Warren Sack reviews The Digital and Its Discontents

Aden Evens. The Digital and Its Discontents. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024. 264 pp.

11 September 2025

In his foreword to Aden Evens’s The Digital and Its Discontents, Alexander Galloway summarizes it as being about the banishment of contingency in the irrepressible necessities of digital logic. The book is the latest word in an ongoing, contemporary discussion in philosophy about contingency initiated by Quentin Meillassoux in his 2008 publication After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. After Meillassoux, key texts in this debate which concern computation include Luciana Parisi’s Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space (2013); M. Beatrice Fazi’s Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics (2018); Yuk Hui’s Recursivity and Contingency (2019); and Galloway’s own 2021 book Uncomputable: Play and Politics In the Long Digital Age. To these monographs, one might also add edited collections like the 2023 Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies (in the series “Media Philosophy” coedited by Fazi).

Interlocutors in this discussion differ according to their respective approaches to the understanding of contingency and computation and why or why not the incomputable or uncomputable—what cannot be computed—is or is not the same thing as the contingent. Evens’s approach is distinctive in two respects. First, along a historical dimension, he considers the digital to be a culmination—an exacerbation—of the integration of three strands of thought that he dates to the Enlightenment: positivism, instrumentalism, and rationalism. Second, conceptually, he distinguishes the actual world from the virtual and argues that the digital is a reduced, inferior form of Gilles Deleuze’s virtual.

According to Evens, the digital is compelled to conform absolutely to a strictly rule-bound behavior of binary logic, leaving no room for play, openness, accident, or creativity. The digital is no place for the contingency that he narrates as an actant with its own agency—“contingency frees the world to go where it will, to choose another path, such that its cooperation is never guaranteed, setting awry the best-laid plans” (p. 84). He tells us that contingency, the actant, is not allowed “to show up” in the realm of the digital: “The digital offers a world that is stripped, at last, of the irreducible, the remaindered, the unassimilable, the resistant. In a world rendered positive, contingency doesn’t even show up and is thus sacrificed without a thought” (pp. 163–64; my emphasis). Although he does consider the notion of a “digital contingency,” Evens finds it lacking (p. 161). Actual, nondigital contingency, according to the argument of the book, “puts everything in touch with everything else; starting at any point, it traces its meshy relations to the ends of the universe” (p. 157). Not just here but elsewhere in the book, the quantum realm appears to be the model of actual contingency. In contrast, Evens’s model of the digital seems more Newtonian than quantum: while in principle everything in the universe affects everything else, for all practical (computable) purposes this is not the case.

In the discipline of software design, the circumscribed influence of any given part is considered a virtue: software is designed in layers, structures, modules, and objects so that each part is not connected to all the other parts—essentially so that a failure of one part need not cause the failure of everything. Evens acknowledges this but calls it the “fundamental ontology of the digital” rather than a widely employed precept of software design (p 116).

In the book, software is largely elided in order to better highlight the bits at the bottom of any computer technology. For example, Evens writes “all the complicated representational possibility of machines, all of their forms are built only from bits and using only logic gates as tools” (p. 109). Yes, but if that were literally the case, would it not also be true that the representational possibility of English literature is built only from a twenty-six letter alphabet (à la Marshall McLuhan)?

One might compare Evens’s approach to the digital—attempting to see through software to focus on hardware at the bottom levels of the machine—to a position staked out by Friedrich Kittler who, in his essay “There Is No Software,” wrote “All code operations . . . come down to . . . signifiers of voltage differences.”[1] Graphical interfaces and software (aka code) of all kinds are seen as obfuscations of what takes place in the boolean circuits of computer hardware. In contrast to Evens, for Kittler, media determine our situation.

For Evens, the digital is not a determined situation but an ongoing effort to banish contingency from thought and life. To narrate this effort, he also figures the digital (in addition to contingency) as an actant when he says “the digital kills what it eats, renders its captives lifeless in order to keep them captive” (p. 210). For him, it differs from the actual primarily because the digital precludes all significant kinds of contingency. He argues that contingency is impossible in the digital because the digital is based on bits, and bits are just numbers: “the digital . . . [works by] constructing its entire world, data and process, out of numbers” (p. 25).

In reference to a much older philosophical discourse, specifically Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s essay “On Contingency,“ one might ask what kind of numbers Evens has in mind. Leibniz distinguishes necessary and contingent truths with an analogy to rational and irrational numbers. Necessary truths, like rationals, can be expressed as static identities: X = Y. Irrationals, such as pi and the square root of 2, can only be approximated without a nonterminating, infinite calculation. Analogous to contingent truths, with only a finite amount of time, irrationals cannot be resolved to a definitive identity. Would it make a difference for Evens’s argument that, within the digital, there is the means to represent an irrational number with a computer program that never terminates?

[1] Friedrich Kittler, “There Is No Software,” Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. John Johnston (New York, 1997), p. 150.