Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 7

Larry and Sergey: a valediction

Photographer: “How ’bout we do the shoot in a hot tub?”

Larry and Sergey: “Sure!”

Never such innocence again.

Can billionaires be tragic figures? Lear must have been worth a billion or two, in today’s dollars. And surely the family fortunes of Hamlet and Macbeth crossed the magical ten-figure line. I’d go so far as to suggest that, these days, you have to be a billionaire to be a tragic figure. The most the rest of us can aspire to is pathos, our woes memorialized by a Crying Face emoji.

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From public intellectual to public influencer

The corpse of the public intellectual has been much chewed upon. But only now is its full historical context coming into view. What seemed a death, we’re beginning to see, was but the larval stage of a metamorphosis. The public intellectual has been reborn as the public influencer.

The parallels are clear. Both the public intellectual and the public influencer play a quasi-independent role separate from but still dependent on a traditional, culturally powerful institution. Both, in other wo...

The state of media

On autopilot: the dangers of overautomation

The grounding of Boeing’s popular new 737 Max 8 planes, after two recent crashes, has placed a new focus on flight automation. Here’s an excerpt from my 2014 book on automation and its human consequences, The Glass Cage , that seems relevant to the discussion.

The lives of aviation’s pioneers were exciting but short. Lawrence Sperry died in 1923 when his plane crashed into the English Channel. Wiley Post died in 1935 when his plane went down in Alaska. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry died in 1944 whe...

Thieves of experience: On the rise of surveillance capitalism

This review of Shoshana’s Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism appeared originally in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

1. The Resurrection

We sometimes forget that, at the turn of the century, Silicon Valley was in a funk, economic and psychic. The great dot-com bubble of the 1990s had imploded, destroying vast amounts of investment capital along with the savings of many Americans. Trophy startups like Pets.com, Webvan, and Excite@Home, avatars of the so-called New Economy, were punch...

The map and the script

Shoshana Zuboff’s epic critique of Silicon Valley, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, is out today, and so is my review, “Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism,” in the Los Angeles Review of Books. It begins:

We sometimes forget that, at the turn of the century, Silicon Valley was in a funk, economic and psychic. The great dot-com bubble of the 1990s had imploded, destroying vast amounts of investment capital along with the savings of many Americans. Trophy star...

Chaos and control: the story of the web

As societies grow more complex, so too do their systems of control. At best, these systems protect personal freedom, by shielding individuals from the disruptive and sometimes violent forces of social and economic chaos. But they can also have the opposite effect. They can be used to constrain and manipulate people for the commercial or political benefit of those who own, manage, or otherwise wield power over the systems. The story of the Internet is largely a story of control — its establish...

The future’s so bright, I gotta wear blinders

“This is only the beginning,” writes Kevin Kelly in an essay in Wired‘s 25th anniversary issue. “The main event has barely started.” He’s talking about the internet. If his words sound familiar, it’s because “only the beginning” has become Kelly’s stock phrase, the rhetorical device he flourishes, like a magician’s cape, to draw readers’ eyes away from what’s really going on. Back in 2005, in a Wired story called “We Are the Web,” Kelly wrote, “It is only the beginning.” And then, his enthusi...

Decoding INABIAF

Used to be, in the realm of software, that bugs would turn out to be features in disguise. Nowadays it’s the other way around: features are revealed to be bugs. As part of Wired‘s 25th anniversary celebration, I have a piece on the history of the catchphrase “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” A taste:

A quick scan of Google News reveals that, over the course of a single month earlier this year, It’s not a bug, it’s a feature appeared 146 times. Among the bugs said to be features were the decl...

Media democratization and the rise of Trump

The following review of the book Trump and the Media appeared originally, in a slightly different form, in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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President Trump’s tweets may be without precedent, but the controversy surrounding social media’s influence on politics has a long history. During the 1930s, the rapid spread of mass media was accompanied by the rise of fascism. To many observers at the time, the former helped explain the latter. By consolidating control over news and other informat...