The Digital Sublime
Source: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262633291/the-digital-sublime/ ↗
Mosco, working from the political economy of communication tradition, dissects the myths that have accompanied every major technological wave — the telegraph would bring world peace, electricity would eliminate poverty, the internet would create perfect democracy — and shows that the same narrative structure repeats with each new medium.
The central concept is the "digital sublime": the quasi-religious awe that new technologies inspire, which serves to suspend critical judgment precisely when it is most needed.
Mosco traces how the dot-com bubble was inflated not by technology alone but by a mythology of the end of history, the end of geography, and the end of politics that made speculative excess feel like rational investment.
The book argues that myths do not simply deceive — they perform real ideological work by framing technological change as inevitable, natural, and beyond political contestation.
For anyone working in technology who has lived through multiple hype cycles, Mosco provides the analytical vocabulary to understand why the pattern repeats and whose interests the repetition serves.
Central argument
Mosco argues that every major communications technology — from the telegraph to the internet — is accompanied by a structurally identical mythology that he calls the 'digital sublime': a quasi-religious awe that frames the technology as ending history, geography, and politics simultaneously. These myths are not innocent enthusiasm; they perform active ideological work by making speculative excess appear rational and by placing technological change beyond political contestation. The dot-com bubble, in Mosco's account, was as much a product of this mythological infrastructure as of any financial mechanism, and the same narrative apparatus reassembles itself with each new medium precisely because it serves identifiable economic and political interests.
Critique
Mosco's framework is powerful at the diagnostic level but underdetermines the question of agency: if the myth-structure is this stable and this functional for entrenched interests, the book offers little account of how critical awareness actually translates into different outcomes, or why some hype cycles produce durable infrastructure while others collapse entirely. The political economy tradition from which he works also tends to treat ideology as something done to passive audiences, which sits uneasily with the reality that many technologists who inflate hype cycles are themselves sincere believers rather than cynical manipulators — a distinction that matters for any prescriptive argument. Written in 2004, the analysis also predates the platform era, where the mythology of disruption became institutionalised inside firms rather than just in press cycles, which may limit the framework's direct applicability to contemporary organizational dynamics.
Why it matters for product
A CPO who has navigated multiple hype cycles — AI, Web3, no-code, the metaverse — can use Mosco's vocabulary to ask a disciplined question during discovery: which constraints are we treating as natural or inevitable that are actually political choices embedded in a narrative we have not examined? This matters concretely when setting product strategy, because roadmaps built on the assumption that a given technological shift is unstoppable tend to skip the falsifiability tests that would catch bad bets early. More subtly, Mosco's analysis of how myths suspend critical judgment points to a team-level risk: organizations caught in a sublimity moment will systematically underinvest in instrumentation and exit criteria, precisely when those mechanisms are most necessary.