The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult: Social Fears and Religious Fantasies (review)

Coming ten years after its 2000 publication, the 2010 English translation of Philippe Breton's The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult is a historical artifact of those heady early days of the internet as well as a contemporary critique of the individual in a networked society. Breton examines the rhetoric surrounding the internet to show that its champions were nearly religious, even cultish, in their praises. They propagated nothing less than a virtual paradise in which humans could transcend the corporeal limits of the human condition.

As the late I. Bernard Cohen noted in the fall 1990 issue of Technology and Culture (pp. 907-11), Breton often spends little time on technological details. That occasionally lessens his impact. For example, in this book, he notes the importance of The Road Ahead (1995) by Bill Gates for establishing the framework of the internet society. But he neglects Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" (1945) and the work of Douglas Engelbart, and he neglects to mention that the creators of Netscape had essentially forced Gates's conversion. Breton also ignores most comparative historical accounts of the discourse promoting other inventions, such as those explored by Tom Standage in The Victorian Internet (1998).

Breton succeeds in detailing the relationship between man and machine by examining philosophy, fiction, and the writings of important figures in the creation of a wired/wireless society. He does not always show direct evidence that the concepts touched on by authors like Isaac Asimov influenced Bill Gates and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte. However, the evidence is strong in some cases, such as Bill Joy of Sun Micro-systems, and Breton also references the importance of science fiction for computer scientists in general. In addition, the language that Breton uncovers is telling. In the cautionary tale The Naked Sun, Asimov writes about the physical separation of humans through telecommunication, while Gates, far less cautionary, extolls the advantages of virtual dating (p. 188). Philosopher Pierre Lévy writes about the illusion of individual thought (p. 87) and virtual regrouping succeeding the physical village (p. 34).Negroponte champions the inevitable triumph of being digital as "decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering" (p. 30) and former Lotus CEO Mitch Kapor argues that "life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have wanted" (p. 34). Philosopher and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin creates an imagined net of psychic energy over the earth called the "noosphere" while the father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, describes an idealized world composed of relations and communication over that inhabited by the body (p. 6). These parallels, as well as many others, are where Breton is at his strongest. They illustrate powerfully the draw of a virtual world for the internet's progenitors.

Breton's work should appeal to those interested in understanding literary influences in the invention and public acceptance of technology. It should also appeal to those who are concerned about how networking technology may be reshaping our humanity. For the first, a growing body of historical literature has addressed the influence of fiction. David Kirby's Lab Coats in Hollywood (2011) examines the influence scientists have on popular images of science and technology and, in addition, the influence those images can have on real science. Recent essays by historians of technology Thomas Haigh, Hunter Heyck, and Paul Ceruzzi examine, respectively, the historical importance of a society's imagined future, popular images of computer devices reflecting a changing relationship to that technology, and how those investigating artificial intelligence followed the "Kubrick paradigm" (a reference to the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey). As to our reshaped humanity, note the work of Nicholas Carr with The Shallows (2010), and Sherry Turkle's Alone Together (2011), which seem to solidify some of Breton's concerns through approaches that leverage neuroscience and social science, respectively.

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