The Web of Narcissus
Anton Barba-Kay offers a vocation of negation for our digital age
Veteran readers of this Substack will know that I spent much of last summer and fall painstakingly reading, annotating, and digesting Antón Barba-Kay’s masterpiece of tech criticism, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation (2023). Earlier this week, I had the great pleasure of teaching through it to a group of incredibly sharp pastors for the Davenant Institute’s “Congregational Life in a Digital Age” program, and was reinforced in my conviction that it is the essential book on digital technology, and a must-read for anyone seeking to make sense of what he calls the “absolute and comprehensive social harrowing” that we are going through today. However, it’s a densely (though beautifully) woven web of a book, and for those who can’t give it the time it deserves just yet, I’m grateful to be able to offer a full-length review essay, just published at American Affairs.
“Although it would be patronizing to label him a doomer,” I write, “Barba-Kay is certainly no optimist when it comes to our technological predicament.” Digital culture constitutes a
crisis that is not a matter of a few wrong turns in the road of innovation or policy, but which is “intrinsic to the structure and logic of digital technology itself.” We must therefore “take better care not to be betrayed by our own desires for reassurance. Easy hope is itself a temptation, a false meliorism that clouds our ability to take stock of what is wholesale happening.” And yet Barba-Kay’s purpose is not to stand athwart history, shouting Cassandra-like mantras of doom; that would, in any case, not require 250 densely-printed—and still more densely-written—pages of analysis. His purpose is, quite simply, “to take stock of what is happening.” After all, “we are the last generation who (barring apocalypse) will remember what things were like without the internet. And so . . . the best way I know to keep faith with the time is still to insist on noticing just what is taking place.”
The great gift of this book, however else one may judge it, is this relentless commitment to taking notice, this vivid and profound attention to the meaning of our own acts—an attention which digital culture seems to have too often stripped from us.
And yet to phrase it that way is to cast ourselves as too passive and impotent before our own creations. Barba-Kay understands that our technologies are, by and large, what we have asked for, the projection of our own wills and the fulfillment of our own wishes.
Pessimistic though it may be, this book is refreshingly devoid of polemical screeds against the “tyranny of Big Tech” or moralistic denunciations of algorithmic manipulation. Barba-Kay understands that, while certainly not above profiteering and exploitation, most technology firms are indeed responding to a kind of consumer demand. To be sure, they have become very good at creating many of the particular demands that they then go on to satisfy—which of us ever thought we wanted or needed fifteen-second #FoodTok videos? But in a larger sense, digital technology is responding to a set of cultural imperatives, to a vision of what it means to be human—or perhaps rather, more precisely, a quest to define and create what it means to be human. Barba-Kay observes that our modern condition is indeed defined by an uncertainty about this all-important question; thus, “We are looking to find ourselves and we are continually failing to, while all the while remaking ourselves for the purpose.” Digital technology, then, is an attempt to make visible what otherwise remains hidden—to publicly manifest our desires, hopes, fears, and aspirations, “to put an image of ourselves on screen” and perform our too-liquid identities before they slip away from us. This is true, Barba-Kay persuasively argues, at the level of each individual’s social media avatar, and at the collective level of digital technology as a comprehensive projection of modern culture writ large.
Like most technologies, however, there is a feedback loop involved. Digital culture represents both the projection of our desires and an intensification or reinforcement of them, so that we become increasingly unable to frame our desires outside of its terms.
But this feedback loop is the more intense in the case of digital technology, because it represents what Barba-Kay calls “our first natural technology,” a technology so pervasive, intuitive, streamlined, and embedded that it covers its own tracks, and is internalized as part of us. As I write, “No man ever mistook his dishwasher for himself. And yet a man might well mistake his X profile for himself—indeed, many already do.” Barba-Kay thus repeatedly employs the metaphor of the mirror for digital technology—like the mirror, it purports to represent reality perfectly back to us, but in a reductionistic form, tempting us to reconceive ourselves in its superficial terms, and modify our behavior in response to its imperatives.
In my review, I give particular attention to Barba-Kay’s treatment of politics and of love in a digital age.
Digital culture has abetted the descent of our politics into an anti-politics of mutual incomprehension, by depriving us of the contexts of life together that are a prerequisite of authentic political speech. As Barba-Kay writes, “Political life takes place in bonds and bounds. . . . The internet, in contrast, is at basic odds with the attachments of bounded political life. It is a medium of the mind or the unsettled imagination. . . . Where there is nowhere between here and everywhere, political speech cannot take place.”
Similarly in the realm of personal relationships, digital culture offers to free us of the friction that can transform romantic infatuation into genuine love. Indeed, it presents others to us not as genuinely other—as beings outside myself that resist my will and to which I must conform my preferences—but as subject to my own will or control, activated or muted on demand. The allure of AI, Barba-Kay suggests in one of the most profound sections of the book, is its promise of an other who is an extension of self:
We continue personalizing them because we want to, and we want to because it is fun to play master to our tools, showing them who’s boss by telling them what to do. . . . Our technical aim is, in this restricted sense, a quasi-divine one: to make another person in our image so that we can then control them. It is the headiest (as well as the saddest) of temptations to be master of yourself in such terms, to be able to talk down to your own Echo.
The digital mirror, then, offers us the ultimate fulfillment of Narcissus’s delusion: to discover an image of ourselves that we can fall for.
What are we to make of such a comprehensive critique? It is easy to throw up our hands in despair or to mock Cassandras like Barba-Kay as nostalgic fantasists hankering for a simpler world. We should do neither. I write:
There is a true vocation of negation. The monks of early Christendom who renounced the empty pomp of dying Rome did civilization an incalculable service in the end. Yet, granted that most of the world will remain worldlings, there are two forms of monasticism: one seeks a higher holiness and leaves the world to rot or burn in its vices; the other offers a witness to fire the imagination, leaving the world in order to renew it. For better or for worse, most of us are condemned to remain digital natives, and if indeed our humanity is at stake, we cannot evade the demand for practical policy responses.
Thus, in the concluding section of my review, I seek to go beyond critique and sketch the outlines of a way forward. Early on the book, Barba-Kay dismisses policy prescriptions as “anemic and self-helpful advice about how to civilize the internet’s world-rending id. As if one could tame the whirlwind by politely requesting that it shift its trajectory a little to the left.” And yet, have our politicians even tried politely requesting that it shift its trajectory a little to the left? I thus conclude:
The digital landscape is littered with low-hanging legislative fruit, places where we could reestablish a humane dominion over our technologies if we could but conjure the will to do so. Inasmuch as Barba-Kay offers us a powerful account of just why and how we have failed to conjure that will, and just how urgent is the need to recover it, A Web of Our Own Making is a masterpiece of contemporary social criticism. To make the most of it, however, we must still have the confidence to move beyond criticism to action; by all means, let us take the full measure of the challenges we face, rather than comforting ourselves with nostrums about “all things in moderation.” For all our society’s apocalyptic worries about how the by‑products of the industrial revolution might wreak havoc on the natural world, it is fast becoming apparent that while we wrung our hands about climate change, the by-products of the digital revolution were wreaking havoc on our psychical and social world. A new political vision for our technology is assuredly needed. But we may take hope for the task, knowing that the tools of policy have not been tried and found wanting; rather, till now unwanted, have scarcely been tried.
More Where That Came From…
If you’re intrigued by that final line and curious what tools of policy might be available for us to channel our technologies toward human flourishing, I encourage you to sign up for Monday’s event (in-person at AEI and livestreamed), “Dignity and Dynamism: The Future of Conservative Technology Policy.” My colleague Clare Morell and I will be joining Leah Libresco Sargeant, Michael Toscano, Ryan Streeter, Christine Rosen, and Katherine Boyle for what promises to be a fantastic conversation advancing the agenda of our recent statement, “A Future for the Family.”
Clare and I joined the hosts of the podcast “What Would Jesus Tech?” for an interview on this family-first technology agenda, how we can stop hacking humans, and whether it’s really possible to govern technology for the common good. Listen on Spotify or Apple.
ICYMI, last week I argued at FusionAIER that tech criticism needs more room for God talk:
Appeals to human nature can and will gain traction with many, especially when the empirical consequences of our follies are plain for all to see. But without some higher warrant for why we should take our nature as normative, we are liable to lethargically shrug off such worries, trusting that perhaps our current malaise can be solved simply by delving yet deeper into the Metaverse. However, with a growing number of public intellectuals in recent years, from Jordan Peterson to Niall Ferguson, daring to reintroduce God-talk into public debate as an antidote to the woes of our civilization, perhaps it is time to speak more openly about the spiritual dimension of our tech troubles.
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First, I want to echo Drew’s comments. While I’ve subscribed to Ad Fontes for several years, I much appreciate the immediacy of your Substack. Of which this post is a signal example. Moreover, I particularly appreciate your closing it with a call to action by our legislators. There is certainly much low hanging fruit that could-and indeed should—be addressed legislatively. I look forward to reading the review of Barba-Kay’s book as I have time to do it justice—and probably buying a copy for further study.
P.S. I signed the petition as well.
Brad, I’m so glad I came across your Substack! Since becoming more familiar with your work and writing in the last couple of weeks, you have put your finger on some things I’ve been thinking about for some time, but couldn’t quite find the words to voice. I appreciate your own willingness to “take stock” of what’s happening, while also maintaining an optimistic outlook that is willing to take action. If the “Future for the Family” document were ever to become a petition, I’d be the first one to sign! Blessings!