Aden Evens, The Digital and Its Discontents (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2024) 264 pp. $116.00 Hb. $29.00 Pb. ISBN: 9781517916329
Changing one’s laptop can be likened to moving into a new house. The rooms would be located differently, and walls would not immediately have the frames one is so used to seeing. One’s body feels dislocated and disoriented. The muscle memory requires time to move without seeing. As Sara Ahmed writes in Queer Phenomenology ‘we are affected by “what” we come into contact with’.[1] Perhaps, such a metaphor for changing one’s laptop or smartphone might feel too much, overly dramatic even. The digital devices, however, have long become lived spaces with affect despite a common rigid attempt to differentiate digital from actual.
Aden Even’s The Digital and its Discontents does precisely the work in showing the phenomenology of the digital. His book makes an attempt to go to the very fundamentals of how the digital functions; how its inner logic is closely intertwined with humanity’s obsession with the positivist thought and its passionate attempt to live risk-free. In his wording, the digital subjects human thinking to the ideology of banishing contingency. It is no longer cleanly separated from non-digital life as its logic shapes the way humanity thinks. Being now ‘one of humanity’s foremost ways of relating to the world’, digital logic ‘habituates its users to see things and treat things in digital ways’ (1).
In the digital’s inner workings, Evens argues there is no room for surprises, the accidental or the unexpected. The bits that are 1 and 0, even in their endless figurations, are so carefully programmed and designed that the digital is clean, too hygienic even, limited and perhaps suffocating. In all its rigid programming, digital does not leave any room for the world’s contingencies. In many ways, Evens’ work is a celebration of life – how a lemon becomes a lemon, how a non-digital slot machine might be affected by the weather, accidents that might happen during art making that lead to creative results, or in Evens’ words, ‘the messy ambiguity of earthly things’ (36-39) are all celebrated here. The digital, on the other hand, with its ‘rejection of contingency’, ‘strips its prey of flesh, tossing aside the meat and keeping the bones to play games of memento mori’ (210). This is, according to Evens, where its danger lies. Digital logic is, on the one hand, a tool that is the result of the positivist desire of centuries to reduce everything into controllable measurements, countable numbers with no room to err – in fact, to err is what it precisely aims to banish. However, as Evens reminds us, digital logic takes away the very human right to do and experience the unexpected and to go awry.
The title of the book comes from a reworking of Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. In one of its core questions, ‘What sort of reality does the digital offer to us?’, it identifies what society leaves behind in order to be able to live together, and renders its discontent as spontaneity and ambiguity. Hence, it offers readers a phenomenology of the digital – a work on digital philosophy. His first chapter, ‘Approaching the Digital’, further introduces his readers to the core arguments laid out in the introduction. It is important that in his criticism of the digital as one that banishes the actuality, digital is not portrayed as ‘inhumane’. Quite the opposite, he reminds us that while ‘the digital lacks something essentially human’, its values that are ‘positivism, rationalism and instrumentalism’ are ‘originally and characteristically human, and in fact they accord rather well with the legacy of humanism that was also accelerated in and after the Enlightenment’ (14). This argument leads to his following chapter, ‘What Does the Digital Do?’. In order to answer the question, one of the terms Evens turns to is Martin Heidegger’s Ge-Stell. Following Heidegger’s argument in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, on humans seeing nature in an order, made in accordance with humans’ need for reserve ‘as raw materials or energy’ (25), the digital ‘orders the world to make it available’ (26). It is, in other words, a system of ordering the world – its values only turn back on themselves as codes. Hence, ambiguity, ‘yes but also no’ has no room in its logic. For instance, the question of whether souls exist becomes senseless in a system that operates on binaries, as ‘yes but not in a way that one would think of existence’ becomes illegible. As Evens writes, ‘Only a positivist form of information can enter the digital machine, become data or instruction in the computer’ (39-40) which works in commands by ‘breaking down tasks and information into small parts, and ultimately into bits’ (45). Its ultimate purpose as a tool of ‘getting things done’ is, therefore, not inhumane, but on the contrary, it is the very result of ‘the dominant epistemology’ of the Enlightenment ideology.
Beyond being a product, the digital now actually affects the ways we see the world: Ge-Stell. Evens’ third and fourth chapters explain the contrasting characteristics of the ontology of contingency and ontology of the digital respectfully. As Evens notes, this is not a work written for a lay audience; it also does not require one to be technically familiarized with computational or digital studies. However, I’d argue that knowledge of structuralist and poststructuralist thought would probably be beneficial in order to follow his reasoning. For instance, in chapter 4, his discussion on the sixteen binary logic gates to show how ‘two bits of input […] yield a single bit of output’ (88) is further clarified when he likens the digital operations of the symbols, 0 and 1, to Jacques Lacan’s Symbolic (115). If 0 and 1 ‘stand for nothing but await the assignment of meaning through (symbolic) representation’, then ‘Lacan’s elusive idea of the Real corresponds well to the notion of contingency [that] irrupts without pattern, without assurance, as the uncapturable, the uncontainable’ (115). Later in the conclusion chapter, named ‘But…’, when Evens gives GPT-3 the prompt of his book, the system confirms the empty signification of the digital, ‘the idea of the digital is based on the idea of the digital because the idea of the digital is based on the idea of the digital because the idea of the digital is based on the idea of the digital because…’ (192).
His sixth chapter, ‘What Does the Digital Do To Us?’, is perhaps the question The Digital and Its Discontents attempts to answer. Previously in chapter five, ‘From Bits to the Interface’ he lays down the irony of the digital. On the one hand, we have the actual with its contingency that ‘seethes, slips and oozes, denying any clarity but the momentary and ephemeral’, and on the other hand there is the digital that ‘offers nothing but clarity, individuated bits, grouped together to form a layer of basic structures that are themselves grouped to make further structures’ (125). For the digital to continue, to upgrade, however, it still needs the human creativity that exists outside the digital, as it is, after all, unable to offer what it has not been given by the engineers and programmers. The second irony here is that the digital also encourages thinking like the machine in our encounters with it – this is, as Evens puts it, a question of ontology. In our internalization of its ideology, we end up taking it outside of the digital, ‘out into the wider world of the actual’ (168). This is also the warning he leaves us with in the conclusion: ‘It is up to us to use the digital responsibly, to resist its alluring ideology that would train us to see the world’ (210).
Evens’ work is an extremely timely and important philosophical interrogation of the affect of the digital and its ways of shaping our ways of being-in-the-world. In many regards, the digital is nothing new in our contact with the world, but also, in other ways, it is perhaps more effective than its predecessors since the Enlightenment. I am left wondering how the human element that makes us more ambiguous in our experience of the everyday through the digital, namely the information and communication technologies such as chat programs, social media interactions or dating apps, play a part in his discussion on contingency. For instance, his sixth chapter uses examples of the computer games Civilization and Tetris in their way of affecting our ways of seeing the world. However, I wonder whether we may find any unexpected or simultaneous experiences in games that allow human communication as one of their fundamental game-play experiences. I’ve therefore strived more to see the actual in the virtual. But perhaps such desire to see more contingency in the digital is precisely what Evens points to when he refers to in his title, The Digital and Its Discontents.
Şima İmşir, Koç University, Istanbul
[1] Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (London: Duke University Press, 2006), p.2.
