Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 12
May 12, 2017
The digital-industrial complex
Exactly fifty years after the hippies gathered in San Francisco, another summer of love seems set to blossom. This time it’s not the flower children who are holding hands and sharing beds. It’s the titans of Big Internet.
Just this week, at its Build conference, Microsoft gave a hug to former adversaries Apple and Alphabet. “Windows PCs heart iOS and Android devices” was one of the main themes of the event — yes, the heart symbol was on display — and Microsoft even announced that Apple’s iTun...
April 21, 2017
A smaller, nastier world
I have an essay in the Boston Globe‘s Ideas section that takes a hard look at the popular notion that communication networks make the world a better place.
Here’s a taste:
If our assumption that communications technology brings people together were true, we should today be seeing a planetary outbreak of peace, love, and understanding. Thanks to the Internet and cellular networks, humanity is more connected than ever. Of the world’s 7 billion people, 6 billion have access to a mobile phone. Ne...
April 16, 2017
On Robert Pollard: August by Cake
[No. 03 in a Series]
A circus barker’s come-on. A brassy fanfare. The curtain rises, and the show begins with “5° on the Inside,” a thumping, rubber-jointed rocker that sounds utterly joyous, at least until the lyrics hit you.
The sweet spot bled out
to stain your life.
August by Cake is the most accessible Guided by Voices record since 2001’s Isolation Drills, the most relaxed since 1995’s Alien Lanes, and the most topical ever. Robert Pollard once divided humanity into two camps: Sad Clown...
March 9, 2017
Uber’s ghost map and the meaning of greyballing
Uber is not only a scofflaw, but, as Mike Isaac of the New York Times reported last week, the company has been running an elaborate program to deceive and evade cops and other local officials in cities where its car service has been banned or lacks authorization to operate. The centerpiece of the scheme is a piece of software called Greyball, which uses a variety of data, including credit-card records, to identify what Uber calls “opponents.” When an opponent hails a car using the Uber app, ...
February 25, 2017
Whose self does the self-flushing toilet flush?
The public restroom, never a pleasant place, has in recent years become a dystopia. It presents us with a preview, in microcosm, of our automated future. Motion detectors and other sensors register our presence, read our intentions, and, on our behalf, turn on the lights, flush the toilets, open the taps, squirt out the liquid soap, and dispense towelettes for drying. There is a weird tension between the primitiveness of the bodily functions being executed in the contemporary restroom and the...
February 18, 2017
Zuckerberg’s world
The word “community” appears, by my rough count, 98 times in Mark Zuckerberg’s latest message to the masses. In a post-fact world, truth is approached, perhaps even created, through repetition. The message that is transmitted most often is the fittest message, the message that wins. Verification becomes a matter of pattern recognition. It’s the epistemology of the meme, the sword by which Facebook lives and dies.
Today I want to focus on the most important question of all: are we building th...
January 23, 2017
Anxiety as the fuel for surveillance capitalism
The terms addiction and compulsion tend to be used loosely and often interchangeably. But in an article in the Wall Street Journal, science writer Sharon Begley draws a simple but illuminating distinction between the two psychological disorders: addiction is born of pleasure, while compulsion is anxiety’s child.
Behavioral addictions begin in pleasure. But compulsions, according to a growing body of scientific evidence, are born in anxiety and remain strangers to joy. They are repetitive beh...
Anxiety and surveillance: pillars of the new economy
The terms addiction and compulsion tend to be used loosely and often interchangeably. But in an article intheWall Street Journal, science writer SharonBegley draws a simple but illuminatingdistinction between the two psychological disorders: addiction is born ofpleasure, while compulsion is anxiety’s child.
Behavioral addictions begin in pleasure. But compulsions, according to a growing body of scientific evidence, are born in anxiety and remain strangers to joy. They are repetitive behavior...
January 21, 2017
On Robert Pollard: “Man Called Aerodynamics”
[No. 02 in a Series]
“Man Called Aerodynamics,” the opening track ofthe 1996 Guided By Voices album Under the Bushes, Under the Stars, hits you like an anxiety attack, if an anxiety attack were indistinguishable from bliss. Like“Gold Star for Robot Boy,” the first song on the second side of the band’s1994 breakthrough Bee Thousand, itstarts with a disorienting jolt, as if someone had bumped into a turntableplayingthe Nuggets compilation. For the first couple of seconds, it sounds like pure n...
January 12, 2017
On Robert Pollard: “My Zodiac Companion”
[No. 01 in a Series]
Please Be Honest, the latest Guided By Voices record, opens with a dirge. Over spare, unsteady acoustic-guitar chords, Robert Pollard slurs an ode to the otherworld:
Orbital ghosts
attract sparks,
aftermath heavens.
The unborn called:
they miss you.
The verse ends, but despite a slight quickening of the guitar line the song, called “My Zodiac Companion,” can’t muster the energy to dragitself out of its minor-chord funk. No chorus arrives, no lift. The song seems fated, l...
