” of apps and platforms – and the fortunes of the companies that built them – was founded largely on convenience. Apps and platforms offer us convenience above all else: seamless shopping, anytime-anywhere culture and entertainment, instant political participation, and push-button reactions. They remove friction from friendship, communication, creativity, knowledge, contracting, investing, and education. They promise to make the physical world as frictionless as the digital. As former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick put it, “In a world where technology can deliver the ride you need within five minutes wherever you are in the world, just imagine all the other goods and services that you could one day get delivered quickly, safely, with just the single touch of a button.”44
But these are by now old forms of convenience. The new frontiers of convenience are defined by attempts to gauge our moods and anticipate our needs and desires before we are even aware of them. They are defined by attempts to automate and outsource routine actions and decisions – reordering supplies, greeting Facebook friends on their birthdays, replying to routine communications, arranging meetings, or selecting the right music for the moment.45 They mark a shift from making it easier for us to do things to making it unnecessary for us to do them at all.
Hyperconnectivity seems to offer us “a world where everything is organized for [our] convenience”46 – a world that would free us from mental as well as physical drudgery. But the celebration of convenience is informed by an impoverished vision of human nature and politics, and the costs of convenience have become increasingly clear.47 Frictionlessness degrades the public sphere, creates massive cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and displaces and invisibilizes labor as well as the “enormous global networks of extraction, logistics, manufacture, and transportation, along with sites of disposal, salvage, and waste” on which the experience of frictionlessness depends.48 Yet convenience remains powerfully entrenched in app and platform logics, enshrined in prevailing discourses, and engrained in our habits and expectations.
Quantification, my fourth unifying theme, has received much more attention in social theory; it has been central in recent decades to accounts of economic, cultural, and political modernity.49 But digital hyperconnectivity has ushered in a new phase of intensified and generalized quantification. It has opened up new domains of quantification, including the territories of the self, the sphere of social interaction, and the domain of amateur creativity. And it has made quantification in every domain more pervasive. Since digital mediation renders the world as data, more and more aspects of the world can be quantified, and they can be quantified in continuous and automatic rather than episodic and deliberate fashion. Hyperconnectivity, in short, has made quantification universal and ubiquitous. The “avalanche of printed numbers” that Ian Hacking discerned in the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century is nothing compared to the deluge of digital numbers with which, and by which, we live.50
Digital platforms have created vast new infrastructures of datafication and quantification. These infrastructures enable the automatic capture, storage, and analysis of every aspect of platform-mediated activity. Following the lead of the platforms, organizations of all kinds, public and private, subscribe to a cultural and institutional “data imperative”: they seek to collect and store as much data as they can, even when they have no clear idea how the data can be used. Data extraction and storage are so cheap – and the data imperative so firmly embedded in the prevailing ideology of “dataism” – that they become the default option, requiring no special justification.51
The superabundant data thus accumulated feed into both visible and invisible practices of quantification. Metrics have thoroughly colonized the spaces of digital social interaction. Every Facebook and Instagram post is publicly rated by the number of likes (and, in the case of Facebook, other “reactions”) and comments it has generated; every tweet by the number of likes, retweets, and quote tweets; and every Twitter and Instagram user by the number of followers. These metrics do not simply record and describe interactional patterns; by offering “immediate, vivid, and quantified evaluations of … conversational success,” they motivate, organize, regulate, and gamify interaction.52 But scores, ratings, and rankings have become ubiquitous in every sphere of life, not just in social media. Generalized metrics of social value or trustworthiness integrate across a variety of domains and data traces.53 Trending algorithms quantify, and amplify, currently popular items of culture, news, and entertainment.54 Fine-grained, real-time metrics connect advertisers, politicians, musicians, entertainers, live streamers, bloggers, vloggers, and content creators of all kinds directly and immediately to their online audiences. The ubiquity of such metrics has reorganized journalism by substituting the economic logic of measureable and monetizable popularity for the professional logic of trained editorial judgment; this has severely eroded the “wall of separation” between business and editorial operations and transformed the public sphere in a populist direction.
The “quantified self” movement promises a new form of self-knowledge through numbers, based on data streams derived from sensor-enabled self-tracking. But we have all become quantified selves. Even if we have no interest in self-tracking, we are relentlessly tracked and quantified in the background by sociotechnical systems. Our tastes are known by algorithms that may (like that of TikTok) seem uncannily accurate. Our traits and attitudes are probabilistically inferable from our data traces, enabling us to be individually targeted by commercial or political advertisers.55 Our behaviors are predicted by algorithms that engage in price discrimination, allocate welfare benefits, guide bail and sentencing decisions, and distribute enforcement resources accordingly.56 Predictive algorithms are not new: algorithmically generated credit scores, which seek to predict the likelihood that a borrower will repay a loan, go back to the mid-twentieth century. But the vast troves of digital data on which algorithms can now be trained have driven rapid advances in machine learning and enabled the proliferation of much more sophisticated algorithms that have become central not only to commerce but to practices of governance, both public and private.
Discipline, my final crosscutting theme, has figured centrally in traditions of social theory inspired by Foucault and, to a lesser extent, Elias and Weber. But it has not been widely discussed in connection with hyperconnectivity (although its close cousin in the Foucauldian tradition, surveillance, has of course been a key theme). In the influential view of Gilles Deleuze, “disciplinary societies” as understood by Foucault, dependent on enclosed spaces like families, schools, barracks, factories, hospitals, and prisons, have been yielding since the middle of the twentieth century to “societies of control,” dependent on a continuous series of flexible “modulations,” mediated by information technology.57 But this contrast has been too sharply drawn. Digital platforms are themselves spaces of enclosure; they have corralled sector after sector of social life within the ambit of their surveillant gaze and governing regimes.58 And the “universal modulation” that Deleuze identifies as central to control can alternatively be interpreted as enabling new and ultimately deeper forms of discipline. No longer limited to enclosed physical spaces and their corresponding blocks of time, digital disciplines operate more flexibly and continuously throughout the social field.59
One might even think of digital hyperconnectivity as the sociotechnical matrix of a new “disciplinary revolution.” Connective digital technologies and platforms, like the disciplinary technologies of the early modern era studied by Philip Gorski, discipline from within as much as from without; they work in the self as much as on the self. They form our subjectivities, shaping how we think and how we feel as much as how we behave.60 They draw us into their orbits, condition us to desire the gratifications they provide, and channel our interactions into the surveyable, calculable, and manipulable forms and formats provided by digital platforms. They form a powerful and versatile “infrastructure of governance.”61
The augmented powers and new forms of surveillance enabled by digital hyperconnectivity – government surveillance, workplace surveillance, commercial surveillance, social surveillance, and self-surveillance – all have disciplinary workings. They all partake of the disciplinary logic of panopticism, according to which, in Foucault’s celebrated analysis, the individual who is “subjected to a field of visibility … assumes responsibility for the constraints of power,” “makes them play spontaneously upon himself,” and “becomes the principle of his own subjection.”62 They engender social discipline through new forms of self-discipline, social control through new forms of self-control. They create tractable, docile, predictable, trustworthy, and governable citizens and consumers.63
But digital infrastructures also enable modes of discipline that operate not indirectly, through the shaping of subjectivities, as in Foucault’s understanding of disciplinary power, but directly, through the shaping of behavior. The digital mediation of more and more of social life enables neo-behaviorist forms of governance by nudge and automated, self-enforcing forms of governance by algorithm. Conduct on digital platforms is fully controllable by those who design and operate the digital architecture. Platform owners, for example, can automatically prevent certain actions (such as certain forms of speech) or exclude certain participants (such as those whose rating falls below a certain threshold). Disciplinary power in this sense operates through “generative” rules, which cannot be violated, and which operate independently of the consciousness of those whose conduct they govern, rather than through the more familiar “regulative” rules, which can be violated, and which work through the consciousness of those they regulate.64
By intensifying and automating processes of discipline, digital infrastructures of governance make social life – or at least certain platform-enclosed zones of social life – more orderly, more predictable, and more governable. Such digitally mediated disciplinary powers are a boon for platform capitalism and for digital authoritarianism, but they pose new kinds of threats to human freedom and flourishing. This is a challenge with which we have barely begun to grapple.
Notes
1
Converting data exhaust into gold: Kenneth Cukier, quoted in Zuboff 2019: 68. On digital traces generally, see especially Harcourt 2015.
2
On the material infrastructure underlying digital hyperconnectivity, see Bratton 2015. On the materiality of cloud computing specifically, see Monserrate 2022. For an accessible overview of the environmental costs of hyperconnectivity, see Crawford 2021, chapter 1.
3
Mauss 2002 [1925]: 100–1.
4
Other institutions that have been profoundly transformed by digital hyperconnectivity include childhood (Twenge 2017; Danby et al. 2018), education (Williamson 2021), religion (Campbell and Tsuria 2021), sexuality (Nash and Gorman-Murray 2019), and war (Ford and Hoskins 2022); the list could be extended indefinitely.
5
Share of the population with a smartphone:
https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Blog/US-Smartphone-Penetration-Surpassed-80-Percent-in-2016
. Facebook users:
https://www.nickburcher.com/2012/01/facebook-usage-statistics-by-country.html
.
6
For a critique of static notions of an overarching “digital era,” with reference to the challenges of studying digital politics that arise from successive and ongoing transformations in the political affordances of digital connectivity, see Karpf 2020. For a succinct account of the transformation of the internet from a highly decentralized “integrated system of open systems” to a “platform for the reconcentration of power,” see Benkler 2016.
7
On the development of “touchless technology,” see Greetly 2020.
8
“Always-on, always-on-them” devices: Turkle 2008. On continuous background attention to devices, see Burchell 2015.
9
On the ever-denser connectivity of an ever-wider range of ever-smaller networked things, with special reference to the issue of addressability, see Bratton 2015, especially pp. 191ff. On the industrial internet of things in the context of platform capitalism, see Srnicek 2017: 65. RFID tags – the acronym stands for radio-frequency identification – are tiny devices that use electromagnetic fields to identify and track material objects. On their significance as an invisible “infrastructure of identification,” see Frith 2019.
10
“The most profound technologies,” wrote Weiser (1991: 94), “are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” On the ways in which Weiser’s vision of ubiquitous computing has subsequently been recycled and repurposed, see Hong 2021.
11
On the “mobile revolution,” see Rainie and Wellman 2012, chapter 4.
12
On the concept of remediation, see Bolter and Grusin 1999.
13
I return to the theme of infrastructure in chapter 4; see pp. 106ff.
14
The notion of an “ecology of communication” was first developed by Altheide 1994. For an accessible introduction to the “media ecology” approach, see Strate 2008.
15
The legal frameworks governing digital hyperconnectivity are largely beyond the scope of my analysis. For a sustained and influential analysis, see Cohen 2019.
16
On the notion of affordances, in the context of an attempt to stake out a position in the sociological study of technology between radical constructivism and technological determinism, see Hutchby 2001.
17
Paul Starr’s emphasis on the “constitutive choices” that channel the long-term development of media systems in particular directions (Starr 2004) applies equally to the development of digital hyperconnectivity. On the key “design choices” that have shaped and reshaped the internet, see Benkler 2016; for a critique of “internet-centrism,” the tendency to endow the internet with a kind of ahistorical essence, see Morozov 2013a: 15–62.
18
Abbott (2014: 1) calls for a reorientation of social theory around the “central problematic of … dealing with excess.”
19
On “post-scarcity society” and its characteristic forms of politics, see Giddens 1995; on post-materialist politics, see Inglehart 1977.
20
On communicative abundance, see Keane 1999; on mediated experience, Giddens 1991: 23ff and Thompson 1995: 228ff; on the saturated self, Gergen 1991.
21
On the counterfactual quality of experience in late modernity, see Giddens 1991: 29.
22
