The Rumble Strip We Need: Barba-Kay's A Web of Our Own Making

A book that prods, pokes, and jolts you back to the real

Back in April, I finished reading Antón Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making. I knew it had a serious effect on the way I looked at digital technology when people began asking, “What did you read? What happened? What changed your mind?” Some may have wanted to ask, “Why are you so mad?” or perhaps even, “Are you OK?”

I had eaten some bitter herb that had exorcised my lukewarm digital heart.

Since then, I’ve recommended Barba-Kay’s book to thoughtful people who care about the effects of technology, the same types who read Postman and Carr and Turkle. They didn’t respond as favorably as I’d hoped.

Some complained about the book’s difficulty. It was a hard book. I finished with 16 pages of notes on it, and I needed several weeks of monastic attention to work through it. Barba-Kay composed his text in long, technical paragraphs. Yet, despite the demands it placed on time and attention, I still felt the book gave an enormous amount in return.

Marshall McLuhan wrote with penetrating insight into the nature of various media, but he did not live to see our digital day. In case you haven’t realized, the digital has swallowed all our other communicative forms—from radio to film to music to television. Barba-Kay’s book provides fresh angles on the digital: What makes the digital unique as a form? And why should we care?

What You’ll Find Inside

The best books give you new words for familiar phenomena. They drag that which is in the background into the foreground of your attention. With these new words come new perceptions and insights.

At the big picture level, Barba-Kay unpacks some digital ideals: frictionlessness, obedience, and perfection. Take the first ideal. The digital removes friction (a synonym for irritation, conflict, and/or difficulty). You no longer have to even insert the credit card into the chip reader. All you have to do is tap it. Sayonara, Friction!

He also provides a stock of commonplaces to return to whenever your conversation turns toward the digital. Among other things, I learned about Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet hero who prevented a nuclear holocaust (and whose picture I’ve since stuck on my office door). For the first time, I also seriously considered history of the mirror, a precursor to the digital in its semblance of neutrality.

Above all, though, I most enjoyed his critique of quantitative reductionism. What good is human judgment when you have analytics data to justify your decisions? The appeal to numeric “data” can paralyze conversation and other forms of collective decision-making. He writes:

“Data analysis has eclipsed human judgment as our shared conception of what is most authoritative. The quantification of attention has become our central medium for thinking about the policies of human behavior and about the exercise of our own self-determination” (16).

We make our tools, forget that we’ve made them, and then reverence them for their power (i.e., to foretell human behavior). We fall prey to idolatry when we outsource human judgment to data:

“…at bottom, this outsourcing of human judgment to data is also a form of the primitive impulse to idolatry: a heightened reverence for something that we desire to trick ourselves into forgetting we have made, a desire to obey ourselves writ large” (235).

Repeatedly while reading A Web of Our Own Making, I watched Barba-Kay name the hitherto unnamed. The book even concluded in Walker Percy-esque fashion, with a satirical email from a tech executive inviting Barba-Kay to come work with him.

If you want to write with a critical eye on technology, you could do worse than imitate Barba-Kay. He laced his work with references to articles in The Guardian, The Atlantic, etc. Like Nicholas Carr, he used an inductive approach to his object of critique. Examples abound. Like McLuhan, his footnotes and references provided a host of books and articles to explore (e.g., Morozov’s To Save Everything, Click Here, etc.).

Above all, Barba-Kay identified the unique metaphysical question that digital technology posed. The question is: Is it fake or is it real? As of late, AI has only intensified ambiguity of what we mean by the real. Did Jan really write this email? Is this picture fake? Am I talking to a human being?

Prodded Back to Reality

Reading Barba-Kay is like going on a cross-country road trip with someone who occasionally leans over to tase you in the neck. It hurts, but he means well. And it only stings for a moment.

Why does he do it? You keep falling asleep at the wheel, and you’re going to hurt someone. His work is the rumble strip we all need.

At some point, from what I can gather, he moved out west to teach at Deep Springs College, a cattle ranch with a student to faculty to ratio of 5:1. There, in the middle of nowhere California, the students and faculty learn and labor together, presumably herding cattle and baling hay and reading Hegel.

I would not be surprised if, upon arrival, someone handed him a cattle prod so he could do what he does best.