Modernity refers, for Barba-Kay, chiefly if not exclusively to the unfolding of technological progress culminating in the digital. Whereas in the ancient world technē was seen to imitate and aid nature in the realization of its ends, as the physician uses his art to nurse the body to health, early modern thinkers wondered whether art could overcome natural limitations altogether. Medicine might vastly extend human life; the modern state, properly designed, might never die; the bomb, through the threat of mutually assured destruction, might obviate war. Digital technology is not just one more attempt to resist, artificially, the indifference of nature to human happiness. Instead, "the digital is a 'natural' technology, that is, a technology so useful as to serve as a paradigm for usefulness itself, a technology that achieves the goal implicit in technology as such." from This Irresistible Revolution [The Point; ungated]

A review of Antón Barba-Kay's A Web of Our Own Making by Daniel Schillinger Antón Barba-Kay gives the keynote speech during the 2024 Student Conference on Core Texts and Classes at American University's School of Public Affairs.