The Space of the World - by Nick Couldry

About the Book

"Over the past thirty years, humanity has made a huge mistake. We handed over to big tech decisions that have allowed them to build what has become our "space of the world" - the highly artificial space of social media platforms where much of our social life now unfolds. This has proved reckless and has huge social consequences. The toxic effects on social life, young people's mental health, and political solidarity are well known, but the key factor underlying all this has been missed: the fact that humanity allowed business to construct our space of the world at all and then exploit it for profit. In the process, we ignored two millennia of political thought about the conditions under which a healthy or even a non-violent politics is possible. We endangered the one resource that is in desperately short supply in the face of catastrophic climate change: solidarity. Is human solidarity possible in a world of continuous digital connection and commercially managed platforms, and what if it isn't? In the first book of his trilogy, Humanising the Future, Nick Couldry offers a radical new vision of how to design our digital spaces so that they build, rather than erode, both solidarity and community. This trenchant and vividly written book stresses that we cannot afford not to care for our space of the world. We need to rebuild it together"--

Book Synopsis

Over the past thirty years, humanity has made a huge mistake. We handed over to big tech decisions that have allowed them to build what has become our "space of the world" - the highly artificial space of social media platforms where much of our social life now unfolds. This has proved reckless and has huge social consequences.

The toxic effects on social life, young people's mental health, and political solidarity are well known, but the key factor underlying all this has been missed: the fact that humanity allowed business to construct our space of the world at all and then exploit it for profit. In the process, we ignored two millennia of political thought about the conditions under which a healthy or even a non-violent politics is possible. We endangered the one resource that is in desperately short supply in the face of catastrophic climate change: solidarity. Is human solidarity possible in a world of continuous digital connection and commercially managed platforms, and what if it isn't?

In the first book of his trilogy, Humanising the Future, Nick Couldry offers a radical new vision of how to design our digital spaces so that they build, rather than erode, both solidarity and community. This trenchant and vividly written book stresses that we cannot afford not to care for our space of the world. We need to rebuild it together.

Review Quotes

"One of the most pressing questions of our time is the impact of social media on our life-world and our sense of self. This book by Nick Couldry provides the most subtle, far-reaching and theoretically balanced answer to that question yet. In an admirable mixture of sociological observations, philosophical reflections and political considerations, the author succeeds in describing the devastating effects and the small potentials that the internet brings with it in terms of political life and human interaction."
Axel Honneth, Jack B. Weinstein Professor of the Humanities, Columbia University

"Nick Couldry's The Space of the World is a truly astonishing book. His analysis digs much deeper than the design of the digital platform industry; he relates the problems of a toxic digital world to the commercialization of public space and climate change. This first part of a monumental trilogy opens much-needed vistas into the future of humanity, way beyond the digital domain. Indeed, if humans aspire to a future on this planet, that future needs humanizing: solidarity, connectedness, communal rationality."
Jose van Dijck, Professor of Media and Digital Society at Utrecht University and author of The Culture of Connectivity and The Platform Society

"Nick Couldry writes with urgency, clarity, purpose and deep feeling about what we have lost in ceding our digital spaces to large platform companies - and what we can get back, for ourselves and for humanity, by choosing another path. As we stand on the precipice of a new digital era, Couldry is issuing a visionary call to reconsider our design choices of the last few decades and redesign social media from the ground up."
Eli Pariser, Co-Director, New_ Public

"Humanity is what exists in the spaces that neither capitalism nor computers knows how to define. As always, Nick Couldry brings a unique and necessary rigour to our shared quest for a more humane, intuitive and resonance-based approach to designing a digital society from the bottom up."
Douglas Rushkoff, author of Team Human and Survival of the Richest

"Technologies are made by humans, yet not always humane. Couldry takes a deep dive into how capitalist norms render social justice an afterthought, and how this impacts our technologies and our futures. A much-needed manifesto for our civic future."
Zizi Papacharissi, author of After Democracy: Imagining our Political Future

"Couldry makes a clear and unambiguous argument for how Big Tech has taken over the digital "space of the world" and contributed to the multiple crises the world is now facing. But, rather than wallowing in despair, he invites us to take the first steps towards a different solidaristic future in the hope that these will resonate far and wide and build action for social change. Pragmatic and hopeful, Couldry encourages us to see that another world is not only possible but has already begun to be built."
Natalie Fenton, Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of Democratic Delusions

About the Author

Nick Couldry is Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science.