Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 4

Question Marks of the Mysterians

You don’t make friends by telling people they’re not as smart as they think they are. And you definitely don’t make friends by telling all of humanity that it’s not as smart as it thinks it is. That’s why the philosophical school of Mysterianism has never caught on with the public. But, being an amateur Mysterian myself, I continue trying to spread the good word. So, for today’s Sunday Rerun, here’s a Rough Type post on Mysterianism from 2017.

Joseph Wright, “An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pum...

Botched Little Animals

Anatomy of a Laboratory Mouse

I was reading a recent interview with the music critic Simon Reynolds — I reviewed his book Retromania years ago — when I stopped short at this:

In one of his blogs, [the late English writer Mark Fisher] talked about going to the countryside and how amazing it was. He said, ‘It really opened my eyes. I now see birds as marvellous little machines’. And I thought, why not see machines as botched little animals?

Yes, I said. Yes.

Ever since the rise, in the seventeenth ce...

Out of the Landscape, into the Portrait

Constable, “Wivenhoe Park, Essex”

“And the screen, as a faithful mirror, not only of conflicts emotional and tragic, but equally of conflicts psychological and optically spatial, must be an appropriate battleground for the skirmishes of both these optical-by-view, but profoundly psychological-by-meaning, spatial tendencies on the part of the spectator.” –Sergei Eisenstein

On September 17, 1930, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its most consequential meeting ever. Under the ausp...

What Is It Like to Be a Smartphone?

Here, as my second Sunday Rerun, is a Rough Type post from 2020 that draws inspiration from the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s mind-bending work on the varieties of consciousness. If a real AI were to appear, would we recognize it as an intelligent being? Would it recognize us?

Still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris”

“The fact that we cannot expect ever to accommodate in our language a detailed description of Martian or bat phenomenology should not lead us to dismiss as meaningless the claim that bats...

Haystacks of Needles

Before starting New Cartographies, I wrote a blog called Rough Type for nearly twenty years. While I’m getting my footing here on Substack, I thought I’d supplement my new posts with some of my favorites from the Rough Type archives — ones that might still have some relevance to our situation. So, on the occasional Sunday, I’ll publish an old post here, as what I’m calling a Sunday Rerun. This first installment, from 2011, looks at information overload.

Van Gogh, Haystacks in Provence

“It’s not in...

All What Is Delicious to Man

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch,
He said to me, "You must not ask for so much."
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door,
She cried to me, "Hey, why not ask for more?"
–Leonard Cohen

The American dream of abundance was born of the American reality of abundance. All that land “vaguely realizing westward” offered the promise of untold riches just waiting to be excavated, literally or figuratively. The nineteenth-century engineer and inventor John Etzler, a German emigrant to Pennsyl...

Goodbye Rough Type, Hello New Cartographies

Rough Type has had a twenty-year run. That seems like long enough, particularly seeing as the blog has been pretty much dormant in recent years. So this will be the last Rough Type post.

But don’t shed too many tears. I’m going to continue blogging, maybe even at a faster clip, through a Substack I’ve started called New Cartographies. My first new post is up. It’s titled “Dead Labor, Dead Speech,” and here’s how it begins:

If, as Marx argued, capital is dead labor, then the products of large lan...

Large Language Manglers

I was reading Joanna Stern’s report in the Wall Street Journal about the new AI features that Apple is rushing to complete for the iPhone 16s. (Can’t LLMs debug their own code? I thought that was a done deal.) Among the promised features is a Rewrite function that will translate your messages and other writings into different styles of prose. One style is called Professional. Stern tested it on a note she was writing to her mom. Here’s the original:

I’ll be home tomorrow. 

Here’s how it reads a...

Introducing Superbloom

The poppies come out every March in Walker Canyon, an environmentally sensitive spot in the Temescal Mountains seventy miles southeast of Los Angeles, but the show they put on in early 2019 was something special. Thanks to a wet winter in the normally arid region, seeds that had long lain dormant germinated, and the poppies appeared in numbers not seen in years. The flowers covered the canyon’s slopes in carpets of vivid, almost fluorescent orange — the shade you get on hunters’ vests and caps...

Culture vultures

I’m not tearing up over Elon Musk’s termination, with extreme prejudice, of Twitter. Kill the blue bird, gut it, stuff it, and stick it in a media museum to collect dust. Think of all the extra time journalists will now have for journalism.

But there is something ominous about a superbillionaire taking over what had become a sort of public square, a center of discourse, for crying out loud, and doing with it what he pleases, including some pretty perverted acts. I mean, that X logo? Virginia Hef...