On the value of reading books I could never explain to others
Justin Smith-Ruiu's "The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is"
I’m currently mid-way through Justin E. H. Smith’s The Internet is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning—a winding, wonderful book on the perils of the World Wide Web. I’ve been reading it in the sun with an iced cherry Pepsi, trying to read slower than normal, since Smith’s prose—gorgeous when read at a trot—gallops past me when I try to rush through it.
Smith first came to my attention after I, apparently, came to his. In a polemic titled “Neo-Utilitarians Are Utter Philistines”, Smith asked:
Have you not noticed this new cohort of cocky lads, who so proudly speak the language of the calculus of expected utility, who will not hesitate to tell you when it’s time to update your priors [🫣], or which path is most likely to help you max out your utils?2 What is all this? Why did they have to start talking this way? I mean, I like Bentham and Mill well enough —in fact Bentham is the sort of absolute freak who cannot fail to win my heart—, and I would not begrudge anyone their commitment to the tradition these men founded, were it not accompanied today by a scorched-earth revolutionary fervency that sincerely believes this single school of thought is rich enough by itself to go it alone indefinitely into the future, and that we can therefore dispense with any idea of philosophy as living tradition, involving, in part, like all traditions, due reverence to ancestors.
Thus the genial Amos Wollen, after making an incomprehensible (to me) contrast between Alvin Plantinga’s “good” writing and Kant’s “bad” writing, suggests that a possible way for philosophers to avoid the “bad” kind is to stop reading historical texts. Wollen does not in fact think this is a feasible proposal, but also cites some less moderate colleagues who truly seem bent on erasing the past, including Hanno Sauer, the author of a remarkable peer-reviewed piece from 2021 entitled “The End of History”, which argues that we should not waste time on historical texts on the grounds that they tend not to warrant “credence” (as if that were why one reads!). And he cites another fellow calling himself “Bentham’s Bulldog”, who likewise complains that the study of the history of philosophy amounts to a dynamic whereby “Kant will say some inane nonsense, and people will treat him like he’s Jesus Christ.” Surely the lifetime laureate of these cocksure, presentist, proudly monoglot gamins is Michael Huemer, who runs the Fake Noûs Substack and who maintains that “[h]istorians of philosophy… are expending a great deal of intellectual energy on questions that do not matter.”
‘Cocksure, presentist, proudly monoglot gamin’ is such a sick burn that I forgave Smith instantly and subscribed to his newsletter, The Hinternet. (For the sake of the historical record—which won’t exist once I’m through with it, mwahaha—, I only floated, without endorsement, the suggestion that we should ‘drastically downsize the amount of research devoted to interpreting dead philosophers’, as a way of counteracting a relatively minor incentive that philosophy academics have to write impenetrably—not that we should “stop reading historical texts”, or anything like that. How else would we demonstrate that no real philosophy was done until AR 1905, the birthyear our of our teacher, Ayn Rand? (Kidding.))
Not long ago, I ducked into a London bookshop with my significant other to avoid the rain and found Smith’s book on sale for £5. I tapped my card, dipped my nose in on the underground, and have now begun it in earnest.
Chapter II of Smith’s book, “The Ecology of the Internet”, catalogues a range of natural and artificial precursors to the web—some real, some merely imagined. For example, there was this French con artist in the 19th Century called Jules Allix who hoodwinked a bunch of Parisians into believing he’d invented a “snail telegraph” that could send messages overseas by means of “escargotic commotion”. The theory was that two snails, once they’d mated, were magnetically paired for life, meaning any change in one would result in a change in the other, no matter the distance between them. As such, Allix claimed, you could place an assembly of snails in slots, each corresponding to a letter of the French alphabet, ship a corresponding, magnetically-paired assembly of snails to another part of the world, place them in corresponding slots, and then send messages back and forth by manipulating the snails on either end. (Allix even ‘demonstrated’ this feat, in Paris, receiving the message “lumière divine” (divine light) from a correspondent in America.) Though the technology was hokum, the concept was perfectly real.
We also learn of interconnected systems of communication in nature—descriptions of forests, fungi, and the rootstalks of subterranean grass, which Smith suggests are fundamentally analogous to the internet. He writes:
The ecology of the internet, on this line of thinking, is only one more recent layer of the ecology of the planet as a whole, which overlays networks upon networks: prairie dogs calling out to their kin the exact shape and motions of an arriving predator; sagebrushes emitting airborne methyl jasmonate to warn others of their kind of a coming insect invasion; blue whales singing songs for their own inscrutable reasons, perhaps simply for the joy of free and directionless discourse of the sort that human beings—now sometimes aided by screens and cables and signals in the ether—call by the name of chatting.
As I read, I started thinking about what I’d say if someone asked me to explain what I was reading.
Since Smith doesn’t say explicitly at each stage what it’s arguing in the manner of the dusty Analytic Philosophers I’m used to reading (“and in Section XII I’ll provide seven responses to this objection, and six objections to that response…”), I’m not really sure what I’d say. Probably something dense like: “He’s describing… um… things that are similar to the internet, that existed before the internet.”
Which, of course, wouldn’t do justice to it at all. Smith moved from example to example, weaving stories from this history of biology with insights from Leibniz, Kant, and Deleuze, and as he did, I felt like I was really grasping the internet in a new way. But if called on to impart that understanding on to others, there’s literally nothing I could do besides invite them to read the book.
Usually, when a book has that effect on me, I consider it a fault of the author. But I’m realising now that that attitude is mistaken. Sure, some books are meant to equip you to put their ideas into words; but other books don’t have this purpose, and it’s not a sin if they don’t. By analogy, some performances—for example, Ted Talks—aim to equip their audience to put this or that idea into words, words they could convey to other people. But other performances—stage magic, say, or dance—don’t aim to equip their audiences to do anything; they’re done to be enjoyed, and—where appropriate—give their viewers a different angle on things, whether or not that angle could be articulated to someone outside the theatre. In the same way, some books—paradigmatically fiction, but also many works of continental philosophy—aren’t supposed to help the reader put their arguments into words, and it’s not a defect if they don’t.
As I finish The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, I’ll try not to hold it against Smith that, by the 174th and final page, I won’t be able to explain the internet like he does when you listen to him talk about it, leaping laterally from thought to thought, pulling a quote at every juncture. That would be nice, of course, but it’s enough that I’ll glimpse things through his eyes.
We try so hard sometimes to "summarize" things, but often forget that some longer works are not long just to be long, but are long because the author needs every word to effectively say their piece.
This is a great review of books
and also presents quite nicely the effect of reading
Personally, I love when a book does have a way to summarize it but also contains
a mysterious effect like the one you describe