Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 14
September 11, 2016
Facebook is not a media company
“We are a tech company, not a media company,” said Mark Zuckerberg in Rome on August29, shortly after presentingthe Pope with a toydrone. And Zuckerberg — l never thought I’d write this sentence — was right.
Media companies saw it differently. They responded tothe Facebook CEO’sremark with a collective, peeved guffaw. At best Zuckerberg was being disingenuous; at worst he was lying. “Yes, Facebook is a media company,” wrote Recode. “Sorry, Mark Zuckerberg, but Facebook is definitely a media...
September 9, 2016
White Ocean Riot
Everything had been going swimmingly at this year’s Burning Man, the annual desert festival devoted to “decommodification” and “radical self-reliance,”reports social media specialist Becky Wicks in a GQpost:
I turned my head up to the giant shrimp rotating on the ceiling, and realised the end of it had been cleverly moulded into the shaft of a penis. Before I could voice this fact aloud however, I was being thrust a sippy cup full ofchampagne, the shrimp-penis was forgotten and I found mysel...
September 7, 2016
The unbitten Apple
Apple’s logo remains one of the great businessmarks: simple, eloquent, indelible. But, more and more, the stylized apple with the bite missingis looking like an anachronism.
The colors went long ago, of course, those happy, trippy rainbow stripes that connected the company with its flower-child origins.But the bite remained, signaling the human: organic,flawed,sweet. The missing piece was our piece. It welcomed us in. It made us part of the company. It put the personal in personal computing....
September 6, 2016
Transhumanism merges tool-making and myth-making
What will we make of ourselves? The question is no longer figurative; it’s literal. Biotechnology and genetic engineering are giving us new tools to reshape ourselves, at both the individual and the species level. My new book Utopia Is Creepy — out today— concludeswith an essay, “The Daedalus Mission,” that tries to make senseof radical human enhancement, or “transhumanism.” Aeon isfeaturingexcerpts from the essay (mainly the beginning and the ending). Here’s a little more, from the middle:
...September 3, 2016
Big data and the limits of social engineering
The following review of Alex Pentland’s bookSocial Physics appeared originally, in a slightly different form, in MIT Technology Review.
In 1969, Playboy published a long, freewheeling interview with Marshall McLuhan in which the media theorist and sixties icon sketched a portrait of the future that was at once seductive and repellent. Noting the ability of digital computers to analyze data and communicate messages, McLuhanpredicted that the machines eventually would be deployed to fine-tune...
September 2, 2016
The art of Instagram
Jacob Mikanowski has, in The Point, an excellent essay on Instagram, that most civilized of social networks. It begins:
Of all thesocial networks, it’s the easiest, the simplest, the least full of harm. Let’s put it a different way. Facebook is Sauron. It’s also your mom’s couch, a yoga-center bulletin board, a school bus, a television tuned to every channel. Twitter is Grub Street, a press scrum, the crowd in front of a bar. Reddit is a tin-foil hat and a sewer. Snapchat is hover boards, Roc...
August 30, 2016
The music of mind-fracking
I have seen the future of music, and its name is ThinkEar.
A new audio gadgetfrom, oddly enough, a Finnish oil company named Neste, ThinkEaris a set of“mind-controlled earphones” that will allow your brain to control your music without any interference from your mind. Let’s go to the press release:
The world is poised on the brink of a technological revolution; rapid progress in brain mapping technology means that the ability to control devices with our minds is no longer the stuff of scien...
August 26, 2016
Questioning Silicon Valley
Time magazine’s Rana Foroohar says my new book, Utopia Is Creepy, “punches a hole in Silicon Valley cultural hubris.” The book comes out on September 6, the day after Labor Day, but you can read an excerpt from the introduction at Aeon today.
“Computing is not about computers any more,” wrote Nicholas Negroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in his 1995 bestsellerBeing Digital. “It is about living.” By the turn of the century, Silicon Valley was selling more than gadgets and so...
August 25, 2016
Solitaire as symbol and synecdoche
“When a man is reduced to such a pass as playing cards by himself, he had better give up— or take to reading.” –Rawdon Crawley,The Card Player’s Manual, 1876
Bignews out ofthe Googleplex today: the internetgiant is offering a free solitaire game through its search engine and its mobile app. “When you search for ‘solitaire’ on Google,” goesthe announcement on the company’s always breathless blog, “the familiar patience game may test yours!”
Pokémon Go, Candy Crush, Angry Birds, Farmville, Min...
August 8, 2016
“All that is solid would melt into their network”
It’s my longest, funniest book yet — granted, the competition was not exactly fierce on either count— and it is now printed, bound, and on its way to a bookstore near you. The title is Utopia Is Creepy . . . and Other Provocations, and the bookcollects my favorite posts published here at Rough Type since the blog launched in 2005, along with a selectionof essays, aphorisms, and reviews that appearedover the same period. It also featuresa couple of new pieces, including one on transhumanism c...
