The following article is an edited transcript of a talk held in Venice and organized by Becoming Press. You can find the unedited transcript and video recording of the talk here.
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For some time, I have been interested in the relationship between digital technology and how our society is structured. I would like to emphasize, in this regard, the difference between digital technology and analog technology and how different kinds of media have a bias implicit in them. In fact, different media not only allow but facilitate certain structures and political economies.
Seventy‑five years ago, a scholar named Harold Innis wrote a series of books, the most important of which is The Bias of Communication (1951). The subtitle of this talk, “The Bias of Information,” references that work. Harold Innis also published Empire and Communications in 1950 and Changing Concepts of Time in 1952. In these books, he examined the rise and fall of ancient empires as a way of tracing the effects of communication media.
Harold Innis, like other theorists in Toronto such as Eric A. Havelock, belonged to the first generation of the Toronto School of Communication Theory. One generation later came Marshall McLuhan, by far the most well‑known and popular figure. In fact, it is largely due to Marshall McLuhan that, like many others, I discovered Harold Innis and this early generation of Media Theory.
The bias of communication concerns how media produce monopolies of knowledge. One example is the distinction between societies based on writing and societies based on orality. A society based on writing require storage space that involves the construction of buildings and libraries. These developments bring additional systems, such as security structures, guards, and armies. A society based on writing, on the other hand, can evolve into a society organized around the army and the State. However, Harold Innis was never deterministic in this regard, in contrast with Marshall McLuhan, who later depoliticized some aspects of his master’s work.

In ancient Egypt, papyrus grew on the banks of the Nile River. Since papyrus was essential to the development of Egyptian knowledge and existed in a specific location, it encouraged a centralized system that favored the rise of absolute monarchy. Papyrus facilitated absolute monarchy, for example, illustrating the connections Innis traced between media and political structures.
In medieval Europe, the printing press allowed knowledge to move beyond monasteries and the control of the Church toward the Humanist period. A century after the invention of the printing press, the scientific revolution emerged. The printing press did not create the scientific revolution but facilitated the spread of knowledge. Innis described these processes in terms of monopolies of knowledge and monopolies of time.
Harold Innis distinguished between heavy, durable media – such as stone tablets and obelisks – which carried a bias toward stability and time, and lighter media such as paper and parchment. Lighter media move faster and enable commerce and the development of bureaucracy. They eventually paved the way for modernity through the printing press.
These distinctions between heavy and light media are compelling, even though they can collapse under closer examination.
The ancient Egyptian Empire operated with hybrid systems of stone media and lighter media such as papyrus and parchment. Eventually, according to Harold Innis, the tensions between the emphasis on time represented by stone and the emphasis on space represented by lighter media contributed to imperial decline. In the course of history, there was a contrast between absolute monarchy and the rising religious hierarchy. This led to the decline of ancient Egypt, which was later colonized by the Greek Empire and collapsed.
This talk adapts the theory of Harold Innis to the last fifty years and asks a very simple question: What is the bias of digital technology?
Harold Innis focused on analog communication because computers were not yet prominent. Marshall McLuhan, one decade later, talks a little bit about computers, but he is not able to foresee the specific political economies in which media like computers and smartphones developed, even though some of his general theories are still correct.

Today, in contrast with the media of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, technology is digital rather than analog, and mobile rather than fixed. The crucial difference here is that the bias of digital technology is no longer toward time; it is not even a bias toward space but toward speed. Digital technology stores vast amounts of information and enables communication at the speed of light. Bernard Stiegler once joked that digital communication is faster than lightning. Lightning travels at roughly one‑sixth or one‑eighth the speed of light, while fiber‑optic cables transmit information even faster. We are at a point where communication approaches immediacy.
Another preliminary question concerns how thought itself is affected by digital technologies such as computers, smartphones, 3D printing, and virtual reality. Marshall McLuhan described the rise of typographic society and Typographic Man in the fifteenth century: the printing press encouraged linear and rational thought structures that paved the way for the scientific revolution. In the twenty-first century, there is a shift towards a new forma mentis, which brings about various forms of communication and their political economy.
Digital technology is faster and stores more information than any previous medium. There is a picture from 1994 that shows Bill Gates sitting on a stack of three thousand papers while holding a CD in his left hand. The advertisement by Microsoft stated that a single CD-ROM could hold as much information as those papers.
Moore’s Law suggests that the speed of computers doubles approximately every eighteen months – it is an almost self-fulfilling prophecy for the market. Nonetheless, the number of transistors continues to increase. And so, digital technology, aided by cybernetics, made possible new methods of data compression, allowing far more information to be stored than the CD in the hands of Bill Gates.
The situation we are in today is akin to what Jacques Derrida referred to as an archive fever. Everything that can be stored will be stored, and will be stored again tomorrow. There is a red thread that Mark Fisher follows between the nostalgia for the past, to which he refers with the term hauntology, following Derrida, and the capacity of digital technology to literally create “anarchives”; while an archive is supposedly a selection of things from the past, like a library, the internet contains literally everything that exists.
The virtual, infinite capacity for storage and retrieval leads to a digital hauntology. The development of technology should diminish the power of ghosts to haunt us. Instead, these same developments allow the ghost of the past to come back, again and again, leading further to an obsession with the past and all the cultural impasses of the present. Hauntology is a cultural phenomenon that is eminently digital.

Digital technology enables the rise and the abolition of certain concepts; it has a bias toward space because it is mobile and decentralized, which is, in fact, only a bias toward speed. This bias toward speed makes commodities more and more ephemeral. This is part of a digital ideology where concepts once relegated to hard, physical frameworks, such as ownership and property, have disappeared and been replaced by renting and licensing.
The distribution and circulation of digital culture is intrinsically based on an infrastructure of renting and licensing. A video retailer company like Blockbuster was popular on the verge of the beginning of the digital revolution, before its model was later supplanted by digital services like Netflix.
The shift from analog to digital technology is a formal shift in the materiality of information storage. Umberto Eco, in a lecture from about twenty years ago, makes a distinction between vegetal memory – stored on paper, parchment, or papyrus – and organic memory – brains and the nervous system. A third type is mineral memory – stored on stone tablets, obelisks, and silicon computer microchips. As a mineral, silicon represents a paradigm shift from the paper-based medium that dominated monopolies of knowledge for centuries. In the second half of the 20th century, computers replaced paper with a less fragile medium that becomes increasingly lighter.
Moreover, digital technology promotes globalization, a process that is made much more cumbersome with analog technology. Regarding globalization, I would like to emphasize first of all the separation of the world into the Global North and Global South, which means that the commerce of products, as well as the infrastructure and manufacturing system, are outsourced to the latter. This requires a fast, widespread, and literally global communication network.
While digital devices appear light and portable, they require heavy infrastructure, including chargers and internet connections. Digital technology may be defined, therefore, as the repression of its own materiality. This physical element is pushed away to the Global South or to anonymous data centers in Europe and elsewhere where precarious workers operate. Undersea cables and satellites are hidden from our immediate reality, producing the illusion that digital technology is immediate, light, and virtual. But as we know from psychoanalysis, the repressed always returns. The repressed physical elements of digital technology return through climate change aggravated by data centers, increasing social and economic inequality produced by monopolies of information in the Global North, and lastly, with the increasing frequency of glitches, system errors, and blackouts. Climate change, social instability, and system errors return the materiality to the medium.
Digital technology also enables new forms of political resistance. We can think of Tahrir Square, the Arab Spring, but even more recently, what has been dubbed “the selfie yacht,” on which Greta Thunberg is travelling to Palestine for the second time. The Israeli government’s denomination of the Sumud flotilla as a “selfie yacht” highlights that that the most powerful element of this incursion of these activists towards Palestine is not the physical movement of the boat with its passengers, which obviously poses a threat; the biggest threat is the digital technology and the global network that they are transporting to the terrain of war, to which the Israeli government responds with an equal mediatic warfare.
In our own globalized environment, politics has been spectacularized; the spectacle has become politicized. This situation began in 2001, the year of 9/11, which is also the year of the launch of Google Search, Google Images, Wikipedia, the Xbox, and Windows XP. There is a very interesting connection between the history of terrorism and the history of digital technology. Power has become increasingly softer, as we know from our Foucault readings, as it has shifted toward what can be called “nano-power”. This is what happens when power is reproduced into portable, lighter digital devices.
There is a quote by Mark Fisher that I really like in one of his last lectures, where he says to his students, “Imagine if you could invent something like that, where you just endlessly distract yourself, at any point in the world and at any time in the world, you can be reached by the imperatives of capitalism. Imagine an object like that. What would it look like?” And a student replies, “A phone?”.

Today, ideology is engineered into social media algorithms, notification systems, and the constant presence of an internet connection. As we hold our world in the palm of our hands, we are also carrying ideology in our pockets, so to speak.
Digital technology has allowed surveillance capitalism to flourish in a way that analog forms of surveillance could only dream of. Censorship has changed too, in a way that is no longer negative or repressive, as we already know from many theorists like Slavoj Žižek. The dangerous information is suppressed with more information rather than removed from circulation. This is a strategy of “obesity”, to borrow a concept from Jean Baudrillard.
Our conception of history is also shifting. We are more and more aware that the power of the State, which has been facilitated and allowed to increase to the point of State-crafted capitalism, has drifted towards a new type of corporate power in which corporations have taken more and more power within the State. It is enough to think about the dual election of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. A new history is emerging when we read time as the history of corporations rather than the history of the State. For example, IBM’s punch cards were used by the Nazis to record data about Jewish prisoners in the concentration camps. Without the technology produced by IBM, an American computer company, Nazi Germany may not have been enabled, or at least, would have not been facilitated, to commit the Holocaust. In State history, this is a contradiction; in corporate history, it is more than obvious. This is but one example of the reason why we need to rethink our view of history, while keeping in mind the bias of digital technology.
Today, digital technology is able to affect us more and more, for example through censorship and soft power, but it is also able to create alternative ways of reconceptualizing reality and new forms of resistance. The bias toward speed is what makes capital travel faster in the form of information; but it may as well enable different forms of communication and ways of reconceptualizing what history can be, in addition to what digital technology in itself could be and do. Therefore, the value that digital technology produces in our society, which generally tends toward the reproduction of power and capital through speed, could be used to make the system crumble even faster inasmuch as digital technology is used as a political medium. All the while we must not forget to take into account all its limitations and biases.
Digital technology is physical, but there is no return to the materiality of the past. Today, the working principle of technology has shifted toward speed; that’s why we should integrate speed into our politics.
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Alessandro Sbordoni is the author of Beyond the Image: On Visual Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Set Margins’, 2025), Semiotics of the End: Essays on Capitalism and the Apocalypse (Institute of Network Cultures, 2023; Becoming Press, 2024), and The Shadow of Being: Symbolic / Diabolic (Miskatonic Virtual University Press, 2023). He is an Editor of the British magazine Blue Labyrinths and the Italian magazine Charta Sporca. He works for the Open Access publisher Frontiers.