Digital Fix - Fix Digital
Fixing digital from the ground up
Description
There was a stretch, somewhere around 2010, when the digital story still felt like a clean one. Smartphones were spreading, social platforms were connecting strangers across continents, and the people building these tools spoke about them in the language of liberation: flatter access, freer speech, fewer middlemen. The NEXT Conference, run out of Hamburg by Matthias Schrader and Volker Martens, was one of the rooms where that optimism got rehearsed and refined year after year. It was a gathering of strategists, designers, engineers, and researchers who genuinely believed the network was bending the world toward something better.
A decade later, the same room sounds different. The connecting tools also fragment. The platforms built to inform also distort. The automation meant to free up human attention turned out to harvest it instead. None of the original promises were exactly lies, but most of them aged badly, and the people who once sold the optimism are now living inside the side effects. Out of that discomfort came a book — "Digital Fix - Fix Digital" — edited by Schrader and Martens, collecting voices like Virginia Dignum, François Chollet, Pamela Pavliscak, David Mattin, and others who refuse to either cheerlead or despair.
What makes the collection unusual is its starting posture. These are not technophobes writing eulogies for the open web, nor are they boosters insisting the next release will save us. They are practitioners who still like the thing they helped build, and who think the damage is repairable — but only if we stop treating it as a finished revolution and start treating it as an unfinished system that needs deliberate, systemic editing.
The question we’re asking : If the redemption digital technology promised turned out to be partly false, what would it actually take to repair the systems we already live inside?What we’ll see : A field of optimistic insiders arguing, against the grain of both hype and doom, that the digital world can still be fixed — and what fixing it would demand of the people who build it.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The promise that aged badly
The book opens from a position of mild betrayal, though it never uses that word. The contributors came of age professionally inside the optimistic phase of the digital transition — the years when "disruption" was a compliment and connecting the world read as an unambiguous good. They built the products, ran the conferences, wrote the manifestos. So when several of them admit that the outcomes diverged sharply from the intentions, it carries more weight than the usual outside critique. The people confessing are the people who shipped.
Martin Recke and Adam Tinworth, both long associated with NEXT, trace how the early framing went wrong. The mistake was not the technology itself but the assumption baked into it: that more connection, more data, and more automation would more or less automatically produce more freedom and more truth. That assumption treated digital tools as neutral conduits, when in practice every conduit carries the incentives of whoever owns it. Attention became the currency, and the systems optimized for attention rather than for the wellbeing of the people paying it.
02Chapter 2 — What the contributors actually agree on
A book with this many authors — philosophers, engineers, artists, entrepreneurs — could easily dissolve into a dozen unrelated essays. What holds it together is a shared diagnosis that surfaces in different vocabularies. The technologists describe it as a problem of incentives; the philosophers as a problem of values; the designers as a problem of defaults. Underneath the differences sits one agreement: the digital systems we live in were optimized for the wrong things, and optimization is not destiny. It can be redirected.
Virginia Dignum, who works on responsible artificial intelligence, makes the most precise version of the case. Her argument is that ethics cannot be bolted on after a system is built; it has to be a design constraint from the start, the way safety is for a bridge. An algorithm that maximizes engagement will keep maximizing engagement no matter how many warning labels you attach to it afterward. If we want different outcomes, we have to specify different objectives — and that is a governance choice, not a technical inevitability.
03Chapter 3 — Designing for repair, not for engagement
If the second move is diagnosis, the third is method, and here the book gets concrete. The dominant design logic of the last fifteen years was engagement: keep the user on the screen, measure success in time-on-app, treat attention as the scarce resource to be captured. Several contributors argue that this single metric is the rot at the center, and that fixing digital means designing for something other than the maximization of attention.
Pamela Pavliscak, who studies the emotional life of technology, pushes for systems that account for how people actually feel rather than only what they click. A product that leaves its users anxious, compared, or depleted is a failure even if its engagement numbers are excellent — and most current dashboards are simply not built to notice that failure. Her proposal is to widen what gets measured, on the theory that you cannot repair what you refuse to count.
04Chapter 4 — The reckoning nobody scheduled
Step back from the individual essays and "Digital Fix - Fix Digital" is really making one large claim: the digital revolution is not an event that happened to us, finished, to be either celebrated or mourned. It is a system still under construction, and systems under construction can be edited. That reframing is the book's quiet radicalism. Most public conversation about technology oscillates between two useless poles — the boosters who say it is fine and the doomers who say it is over. The contributors stake out the uncomfortable middle, where the thing is broken in specific, nameable ways and therefore fixable in specific, nameable ways.
What that middle position demands is a redistribution of responsibility. For years the burden landed on the individual: manage your screen time, curate your feed, log off if you don't like it. The book treats that framing as a category error. You cannot personally opt out of systems that structure work, news, money, and politics. The repair has to happen at the level of design, governance, and incentive — the systemic level — because that is the level at which the damage was caused.
05Conclusion
The NEXT Conference began as a place to celebrate where the network was taking us. "Digital Fix - Fix Digital" is what happens when that same crowd turns around and looks honestly at where the network actually went. The optimism survives, but it has changed shape. It is no longer the faith that the tools will save us on their own; it is the harder conviction that we can still repair them if we choose to do the work — and that the choice belongs to the people who built them.
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