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.