Utopia Is Creepy Quotes

“In explaining the way that trivial, if diverting, pursuits like Guitar Hero provide an easy alternative to meaningful work, Horning draws on the writing of political theorist Jon Elster. In his 1986 book An Introduction to Karl Marx, Elster used a simple example to illustrate the psychic difference between the hard work of developing talent and the easy work of consuming stuff: Compare playing the piano with eating lamb chops. The first time one practices the piano it is difficult, even painfully so. By contrast, most people enjoy lamb chops the first time they eat them. Over time, however, these patterns are reversed. Playing the piano becomes increasingly more rewarding, whereas the taste for lamb chops becomes satiated and jaded with repeated, frequent consumption. Elster then made a broader point: Activities of self-realization are subject to increasing marginal utility: They become more enjoyable the more one has already engaged in them. Exactly the opposite is true of consumption. To derive sustained pleasure from consumption, diversity is essential. Diversity, on the other hand, is an obstacle to successful self-realization, as it prevents one from getting into the later and more rewarding stages. “Consumerism,” comments Horning, “keeps us well supplied with stuff and seems to enrich our identities by allowing us to become familiar with a wide range of phenomena—a process that the internet has accelerated immeasurably. . . . But this comes at the expense with developing any sense of mastery of anything, eroding over time the sense that mastery is possible, or worth pursuing.” Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable. To buy a guitar is to open possibilities. To buy Guitar Hero is to close them. A”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

“one could say that the smartphone creates an environment that encourages participation at a distance: participation as performance. The smartphone retribalizes by putting us always on display, by eating away at our sense of the private self, but it detribalizes by isolating us in an abstract world, a world of our own. You hit the switch, and the light comes on and you find yourself in an empty room full of people. To put it another way: Participation is the content of the smartphone, and the content, as McLuhan wrote, is “the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” The illusion of involvement conceals its absence. Here comes Walt Whitman, alone and alienated, dreaming dreams of connection, turning a barbaric yawp into silent words on a flat page.”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

“When we speak with emoji, we’re speaking a language that machines can understand.”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

“It’s dubious and dangerous, Drucker is saying, to mistake what’s measurable for what’s important.”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

“THE DESIRE FOR PRIVACY is strong; vanity is stronger.”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

“But as the web matured during the late 1990s, the dreams of a digital awakening went unfulfilled. The net turned out to be more about commerce than consciousness, more mall than commune. And when the new millennium arrived, it brought not a new age but a dispiritingly commonplace popping of a bubble of earthly greed.”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

“With this offhand example, Pichai gives voice to Silicon Valley’s reigning assumption, which can be boiled down to this: Anything that can be automated should be automated. If it’s possible to program a computer to do something a person can do, the computer should do it. Missing from this view is any consideration of the pleasures and responsibilities of everyday life.”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

“Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable. To buy a guitar is to open possibilities. To buy Guitar Hero is to close them.”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

“good ideas are embraced whether they come from a senior executive or the company cook.”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

“most Americans can be identified by name and address using only their ZIP code, birthday, and gender—”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

“We are how we read.”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

“takes a delay of just 250 milliseconds in page loading for people to start abandoning a site.”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

“selling things to early adopters is wise.”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

“Activities of self-realization are subject to increasing marginal utility:”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

“As for the individual track being the “natural unit of music,” that’s a fantasy.”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

“sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy.”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

“We’ll know that Google has truly fulfilled its vision when the Googleplex no longer needs toilets at all.”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

“The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. —D. H. Lawrence,”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

“Late in his life, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith coined the term “innocent fraud.” He used it to describe a lie or a half-truth that, because it suits the needs or views of those in power, is presented as fact. After much repetition, the fiction becomes common wisdom. “It is innocent because most who employ it are without conscious guilt,” Galbraith wrote. “It is fraud because it is quietly in the service of special interest.” The idea of the computer network as an engine of liberation is an innocent fraud.”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

“They failed to appreciate how the network would funnel the energies of the people into a centrally administered, tightly monitored information system organized to enrich a small group of businesses and their owners. The network would indeed generate a lot of wealth, but it would be wealth of the Adam Smith sort—and it would be concentrated in a few hands, not widely spread. The culture that emerged on the network, and that now extends deep into our lives and psyches, is characterized by frenetic production and consumption—”
― Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations