/tech/ - Technology

Have we moved past the post-digital era of the internet? According to Cramer in 2013, "‘Post-digital’ thus refers to a state in which the disruption brought upon by digital information technology has already occurred. […] this technology is no longer perceived as disruptive." At the time of writing, in 2013, this seemed to be a realistic appraisal of the situation, as digital forms of communication (social media, internet news, Wikipedia, etc.) were viewed as a part of life. The post-digital was a rejection of the techno-optimism of Kurzweil and SV, opposing the techno-hegelian view that the digital era was a simple moment on the path to the idealized singularity. Post-digitalism was coined at a time when the internet had started to lose its own foggy idealism, and was understood as having been captured in large part by corporate and state interests. DIY communities and counter-cultural trends existed, but the term 'digital' was not a disruptive element at the macro scale of society.
It seems pertinent in 2025 to reassess the term, and the era that we find ourselves in. Has internet culture become uniquely disruptive again? Media institutions have largely acclimated themselves to digital existence after the sink-or-swim period of the 2010s. Social media is seamlessly integrated into the social fabric. Baby boomer policymakes int he EU and US ahve spent thousands of hours debating cryptocurrencies, cryptography, social media, etc.
I'd like to suggest that we find ourselves instead in an era *after* the post-digital era of the 2010s, which is far more in line with the original technic/cybernetic ideals of the 1950s and 1960s. The 2010s were rapid and choatic, as was expected, but after some shuffling around, the digital and analogue components of society can no longer be differentiated, except for on the superfluous technological and material levels. In fact, it could be argued that the entirety of the human experience has been captured by digital systems. I'm hesitant to claim this is a truly cybernetic society, but it does seems that in the imperial core, systems of control and capture have become fully digital, abstract, and everpresent. The I/O systems for the information feedback loop of a cybernetic apparatus have all been established. Should we rehabilitate the field of cybernetics to understand macro systems? Obviously there is a socialist root in classical cybernetics (Cybersyn, etc.), but it might be worthwhile to reappraise Big Computer as a transformative method for states like China. If the apparatus is already present for cybernetic management, it seems like something *we* should be analyzing, since it's blatantly obvious that the managerial class is analyzing them.