Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 3

Vibe Shiftlessness

“It scared me, the word ‘vibrations.’” —Brian Wilson

The word “vibe,” once a plaything of hippies, has itself become a vibe. It’s the vibe of our times, a lazy devil-may-care linguistic shrug radiating through culture and, now, politics. If you have nothing to say, at least you can say “vibe shift.”

I did an exhaustive search of every opinion column published by major U.S. newspapers since the recent election, and I found that the phrase “vibe shift” appears 4,322 times. That number is a complete ...

Harold Innis and Our Time

Emperors of information at work, January 20, 2024.

“Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.” So said Harold Innis during a lecture in Quebec City in 1947. His statement fell on deaf ears. It wasn’t something people were prepared to hear. Everyone took it for granted that communication and understanding were and always would be allies. Only Innis saw that they were becoming enemies.

Harold Adams Innis was in his day one of the world’s foremost political econom...

Truth Doesn't Scale

Still from Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly.

I’ve been fact-checked. It’s an uncomfortable experience but also therapeutic. One has one’s flaws exposed — sloppiness, overreaching, wrong-headedness, impetuousness, ignorance, peevishness — and dealt with. Nothing gets swept under the rug; it all has to be resolved on the page, in public view. One emerges from a rigorous fact checking a chastened, and maybe a better, writer and man. And one avoids the embarrassment of the printed error, the u...

Smartphones Are Hot

Today’s Sunday Rerun takes up the question: What would Marshall McLuhan make of the smartphone? I wrote this in 2014, when the smartphone had displaced the laptop and desktop as our personal computer of choice but had not yet become our heart’s desire.

Image of ice cave, from Apple’s “One Night on iPhone 7” ad campaign.

The lightbulb, Marshall McLuhan wrote at the start of his 1964 book Understanding Media, is an example of a medium without content. Walk into a dark room and hit the light switch, ...

Dead, Loud and Snotty

This vulgar picture was not generated by AI. Or was it?

In 1978, when I was clinging, like a rabid monkey, to the last days of teenagerhood, I went to a club in Connecticut to see the Dead Boys, whose first album, Young, Loud and Snotty, was a favorite. Early in the show, the leopardskin spandex tights worn by the lead singer, Stiv Bators, split open, and he spent the remainder of the set with his scrotum on display. It was quite a performance, and it became one of the touchstones of my punk yout...

The Mirrorball Self

My new book, Superbloom, won’t be out for a few more weeks (January 28), but I’m pleased to share a preview here at New Cartographies. This excerpt comes from the seventh chapter, “The Dislocated I.” It opens the third and final section of the book, where I shift from examining how digital media has reshaped personal relations and social dynamics to looking at the fate of the self in a world where everything is mediated.

Paul Klee, Senecio (detail)

It happened quickly. Twenty-five years ago, at th...

Seeing Things

Joachim Patinir, Rest on the Flight into Egypt

“The art of Joachim Patinir revels in a world that is earthly, visible, concrete,” observes the Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina at the start of “Imagining the Real,” a lecture celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

You must stand for a long time before his Rest on the Flight into Egypt to grasp each of the minute details the painter has gathered into the rather small rectangular space of the panel — if he has n...

The Arc of Innovation Bends toward Decadence

For years, people have bemoaned the sorry state of innovation. Compared with the great inventions of the industrial era, the inventions of our own time seem pathetic. In today’s Sunday Rerun, I offer a different take: We’re as innovative as ever, but the focus of innovation has shifted. The post originally appeared in 2012.

“Window to the Future,” Motorola magazine ad, circa 1961

“If you could choose only one of the following two inventions, indoor plumbing or the Internet, which would you choose?...

Welcome to the Poppy Field

My new book, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, doesn’t come out until the end of January, but I just received my box of author copies. I will spare you the unboxing video (though it is exceptionally engaging), but I won’t spare you the photo:

Superbloom offers a cultural history of communication, particularly in its mechanized, mediated form, that culminates in an exploration of how one particular media machine, the computer network, shapes the way we communicate today — w...

The Love that Lays the Swale in Rows

The Sunday before Thanksgiving. A good day for a long essay — a veritable “30 min,” if Substack’s calculations are to be trusted. The latest in my series of Sunday Reruns, “The Love that Lays the Swale in Rows” appeared originally, in a somewhat different form, as the closing chapter of my 2014 book on the human consequences of automation, The Glass Cage . If I have a philosophy of technology, you’ll probably find it here.

There’s a line of verse I’m always coming back to, and it’s been on my mind...