Today it seems as though everywhere you turn something else is “going digital” in our modern society, as it has been for hundreds of years. Tradition and the ways of old, painted as archaic relics of a bygone era, are abandoned in favor of new digital technologies in the name of efficiency and societal advancement. Somehow, gramophones and records turned into iPhones and MP3s. Incandescent light bulbs were phased out in favor of the ubiquitous LED. Office conferences turned to Zoom, and Dartmouth ID-swipes along with a friendly hello at Foco turned to a biometric hand swipe and an inert metallic box to greet you. And when those who dare question this new orthodoxy of digital hegemony are shouted down as out-of-touch luddites who threaten to impede the inexorable progression of humanity’s advancement, as they inevitably are, there is little standing in its way. However, determined to add his own comprehensive analysis and voice to the conversation, Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College Aden Evens has published The Digital and Its Discontents. In this thought-provoking, vocabulary intensive examination of digital technologies and their interconnected relationship to the societies that utilize them, Evens ultimately urges readers to adopt a more intentional approach to interactions with the digital world.
Rather than specifically focusing on technologies such as the laptop, smartphone, or television like other works in this field of study, Evens opts for a more philosophically-oriented approach that makes as few assumptions as it can in order to apply to as broad an array of technology as possible. Evens begins his analysis with a meticulous exploration into the specific mechanisms underlying digital technologies, starting at the most fundamental level of their binary code. Then the opposing ontologies of the actual and the digital are introduced which serve as the basis of much of the work’s analysis and argumentation. The work is concluded with connections to both the individual and society, as Evens addresses the buzz surrounding polarizing technologies such as Chat-GPT and offers his final thoughts as to where digital technologies rightfully stand in relation to the infinite beauties of human cognition. Before I go on I feel it is appropriate to define some of the key terms in this work’s lexicon in hopes of making the commentary to follow more intelligible to a general audience.
Arguably the most significant concept in the work, the digital, is defined by Evens as “what works by way of discreteness” via the underlying binary code, giving rise to its own digital ideology. This digital ideology is then broken down into three constituents of positivism, rationalism, and instrumentalism. It is most essential to understand positivism, grounded in the studies of philosophers Auguste Comte and Christian Wolff, which commits to “the idea that knowledge must be grounded in facts or posits.” A positivist outlook is one that sees the individual components of a whole as what is most fundamental, viewing the world as “an aggregation of the things in it, each of which is real, individual, and in principle autonomous.” In the context of the digital, these posits are represented by the binary 1s and 0s (and emergent bits) that encode all digital information and direct a digital technology’s every action. This positivist division of reality into individualized entities is what gives the digital its distinct sense of “discreteness” mentioned above.
Closely tied to the aforementioned ontology of the digital is the concept of necessity. Any detailed examination into this philosophical notion of necessity will yield little success on its own, for only in juxtaposition with its opposing concept of contingency does it regain its substantive meaning. In Evens’s words, “what is contingent is what is not necessary.” Furthermore, he goes on to explain how “contingency is the condition of the unconditioned; freed from necessity, it inhabits an openness or indeterminacy, respecting no rule, owing no allegiance.” In short, contingency is the “locus of freedom,” or what is essentially unpredictable, spontaneous, and creative. Necessity, therefore, must be what is predictable, calculated, and dull.
A slave to necessity, the digital must carry out its binary code’s every last command unceasingly, entrapped by the very set of rules that engender its existence in the first place. In an almost science fiction manner that we seldom recognize, “those rules [of the digital] extend to and govern even the interface, the surface of encounter between the device and the user…if you want the machine to do something, you have to address it in a language it can understand.” This is the language of mouse movements, clicks and double clicks, keystrokes, swipes and more that make up the way we interact with our devices on a daily basis. More frightening still, Evens reveals that “in brief, you must think and act like a digital device.” Thus, when interacting with digital devices we temporarily relinquish our connection to the contingency of the actual and succumb to the digital’s all-encompassing hermetic necessity. It is the digital’s self-imposed “world of necessity” that explains both its “irredeemable deficit but also its remarkable capacities and its wild appeal.”
This mysterious deficiency of the digital is its inability to incorporate the contingency present in our everyday lives into its programing and therefore into itself. One of the most interesting and essential ideas of the work, Evens brilliantly explains how despite the billions upon billions of computations any one program can perform per second, no number of finite calculations could ever begin to challenge the awe-inspiring infinitude of our real experience in “the actual” world. In other words, “no number of individuals ever achieves the complex heterogeneity of the mesh” that constitutes our physical reality. Moreover, it is this sheer numeracy of computation that fools us into equating the digital with the actual.
It should be made clear, however, that this almost incomprehensible numeracy of the digital is what gives rise to its incredible efficiency and precision—a manifestly positive outcome that has helped the lives of billions. It is here that we find ourselves at the great dilemma, the crossroads that Evens seems to wrestle with throughout the duration of his work. Are the spectacular abilities of the digital and its seemingly limitless capabilities worth the contingency that is lost, and does this warrant the almost equally as spectacular transition of our human civilization towards a digital world that has occurred over the past few hundred years, especially over the past thirty? These are the important questions The Digital and Its Discontents urges us to consider, the ones that even Evens himself appears undecided on by its conclusion. Instead of definitively deciding on one side or the other, Evens takes the neutral position that “with vigilance, we can both avail ourselves of its fantastic value and ward off its delirious invitation to think like a machine” in the work’s concluding lines.
The ideas presented in Evens’s work resonate strongly with me because I find myself becoming increasingly hesitant towards the blind adoption of new technologies and generative AIs that so many seem to implicitly accept and support now in 2025.
The progressively challenging process that procuring hard copies of my college textbooks has become is just one example of how the digital orthodoxy tangibly impacts my daily experience at Dartmouth. Something deep down tells me that scrolling through the digitally generated PDF of an online textbook feels wrong, as if the primeval regions of my brain are not fooled by the online alternative that should in theory provide an equivalent learning experience to that of a physical paper textbook. To me, there is a profound sense of emptiness, a distinct sense that something is missing. Contingency, I have now learned, is what is missing. Reading a physical book isn’t simply the experience of processing words one after another until they give rise to some arbitrary meaning. Reading is also holding the book in your hand; feeling the gloss of the paper cover; the kinesthetic sensation of the crisp paper on your fingers as you turn each successive page and the sound this makes; the musty, yet rich scent that may emanate as you read a book that has perhaps sat untouched on a bottom shelf of the stacks for countless years; and the infinite other imperceivable components that make up the experience of reading a hard copy book.
An eerily similar feeling presented itself to me, and to much of the world, for the first time during 2020. I now refer to the popularization of meeting on Zoom as opposed to in person beginning out of necessity due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Many, including myself, reported feeling inordinately exhausted after meeting and talking with others on Zoom for extended periods of time, for me most pronounced after my high school debate tournaments held over Zoom. While I cannot remember who I first heard this from, I love the way they explained the phenomenon I refer to here. They believe that it is the palpable sense of the other person or people’s absence that causes the feelings of extreme tiredness, what has been dubbed “Zoom Fatigue.”
As we go forth into our inevitably digital lives, let us heed Evens’s advice to bring more intention to our digital interactions, and to still cherish and recognize the contingency that gives each of our lives its wonderful richness and beauty. Let us wholeheartedly embrace this vibrant contingency, the eternal wellspring of life’s infinite complexity and joy, and vow to keep it part of us ‘til death.
Nice article Charlie!