Status Updates From A Web of Our Own Making: Th...

Either I'm dumb and a lot is going overhead, or this book is nothing but a compendium of trivial observations expressed in a convoluted style, which got a lot of hype because no one has written the Undetstanding Media of social media yet.

Full of doubletalk like "the tractability of our inherited opacities".

These guys are constantly blowing each other in the blurbs...Justin "Ruiu" EH Smith, who wrote a 2star timewaster of a tome called " the internet is not what you think it is", blurbs this as "compelling elegant prose". Meanwhile Barbakay is writing epilepsy inducing sentences such as "...the defense of free speech has itself often enough taken the form..."

Guy has an amazing knack for making the obvious tortuous and restating banalities in a complex fashion.

I'm wondering, "Is this guy a crap writer or is it my fault that I can't read more than 5 pages of this tome at a sitting"...then I came to this: "... frequently used as a cudgel with which to wholesale impugn the merits of their findings." Image a whole tome of this.

This book is dense, with insights to underline on every single page.

As Antón warns against the danger of quick, fleeting online activity, his style seems designed to train his reader to engage in slow, lengthy pondering thoughts.

There is so much in here, to summarise it would be very difficult. A key focus is how the use of digital is remaking humanity, each of us individually and hence all of us.

" we must struggle to clarify what most matters within new circumstances, to press the new to prove itself, to count the costs, to argue over what is gained, to give our best thinking to the question of how to accommodate the new within the highest purposes that make sense of our life"....blather, empty platitudes, handwaving, ivory tower vaporware make up half this book

a masterclass in puffing up a few basic ideas to book length

Ari Aster did an AMA on Reddit last year (2025) in which he wrote: "...As far as "philosophers" go: with Eddingtion, I was reading a lot of "media" guys. People like Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich A Kittler, Anton Barba-Kay (who Bo Burnham turned me on to), etc." As far as I know, this is the only book (so far) that Anton Barba-Kay has had published. Excited to start reading!