Barba-Kay admits digital technology has improved and will continue to improve our lives in particular ways. However, he doesn’t leave us guessing about his basic evaluation: “I regard the digital revolution as a basically dehumanizing force”.

Our digital devices are history’s first “natural” technology. The printing press and the telephone, for example, each changed the world by doing a particular task. But digital technology doesn’t do a singular thing; it’s the medium on which we do nearly everything. We use it for driving, working out, entertainment, conversations, dating, school, worship, shopping, and planning vacations. Unlike past world-changing inventions, digital technology is involved in every area of our lives. It’s “natural” in that it’s always with us, capturing our attention like no technology ever has.

Paradoxically, however, digital technology captures our attention while fading into the background. Like a mirror, it’s designed to reflect “reality” back to us. We aren’t attracted so much to our devices as to the seemingly “frictionless” uses and “objective” pictures they offer. When Apple introduced the iPad 3, they made this goal clear: “We believe technology is at its very best when it’s invisible, when you’re conscious only of what you’re doing, not the device you’re doing it with. . . . We think it’s going to change how you see and do just about everything.” It’s our devices’ invisibility, the way they frame the world without us giving them much thought, that makes them so transformative.

In A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation, Antón Barba-Kay contends that digital technology—everything from our computers and phones to our smart lawnmowers—isn’t just another stage in technological history. Rather, it’s a unique technology, ushering in a new way of life and transforming us in the process.

Technology Directs Our Behavior

Digital technology tacitly holds us captive, directing our behavior. On the surface, this may seem far-fetched—our devices feel neutral, even liberating. Yet this sense of neutrality combined with the seeming insignificance of each individual click and swipe makes the repatterning of our behavior so effective. As Barba-Kay observes, “The more the terms of our digital choices seem intuitive, invisible, or ‘democratic’ to us (as the pure reflection of ‘our’ preferences), the stronger the indication that we can longer see how they are utterly refashioning those very preferences” (229).

The online world isn’t just in the business of getting and keeping our attention. Its aim is to push our buttons: coaxing us to behave in certain ways while making us feel like “we are our own bosses every step of the way” (228). When we’re scrolling on our phones or streaming whatever we decide to watch next on our big screens, we feel free. We’re in the driver’s seat. So we think. But that’s the racket of “choice architecture” that uses data analytics to measure “not just what I click on, but in what order, how often, and how long I spend on each page” to direct our actions. Sure, we’re in the driver’s seat, but we’re driving “the routes that have been minutely and thoroughly planned for us to spend time and money on” (229).

Forced labor can only be imposed by the strong. But when we become convinced that bondage is freedom, the master is all the more dominant. And the servants slave away even harder.

Technology Makes Data the New Authority

Digital technology redefines our ideal for the way humans ought to think because it’s so efficient in collecting and regurgitating massive amounts of information. Most of us don’t understand algorithmic calculations and the statistical models that serve as the foundations of the algorithms (or the biases involved in any data collection and the assumptions of these models); nonetheless, we increasingly yield to what the experts tell us the algorithmically synthesized data “says.”

For example, most football coaches don’t fully understand why the analytics are telling them to go for it on 4th and 2.

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