A groundbreaking critique of the digital world that analyzes its universal technological foundations

Whence that nagging sense that something in the digital is amiss—that, as wonderful as our devices are, time spent on smartphones and computers leaves us sour, enervated, alienated? The Digital and Its Discontents uniquely explains that worry and points us toward a more satisfying relationship between our digital lives and our nondigital selves, one that requires a radical change in the way we incorporate technology into our lives.

Aden Evens analyzes universal technological principles—in particular, the binary logic—to show that they encourage certain ways of thinking while making others more challenging or impossible. What is out of reach for any digital machine is contingency, the ontological principle that refuses every rule. As humans engage ourselves and our world ever more through digital machines, we are losing touch with contingency and so banishing from our lives the accidental and unexpected that fuel our most creative and novel possibilities for living.

Taking cues from philosophy rather than cultural or media theory, Evens argues that the consequences of this erosion of contingency are significant yet often overlooked because the same values that make the digital seem so desirable also make contingency seem unimportant—without contingency the digital is confined to what has already been thought, and yet the digital’s ubiquity has allowed it to disguise this inherent sterility. Responsive only to desires that meet the demands of its narrow logic, the digital requires its users to practice those same ideological dictates, instituting a hegemony of thought and value sustained by the pervasive presence of digital mechanisms. Interweaving technical and philosophical concepts, The Digital and Its Discontents advances a powerful and urgent argument about the digital and its impact on our lives.

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Aden Evens is associate professor of English at Dartmouth College. He is author of Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience (Minnesota, 2005) and Logic of the Digital.

Alexander R. Galloway is professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University, Steinhardt.

"This book argues that the digital’s decisive discreteness is actually an intensification of a dominant predigital ideology. Such a perspective supposes a parsable world that blinds us to an actuality of elusive contingency. Drawing on deep understandings of digital technology and philosophy, Aden Evens demystifies crucial arcane features with startlingly lucid and accessible explanations, all while summoning a world that defies explanation."—Katherine Behar, Baruch College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York

"The Digital and Its Discontents will be illuminating for anyone who has ever twisted their speech into discrete, mechanical sounds to please a voice recognition system. Determined to resist the digital imperative to speak, write, think, and ultimately be like a machine, Aden Evens reaches for contingency as the ontological spice that distinguishes actuality from virtuality. And he flavors his formalist approach with vignettes that compare human and digital relationality in scenes that range from playing a video game or a cello to hitting a baseball or squishing a lemon."—Marcel O’Gorman, founding director, Critical Media Lab, University of Waterloo