Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 5

Vision Pro’s big reveal

At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much to connect Meta’s $500 Quest 3 face strap-on for gamer-proles with Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro face tiara for elite beings of a hypothetical nature, but the devices do share one important thing in common: redundancy. Both offer a set of features that lag far behind our already well-established psychic capabilities. They offer kludgy imitations of what our minds now do effortlessly. Our reality has been augmented, virtual, and mixed for a long time, an...

Meanings of the metaverse: Liquid death in life

So I was about to write this post about how Liquid Death should be named the official beverage of the metaverse, and then I made the mistake of doing some due diligence. I googled “liquid death metaverse” and discovered I’d been scooped. Liquid Death has already proclaimed itself the official beverage of the metaverse — in a TikTok it posted last November. (Actually, it called itself the official water of the metaverse, but that’s neither here nor there.)

@liquiddeath The official water of the ...

At the Concord station (for Leo Marx)

Leo Marx has died, at the mighty age of 102. His work, particularly The Machine in the Garden, inspired many people who write on the cultural consequences of technological progress, myself included. As a small tribute, I’m posting this excerpt from The Shallows, in which Marx’s influence is obvious.

It was a warm summer morning in Concord, Massachusetts. The year was 1844. Nathaniel Hawthorne was sitting in a small clearing in the woods, a particularly peaceful spot known around town as Sleepy H...

Meanings of the metaverse: The people of the metaverse

Through deep-learning algorithms, computers are learning to simulate us — the way we look, the way we speak, the way we move, the words we use. They are becoming experts at pastiche. They collect the traces of ourselves that we leave behind online — the data of beingness — and they weave that data into something new that resembles us. The real is the raw material of the fake.

Our computers, in other words, are learning to do what we have already learned to do. For many years now, we have spent ...

The people of the metaverse

Through deep-learning algorithms, computers are learning to simulate us — the way we look, the way we speak, the way we move, the words we use. They are becoming experts at pastiche. They collect the traces of ourselves that we leave behind online — the data of beingness — and they weave that data into something new that resembles us. The real is the raw material of the fake.

Our computers, in other words, are learning to do what we have already learned to do. For many years now, we have spent ...

Meanings of the metaverse: Reality surfing

The metaverse promises to bring us an abundance of realities. There’ll be the recalcitrant old status-quo-ante reality — the hard-edged one that Dr. Johnson encountered when he kicked that rock to refute Bishop Berkeley’s theory of radical solipsism. (Let’s call that one “OG Reality.”) Then there’ll be Virtual Reality, the 3-D dreamscape you’ll enter when you strap on VR goggles or, somewhat further in the future, tap your temple thrice to activate your Oculus Soma brain plug-in. Then there’ll ...

The automatic muse

In the fall of 1917, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, now in middle age and having twice had marriage proposals turned down, first by his great love Maud Gonne and next by Gonne’s daughter Iseult, offered his hand to a well-off young Englishwoman named Georgie Hyde-Lees. She accepted, and the two were wed a few weeks later, on October 20, in a small ceremony in London.

Hyde-Lees was a psychic, and four days into their honeymoon she gave her husband a demonstration of her ability to channel t...

Social media as pseudo-community

In 1987, two years before James Beniger wrote The Control Revolution, his seminal study of the role information systems play in society, he published an article called “Personalization of Mass Media and the Growth of Pseudo-Community” in the journal Communication Research. Beniger’s subject was the shift from “interpersonal communication” to “mass communication” as the basis of human relations. The shift had begun in the eighteenth century, with the introduction of high-speed printing presses an...

Deep Fake State

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In “Beautiful Lies: The Art of the Deep Fake,” an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, I examine the rise and ramifications of deep fakes through a review of two books, photographer  Jonas Bendiksen‘s The Book of Veles and mathematician Noah Giansiracusa‘s How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News. As Bendiksen’s work shows, deep-fake technology gives artists a new tool for probing reality. As for the rest of us, the technology promises to turn reality into art.

Here’s a bit from the es...

Meanings of the metaverse: The Andreessen solution

We’ll be happier there.

I like to think of Marc Andreessen as the metaverse’s Statue of Liberty. He stands just outside the virtual world’s golden door, illuminating the surrounding darkness with a holographic torch, and welcomes the downtrodden to a new and better life.

You might remember the colorful interview Andreessen gave to Substack trickster Niccolo Soldo last spring. At one point in the exchange, the high-browed venture capitalist sketches out his vision of the metaverse and makes a pas...