Superbloom Quotes

“Communication, we tell ourselves, is not just what makes us special. It is the nearest thing we have to a universal remedy for personal and social ills.”
― Nicholas Carr, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

“One of the curiosities of the early twenty-first century is the way so much power over social relations came into the hands of young men with more interest in numbers than in people.”
― Nicholas Carr, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

“Many philosophers, from Aristotle to William James, have described the dualistic nature of human thought. One way we think is quick, intuitive, and largely unconscious. It draws on sensory impressions, instinct, and experience to recognize patterns in the world, and it often uses emotion as a means of interpreting phenomena. The other way is slow and deliberative, involving the conscious, step-by-step application of reason.”
― Nicholas Carr, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

“But it’s also important to take the end-time visions propagated by Musk, Altman, and their ilk with skepticism. Behind today’s dystopian AI dreams lurk character traits all too common to the tech elite: grandiosity, hubris, and self-aggrandizement. The visions are yet another expression of Silicon Valley’s god complex: we may have failed in our attempt to use computers to establish a new Eden on Earth, but at least we still have the power to lay everything to waste.”
― Nicholas Carr, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

“The fear isn’t that we will reveal, and hence lose, the essence of our soul. Very few of us, no matter how hard we peer inside ourselves, ever come across a kernel of selfhood. The fear is the opposite: that we will be reduced to a kernel. In allowing ourselves to be pinned down, we will sacrifice the self’s flexibility and freedom. It’s the same fear that lies behind many people’s aversion to being photographed. A photograph condenses you into a single image, turns you into a pattern of information. In fixing you as an object in the minds of others, it robs you of complexity and agency. In a photo, you can’t explain yourself. You’re rendered mute.”
― Nicholas Carr, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

“By freeing the reader from his physical surroundings and local social group, the written word not only hastened the spread of knowledge; it fueled the rise of individualism.”
― Nicholas Carr, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart