Digital Æther
Our Relationship with Technology Gets Complicated
Many people once believed all apparently empty space to be filled with a zero-density substance called “æther”. Think of space as a thing instead of not-a-thing, and you have the idea. Through æther as a material conductor were light and sound thought to be able to travel.
The digital realm functions today as a kind of æther. It surrounds us and connects us, mediating nearly every aspect of our existence. One manifestation of this new reality is the power of so-called filter bubbles to create homogenous and self-reinforcing communities of thought. But the phenomenon I’m describing is both broader and deeper. It affects more things, its effect is more potent.
Consider: from recipe-streaming refrigerators to smart utility grids, digital journalism to shipment-tracking sensors, social media to farm-surveillance drones, satellite phones to robotic vacuums, self-adjusting home thermostats to ATMs, remotely adjustable LED lighting to online subscription video libraries, ride-sharing to electronic health records, everything is getting connected to everything else via the internet.
This platform for connection may ultimately, in a technical sense, be reducible to code-upon-hardware, but it is the sum reality of the innumerable interactions built upon that platform that constitutes the digital æther.
Pervading physical reality as much as it aids in the social construction of meaning, digital æther is the infrastructure of everything.
Without this layer, this interstitial substance, our lives and our world would fall apart — cars wouldn’t drive, money wouldn’t flow, “friends” wouldn’t connect — and the after-existence we would not recognize as our own, so limited would the opportunities for experience and exchange be within it.
We should acknowledge the world-historical importance of this shift: Magnificently augmented by digital technology, terrifyingly dependent upon it, unable to comprehend ourselves without it, we are now our own digital children. The internet is no longer of us — rather, we are of the internet. As a consequence, all of human experience and potential is now entwined with an information system external to our own biology.
So if there is such a thing as revenge by metaphor in the history of ideas, here it is: material æther may have been shoddy physics, but digital æther is inescapable reality.
