Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 8

The problem with Facebook

In the Washington Post, I have a review of two new books that offer critical assessments of Facebook and other social networks: Siva Vaidhyanathan’s Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy and Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. It begins:

The only thing worse than being on Facebook is not being on Facebook. That’s the one clear conclusion we can draw from the recent controversies surrounding the world’s favorite soci...

Chatbots are saints

I feel sorry for the machines. When, at Google’s big I/O conference last week, CEO Sundar Pichai demoed Google Duplex, the company’s latest and most convincing robot interlocutor, people were either ecstatic (stunning!) or appalled (horrifying!). I just felt ashamed. Here we are, the brainiest of species, the acme of biological intelligence, yet our ability to process even the simplest information remains laughably bad. The I/O functionality of the human mind is pathetic.

Pichai played a rec...

I am a data factory (and so are you)

1. Mines and Factories

Am I a data mine, or am I a data factory? Is data extracted from me, or is data produced by me? Both metaphors are ugly, but the distinction between them is crucial. The metaphor we choose informs our sense of the power wielded by so-called platform companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and it shapes the way we, as individuals and as a society, respond to that power.

If I am a data mine, then I am essentially a chunk of real estate, and control over my data bec...

When a regulatory burden is a competitive boon

The incipient surveillance economy is dominated by a duopoly: Google and Facebook. (Shall I call it GooF? Yes, I shall.) According to estimates, the two companies control somewhere between half and three-quarters of spending on digital-advertising throughout the world, and that already extraordinary share seems fated to rise even higher. Thanks to Google’s failure to develop a strong social-media platform, the two companies compete only glancingly. Their services are largely complementary, so...

Re-engineering humanity

I had the pleasure and honor of writing the foreword to Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger’s new book, Re-engineering Humanity. The book is out today, from Cambridge University Press. You can find more information, and ordering links, here and here. And here is my foreword:

Human beings have a genius for designing, making, and using tools. Our innate talent for technological invention is one of the chief qualities that sets our species apart from others and one of the main reasons we have ta...

Democratization vs. Democracy

The Los Angeles Review of Books has published my review of the new MIT Press book Trump and the Media, a collection of essays edited by Pablo J. Boczkowski and Zizi Papacharissi. Here’s a bit:

The ideal of a radically “democratized” media, decentralized, participative, and personally emancipating, was enticing, and it continued to cast a spell long after the defeat of the fascist powers in the Second World War. The ideal infused the counterculture of the 1960s. Beatniks and hippies staged ka...

AI: the Ziggy Stardust Syndrome

“Ziggy sucked up into his mind.” –David Bowie

In his Wall Street Journal column this weekend, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek offers a fascinating theory as to why we haven’t been able to find signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Maybe, he suggests, intelligent beings are fated to shrink as their intelligence expands. Once the singularity happens, AI implodes into invisibility.

It’s entirely logical. Wilczek notes that “effective computation must involve interactions and that th...

The Big Switch: ten years on

My second book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, celebrates its tenth birthday this year. The book, which came out in January 2008, heralds the coming of the cloud and speculates on its consequences. It’s hard to imagine now, but in 2008 cloud computing was a new and largely unproven concept, and the common wisdom was that it wouldn’t work. Software programs running in centralized server farms and delivered over the internet to users would be too slow and balky, it w...

The metadata of experience, the experience of metadata

I like to know where things stand. I like to know how things are progressing. I signed up for UPS My Choice and FedEx Delivery Manager and USPS Informed Delivery. I know when a package has been shipped to me, where it is at every moment as it hops across the country toward me, the projected window of its ultimate delivery, the fact of its delivery.

I know when there are exceptions. I know when the weather has turned inclement. I know the hubs, and I know the spokes.

When I myself require carr...

Trump and Twitter

I have an essay on Donald Trump’s Twitter habit, and what it says about the times, in the new issue of Politico Magazine.

Here’s a bit:

In the early 1950s, the Canadian political economist Harold Innis suggested that every informational medium has a bias. By encouraging certain forms of speech and discouraging others, a popular medium not only influences how people converse; it also shapes a society’s institutions and values. Early types of media — tablets, scrolls, theaters — were “time-bia...