Evidence of writing in human society goes back 5 millennia. What did people think, 1,000 years into it, should be done about the presence of writing in society? Did they think of writing as magic, or as a mundane practical capability, like putting things in bags? Were there people who wanted to regulate writers so that no one could produce evil or false messages? Were there people who hoarded knowledge of literacy, or made rules about who could and could not write, so as to maintain their power? Were there people who said we should never have invented it in the first place?

Whatever people might have said in the Bronze age, we can, looking back from now, think of thousands of ways the ability to record symbols of numbers and speech has affected the course of human history, for better and worse. Organizational and religious hierarchies, commerce, empires and cultures built around written texts rose and fell. As we adapted to writing, it adapted to us: writing tools and writing media (clay, parchment, paper, etc.) co-evolved. Ancillary institutions arose – libraries, schools, filing systems, public news and entertainment media. The clustering of people around those institutions created groups with differentiated perspectives, interests and politics. Thus, writing’s impact and effects were extended in time, cumulative, and branched out in innumerable directions. It is hard to see how advocates of “a national writing policy” or “writing governance” 4,000 years ago, if they existed, could have anticipated all that.

Digitization is a social transformation comparable to, and at its core more powerful than the development of writing. Like writing, it is a new way of symbolizing and recording speech, concepts, and numbers. But there are two significant differences. Digital technologies have supercharged our ability to communicate with and process those symbols. Networked communication and automated calculations have been added to the “alphabet.” We can retrieve, calculate, sort, identify, automate, and rapidly transmit digital symbols on a massive scale with growing ease and speed. The universality and uniformity of its language of bits and bytes makes its implications for human civilization even more consequential. We overuse the word “revolution” in our discussions of technology, but this really is one.

Digitization is a process, not simply a “technology.” It is the process by which social systems co-evolve with digital information systems and become interdependent. The ization in digitization connotes its growth and spread, the idea that this interdependence is advancing. Digitization is not the “adoption” or “diffusion” of a discrete thing, but a process of substitution: digitized data and information systems replace or supplement other, preexisting information systems. They take over functions once performed by record-keeping bureaucracies, word of mouth, analogue mass media, printed money, physical assets, managerial hierarchies. Social systems’ reliance on networked computing to perform their functions ratchets ever upwards. As this happens, their tendency to convert their records and cultural artifacts into digitized data, so that they can be processed and stored by computers and transmitted over networks, is reinforced. Powerful economies of scope and network effects are in play, giving digitization its own momentum. At a certain point, social processes get digitized because everything else around them, both inputs and their outputs have also been digitized. But it is not just substitution; as we digitize, we also discover that we can create new forms of organization or perform new functions that simply weren’t possible before.

In technical terms, digitization is the convergence of human symbolic processing on information systems using binary logic embedded in solid-state electronics, powered by electrical energy. While this core “alphabet” of the digital can be considered (roughly) a constant, the forms taken by its implementations, uses and applications are not. They evolve and diversify. This is why we reject the “diffusion” model of technology’s spread through society. Instead of treating digital technologies as if they were “particles” that “diffuse,” or as fixed things that people “adopt,” like a laptop or a printer, a systems approach sees them as operational infrastructures that people build and join, and the components of those systems evolving in response to economic, political and cultural forces. A computer in 1955 has only a distant ancestral relationship to the digital devices and applications of the present. Mobile phones and laptops can no longer be seen as “miniaturized computers,” but as manifestations of specialization and differentiation of functions. The proliferation of digital capabilities into wireless networks, tiny surveillance cameras, massive, shared cloud computing infrastructures, autonomous vehicles, drones, and a thousand other types of goods and services is an evolutionary process. Streaming media is just digitized media. The Internet is just digitized networking. Social media is digitized intermediation.

Being in the thick of this digitization process, we think we have some understanding of its implications, and we may even think we can assert some kind of control over it. Digital technology and its governance have become the focus of global attention. Social policy advocates want to make it “responsible” and “ethical.” Great powers locked in geopolitical competition see control of the digital ecosystem as strategic. Politicians and regulatory agencies offer an endless supply of new laws and regulations in response to it. Everyone wants to steer digitization in one way or the other.

But as we attempt to make “public policies” to “govern” digital technology, has anyone given serious thought to how much control we actually have? To what it means to “control” information and communication technology? How much control resides in the play of market forces, how much in our individual psychology, how much in our cultural norms, how much in the state - and which state(s) of the 200 or so that currently exist? Do the systemic imperatives of the technology itself play a role in its expansion? Assuming “we” figure out how to exercise control, what direction do we steer things in, and how much do “we” understand about the long term consequences of those decisions?

This is when it becomes useful to imagine ourselves in the position of those ancient Mesopotamians in the early stages of writing. Looking back that far, we can better realize how complicated and potentially unrealistic it is to expect someone to “govern” or assert “control” over the long term direction of a technology as basic to human society as writing. Such an expectation would have to assume that ancient policy makers had forms of knowledge or control that they did not have, or could not have, or possibly should not have. When technology is so directly related to our ability to communicate, learn, think, and exercise control, who is going to be controlling what?

This is not to say that a critical take on digitization isn’t justified. It’s just that the critics need a better understanding of what it is they are criticizing, and a better understanding of what they propose to do about it.

That, in a nutshell, is what this Substack is about.