Table Of ContentHyperconnectivity
and Its Discontents
ROGERS BRUBAKER
Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents
in memory of my mother
Elizabeth Brubaker
Hyperconnectivity
and Its Discontents
Rogers Brubaker
polity
Copyright © Rogers Brubaker 2023
The right of Rogers Brubaker to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in
accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
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Contents
Preface · vi
Acknowledgments · x
Introduction · 1
1. Selves · 20
2. Interactions · 49
3. Culture · 77
4. Economics · 99
5. Politics · 126
Conclusion · 154
Notes · 172
References · 212
Index · 253
v
Preface
“The fox,” wrote the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, “knows many
things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In the figurative sense
popularized by the philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin, this
dictum distinguishes writers who “relate everything to a single central
vision” or “organizing principle” (the hedgehogs) from those who
embrace “a vast variety of experiences and objects” without “seeking to
fit them into … [a] unitary inner vision” (the foxes).1 This is the book
of a fox. It has no overarching thesis to defend, no single conceptual
prism to promote. It aims rather to provide a synoptic account of the
sprawling, unruly, many-sided sociotechnical phenomenon I call digital
hyperconnectivity, without squeezing it into the conceptual mold of a
single big hedgehog-worthy idea. It aims to show how hyperconnectivity
has transformed all aspects and spheres of social life, private and public,
from the precincts of the self to the architecture of the economy and
polity, and how these transformations, which have opened up so many
new and exciting possibilities, are in other respects inimical to human
freedom and flourishing.
The book grew out of an undergraduate seminar I had been teaching
for a number of years in UCLA’s Honors Collegium. The seminar
invited students to think critically about the increasingly pervasive digital
mediation of their everyday social experience and about the broader
cultural, economic, and political transformations that had been set in
motion, or accelerated, by digital hyperconnectivity. As I designed and
redesigned the course for successive offerings, looking for appropriate
readings, I did not find an integrated, encompassing account of digital
hyperconnectivity that addressed both everyday experience and under-
lying structural transformations in a manner at once challenging and
accessible. I hope that this is that book.
I began work on the book a year before the novel coronavirus
brought normal life on the planet to a standstill. But the pandemic has
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PREFACE
made the project more opportune than ever. Its confinements, disrup-
tions, and restrictions have sharply accelerated the digitalization of all
spheres of life. They occasioned a sudden and massive shift to remote
work, education, shopping, medicine, therapy, culture, entertainment,
sociability, and more. None of these shifts will be anywhere near fully
reversed. In all of these spheres, this abrupt and radical reorganization
of social life was possible only because of preexisting digital infrastruc-
tures. Hyperconnectivity thus prepared us for the pandemic. Yet the
pandemic, in turn, has prepared us for an even more fully digitally
mediated future.
Before the pandemic, the immense and unaccountable power of Big
Tech and the degradation of the digital public sphere had prompted
heightened critical scrutiny. Much of the energy of this incipient
“techlash” dissipated temporarily in the face of Covid-19. Big Tech was
no longer an urgent problem; it was a keenly appreciated solution,
allowing social life to continue online when it was suspended in the
flesh. The pandemic was therefore a godsend for the tech giants. It
offered a unique opportunity to open up new markets, experiment on
a planetary scale, and remake the social world. It also offered an oppor-
tunity for redemption: tech firms could present themselves as working
for the public good by partnering with governments and public health
authorities. Mounting concerns about misinformation, to be sure,
have kept platforms under pressure. The tech giants still face a series
of antitrust and regulatory initiatives, some with a degree of bipartisan
support. But whatever the fate of these initiatives, the power of Big Tech
– cultural and political as well as economic – is likely only to increase
further. And the “solutionist” ideology of Silicon Valley that Evgeny
Morozov so brilliantly skewered a decade ago – the habit of thinking
that all social and political problems have technological solutions – seems
more firmly entrenched than ever.2
The book’s broad scope and modest length oblige me to be ruthlessly
selective as well as brutally concise, and they condemn me in advance
to neglecting or at best merely scratching the surface of many important
topics. The particular path I have charted through the vast territory I
stake out is no doubt informed by my intellectual, moral, and political
sensibilities. My account is therefore in some respects a personal and
idiosyncratic one. But it is not only or primarily that: it is an effort to
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PREFACE
grasp the complexity of digital hyperconnectivity as a “total social fact”
that powerfully structures the world in which we live.3
A book as wide-ranging as this one is obviously not based on primary
research. It is a “quaternary” work, as Abram de Swaan memorably
characterized a book of his own; it relies not only on a large body of
more or less specialized secondary studies but also on synthetic “tertiary”
works.4 The literature on the various aspects of my subject – spanning
the social sciences, media and communication studies, and science and
technology studies – has become unsurveyably vast. I cannot of course
pretend to have read, or even to be aware of, all of the relevant work.
But the reader wishing to explore particular topics in greater depth will
find abundant pointers to the literature (as well as amplifications and
qualifications of the argument) in the endnotes.
Digital hyperconnectivity is a planetary-scale phenomenon, but it
is configured very differently in different world regions and among
different groups of users. Attentive readers may therefore wonder about
my frequent use of first person plural pronouns. Who is this “we,” they
may ask, that is so casually invoked? The authorial “we” is a stylistic
convenience, but a sociological fiction. “Our” relation to hypercon-
nectivity is a highly differentiated one, and “we” experience it in many
different ways. Generational differences loom especially large, but differ-
ences of country, class, education, gender, religion, and race and ethnicity
matter as well. It is not my aim to map out these differences, though they
will come up from time to time in my discussion.
Yet I would offer a qualified defense of the authorial “we.” Digital
hyperconnectivity affects us in different ways, but it increasingly affects
all of us. Even the relatively unconnected are drawn ineluctably into its
orbit, as anytime-anywhere connectivity – minimally, the possession of
a smartphone – becomes, in effect, a requirement of full citizenship.
And the still more digitally mediated future that is being constructed by
the great tech platforms is one that we will all inhabit. While users can
remake platforms in unanticipated ways, increasingly powerful platforms
also design, construct, and discipline their users. In certain respects, they
can make the sociological fiction into a sociological fact.
Some parts of my argument, especially in parts of the politics chapter,
address the American context specifically. But this is not a book about
the US. The argument applies, for the most part, throughout the
viii
PREFACE
developed West, notwithstanding significant legal and institutional
differences between Europe and the US, notably a much more robust
data protection framework in Europe. And much of the argument applies
beyond the West. I have not, however, been able to give the distinctive
configuration of digital hyperconnectivity in China – the central role of
the state, the specific characteristics of the giant Chinese tech platforms,
and the even greater degree of digital mediation of everyday life – the
attention it deserves. In the geopolitics of hyperconnectivity, China
represents a major counterweight to the hegemony of the American tech
giants elsewhere.5
A broadly critical account of digital hyperconnectivity by a sixty-five-
year-old first-world university professor risks caricature as a “declinist”
screed that frets dyspeptically about “kids these days,” naïvely idealizes
digitally unmediated face-to-face relations, and bathes the pre-digital
public sphere in the warm but distorting glow of nostalgia. I hope that
nothing in this book warrants such a reading. I readily acknowledge the
many ways in which my own life – and the lives of billions of others
worldwide – has been enriched by digital connectivity. My stance is
indeed critical, but it is not uncritically critical: I have no interest in
writing a jeremiad or a disconnectionist manifesto, and I underscore
throughout the ambivalence of hyperconnectivity. For better or worse –
for better and worse – we live in a world that is shaped and structured
on every level and in every sphere of life by hyperconnectivity. The way
forward is anything but clear. But there is no turning back.
ix
