11.0 From Postmodern to Post-Postmodern
The official post-postmodern year is 2015; the catalytic technology is the pocket computer on a broadband leash. Culturally, however, the hinge began in 2007, when Steve Jobs pulled the first iPhone from his jeans and put a networked camera in every palm.
The deeper break can be grasped by contrasting 1948 with 1984—both chronologically and literarily:
1948 welcomed broadcast television: one-way variable images that audiences largely trusted.
1984 in George Orwell’s novel imagined a two-way television—a telescreen that watched back, fusing media and surveillance.
1984 in Apple’s iconic Super Bowl ad promised the Macintosh would prevent that dystopia—only for personal computing to supply the very tools that later enabled omnipresent cameras, cookies, and face recognition.
In Baudrillard’s language, postmodernity was the rule of centrally curated simulacra; post-postmodernity begins when every spectator becomes a broadcaster, truth competes with algorithmic filters, and “Big Brother” is your own front-facing lens.
With the cultural lens fixed, we now track the machines that enabled the shift—first on desks, then in pockets.
11.1 The Desktop Paradigm — Hobbyists, Garages & Graphical Windows
The personal computer is quintessentially American, hatched in suburban garages as falling storage costs invited hobbyists to tinker. Steve Wozniak’s Apple I (1976) was little more than a pre-assembled breadboard, yet it set off a chain that reached the Macintosh (1984)—the first mass desktop to pair a bitmap GUI, mouse, and “insanely great” marketing.
Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 “Mother of All Demos” had already sketched the desktop metaphor, mouse, and networked collaboration; Jobs’s genius was packaging that vision for consumers. Whether Microsoft “copied” Apple misses the larger point: both vendors rode the same logic—turning text terminals into image machines where icons stood for files and folders.
Jobs’s rounded-corner window frames reduced eye fatigue by smoothing the rate of pixel-color change—squaring the circle in hardware aesthetics.
11.2 Mobile & the Two-Way Image Machine
The desktop won on versatility; the smartphone wins on proximity. With constant-on broadband and batteries that halve in size each five years, the phone became the first truly ambient computer. Apple’s iPhone replaced physical keys with capacitive glass, trading a hardware keyboard (used <50 % of the time) for a larger screen and better camera. If the iPod succeeded the Walkman, the iPhone succeeded the Polaroid: a variable-image machine by default.
Global smartphone shipments leapt from ~1 billion in 2014 to 1.43 billion in 2015 (IDC 2016). And when the iPhone X (2017) dedicated most of its weight budget to display and optics (iFixit teardown), it signaled the handset’s final evolution from text tool to image sensor.
Hardware is only half the story; the pipes feeding it dictate how dense cyberspace can grow.
11.3 Batteries, Broadband & Cyberspace Density
11.3.1 Battery:
The strictest limit on any mobile computer is stored energy; lithium-ion chemistry sets an upper bound on session length and camera flashes.
11.3.2 Broadband:
Spectrum and fiber determine how much physical space can tap cyberspace, and at what bit-rate. Denser bandwidth enables richer media, thicker “feeds,” and always-on cloud sync—deepening the phone’s pull on attention.
Cyberspace itself—“the matrix of binary digits”—is defined less by storage capacity than by total human time spent inside it. As Moore’s law shrinks transistors, that digital density soars.
11.4 Shared Cyberspace — From ARPANET to Web 2.0
Pre-Web (ARPANET & BBS) The 1970s ARPANET proved packet switching; 1980s bulletin-board systems let enthusiasts trade files and forum posts.
Web 1.0 (1991–2002) Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web scaled ARPANET’s academic links to anyone with TCP/IP. The first global media “moment” came when the 1996 Everest disaster was live-blogged via MountainZone.com (Krakauer 1997, ch. 18). After that, HTTP traffic ballooned; by 2001 Google logged $86 million in ad revenue on ~$700 million sales (SEC 10-K 2002).
Web 2.0 (2003–12) Social-media platforms weaponised the network effects of a scale-free graph: information flows sped up (zeitgeist compression) while publics fractured into countless “micro-Volksgeists.” Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter turned users into both content and customer.
Notes & Sources
- IDC. Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, 2016.
- Krakauer, J. Into Thin Air, 1997, ch. 18 (Everest dispatches).
- SEC. Google Form 10-K, fiscal 2002, p. 33 (ad revenue breakout).
- Orwell, G. Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949.
- Baudrillard, J. Simulacra and Simulation, 1981 (Eng. 1994).
- iFixit. iPhone X Teardown Report, 2017.
- Engelbart, D. Augmenting Human Intellect, 1962; “Mother of All Demos,” 1968.
The Z score 