Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 54

Cold off the press

On Saturday, the UPS guy showed up with a printed, bound, and jacketed copy of my book The Shallows. It's exciting and gratifying, of course, to receive a finished copy of a book that's been in the works for a couple of years, but it's also scarifying. No more edits, corrections, updates, rethinks: the ink is indelible. The phrase shouldn't be "hot of the press" - hot things tend to be malleable - but rather "cold off the press." Oh, well. It's now the reader's book, not the writer's. One thi...

L.A. melee

I'll be at the LA Times Festival of Books on Saturday, participating on a panel with David Shields and Ander Monson called "Rebooting Culture: Narrative & Information in the New Age." Shields is playing the nihilist, Monson is playing the anarchist, and I'm taking the role of the vigilante. Moderating is David Ulin, the Times's book editor. Stop by if you're in Los Angeles. More details and a bonus link....

Echoes

Three strangely echoing visions of the future: 2010: "As humans rely on the Internet for all aspects of our lives, our ability to think increasingly depends on fast, reliable applications. The web is our collective consciousness, which means web operators become the brain surgeons of our distributed nervous system. Each technology we embrace makes us more and more reliant on the web ... For much of the Western world, technology, culture, and society are indistinguishable ... Today's web tells...

TuringCraft

Inspired by Weizenbaum's ELIZA, Ben Weber has created a chatbot that converses with other players in online games of StarCraft. The bot's name is EISBot. "Once every thirty seconds," explains Weber, "EISBot randomly selects a message from a pool of 75 messages and sends it to the console." As the following transcript reveals, the bot's randomly chosen messages fit seamlessly into the conversation: EISBot: What to ally victory? Player: damn you Player: im not stupid EISBot: Wanna join my clan ...

Pynchon and the Badass Luddites

To close out Luddite week here at Rough Type, I would like to direct the Internet's attention (when the Internet pays attention, servers fail and nodes collapse, and a rictal grin spreads itself across Ned Ludd's bareboned face) to an article on the topic of Ludditism by Thomas Pynchon, which ran in the New York Times Book Review in that fabled year, 1984. Written nearly a decade before the World Wide Web would turn the Internet into a popular medium, the article is nevertheless entirely up t...

The law of situational Ludditism

As I've thought some more about my iPad Luddites post, and the many fine comments that have affixed themselves to its hull, I've formulated the following observation: We are all Luddites, but to avoid admitting our Ludditism to ourselves we will define any manifestation of progress that we don't approve of as "regress" and criticize it as such....

Exodus

Has it begun? James Sturm, the cartoonist, can't take it anymore, "it" being the Internet: Over the last several years, the Internet has evolved from being a distraction to something that feels more sinister. Even when I am away from the computer I am aware that I AM AWAY FROM MY COMPUTER and am scheming about how to GET BACK ON THE COMPUTER. I've tried various strategies to limit my time online: leaving my laptop at my studio when I go home, leaving it at home when I go to my studio, a Satur...

The iPad Luddites

Is it possible for a Geek God to also be a Luddite? That was the question that popped into my head as I read Cory Doctorow's impassioned anti-iPad diatribe at Boing Boing. The device that Apple calls "magical" and "revolutionary" is, to Doctorow, a counterrevolutionary contraption conjured up through the black magic of the wizards at One Infinite Loop. The locked-down, self-contained design of the iPad - nary a USB port in sight, and don't even think about loading an app that hasn't been bles...

Days of tweets and roses

Edan Lepucki goes cold turkey from Facebook and Twitter - not trusting her willpower, she has a loved one go into her accounts and change her passwords - and she lives to tell the tale....

Digital decay and the archival cloud

Throughout human history, the documentation of events and thoughts usually required a good deal of time and effort. Somebody had to sit down with a stylus or a pen or, later, a typewriter or a tape recorder, and make a deliberate recording. That happened only rarely. Most events and thoughts vanished from memory, individual and collective, soon after they happened. If they were described or discussed at all, it was usually in conversation, face to face or over a phone line, and the words evap...