Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

by Nicholas Carr

Overview

A freewheeling, sharp-shooting indictment of a tech-besotted culture.

With razor wit, Nicholas Carr cuts through Silicon Valley’s unsettlingly cheery vision of the technological future to ask a hard question: Have we been seduced by a lie? Gathering a decade’s worth of posts from his blog, Rough Type, as well as his seminal essays, Utopia Is Creepy is “Carr’s best hits for those who missed the last decade of his stream of thoughtful commentary about our love affair with technology and its effect on our relationships” (Richard Cytowic, New York Journal of Books).

Carr draws on artists ranging from Walt Whitman to the Clash, while weaving in the latest findings from science and sociology. Carr’s favorite targets are those zealots who believe so fervently in computers and data that they abandon common sense. Cheap digital tools do not make us all the next Fellini or Dylan. Social networks, diverting as they may be, are not vehicles for self-enlightenment. And “likes” and retweets are not going to elevate political discourse. Utopia Is Creepy compels us to question the technological momentum that has trapped us in its flow. “Resistance is never futile,” argues Carr, and this book delivers the proof.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393354744
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/12/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Nicholas Carr is the author of The Shallows, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Glass Cage, and Utopia is Creepy. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Atlantic, and Wired. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Silicon Valley Day's xv

Utopia is Creepy: The Best of Rough Type 1

The Amorality of Web 2.0 3

Myspace's Vacancy 10

The Serendipity Machine 12

California Kings 16

The Wikipedian Crackup 18

Excuse Me While I Blog 21

The Metabolic Thing 23

Big Trouble in Second Life 25

Look at You! 28

Digital Sharecropping 30

Steve's Devices 32

Twitter Dot Dash 34

Ghosts in the Code 37

Go Ask Alice's Avatar 39

Long Player 41

Should the Net Forget? 47

The Means of Creativity 49

Vampires 50

Behind the Hedgerow, Eating Garbage 52

The Social Graft 53

Sexbot Aces Turing Test 55

Looking into a See-Through World 56

Gilligan's Web 58

Complete Control 63

Everything That Digitizes Must Converge 66

Resurrection 69

Rock-By-Number 71

Raising the Virtual Child 73

The Ipad Luddites 76

Nowness 79

Charlie Bit My Cognitive Surplus 80

Making Sharing Safe for Capitalists 83

The Quality of Allusion is not Google 86

Situational Overload and Ambient Overload 90

Grand Theft Attention 93

Memory is the Gravity of Mind 98

The Medium is McLuhan 102

Facebook's Business Model 107

Utopia is Creepy 108

Spinelessness 110

Future Gothic 112

The Hierarchy of Innovation 116

Rip. Mix. Burn. Read 121

Live Fast, Die Young, and Leave a Beautiful Hologram 126

Online, Offline, and the Line Between 127

Google Glass and Claude Glass 131

Burning Down the Schoolhouse 133

The Ennui of the Intelligent Machine 136

Reflections 138

Will Gutenberg Laugh Last? 140

The Searchers 144

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Al 147

Max Levchin has Plans for Us 148

Evgeny's Little Problem 151

The Shortest Conversation between Two Points 152

Home Away from Home 155

Charcoal, Shale, Cotton, Tangerine, Sky 160

Slumming with Buddha 162

The Quantified Self at Work 163

My Computer, My Doppeltweeter 166

Underwearables 168

The Bus 170

The Myth of the Endless Ladder 174

The Loom of the Self 178

Technology Below and Beyond 179

Outsourcing Dad 181

Taking Measurement's Measure 182

Smartphones are Hot 183

Desperate Scrapbookers 185

Out of Control 187

Our Algorithms, Ourselves 190

Twilight of the Idylls 195

The Illusion of Knowledge 199

Wind-Fucking 201

The Seconds are Just Packed 203

Music is the Universal Lubricant 207

Toward a Unified Theory of Love 210

<3S and Minds 214

In the Kingdom of the Bored, the One-Armed Bandit is King 216

Theses in Tweetform 221

The Eunuch's Children: Essays and Reviews 227

Flame and Filament 229

Is Google Making us Stupid? 231

Screaming for Quiet 243

The Dreams of Readers 247

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Privacy 255

Hooked 260

Mother Google 264

The Library of Utopia 267

The Boys of Mountain View 279

The Eunuch's Children 286

Past-Tense Pop 292

The Love That Lays the Swale in Rows 296

The Snapchat Candidate 314

Why Robots Will Always Need Us 321

Lost in the Cloud 325

The Daedalus Mission 329

Acknowledgments 341

Index 345

Editorial Reviews

"Carr’s best hits for those who missed the last decade of his stream of thoughtful commentary about our love affair with technology and its effect on our relationships."

New York Journal of Books - Richard Cytowic

"The prescient Nicholas Carr punches a hole in Silicon Valley hubris."

Time - Rana Foroohar

"[F]ull of wry vignettes and articles lampooning the motivated enthusiasm and game-changing promises of Silicon Valley’s tech bro elite… by turns cute, funny or chilling. And it’s more than the sum of its parts."

New Scientist - Sally Adee

Carr's natural length is the essay. The best material here is the longest, because his core commitment is not denunciation but reframing. "Long Player," his 2007 argument about the album format as an aesthetic unit, is subtle and capacious…Then there's "The Love That Lays the Swale in Rows," for my money the best essay Carr has ever written. The piece contains the thesis for much of his work: "Technology is a pillar and a glory of civilization. But it is also a test that we set for ourselves." Carr's great concern is wondering whether we can pass that test.

The New York Times Book Review - Clay Shirky

"Carr, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, takes on modern life’s short attention spans and worship of the superficial in a . . . rapid-fire volley of ideas deceptively designed to engage at a depth greater than 140 characters. By turns wry and revelatory, and occasionally maddening, Carr succeeds at shaking the reader out of screen-zombie complacency."

Discover Magazine

06/15/2016
In this compilation from the past decade, Carr (The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains) presents a selection of nearly 80 posts from his Rough Type blog, several magazine articles and book excerpts, and an original essay on transhumanism. It is easy to trace his technoskepticism through these writings and the warnings that as technology is being sold with utopian zeal, people are often blinded to the business interests that are quietly reshaping our culture and values. Carr's wry take on new technologies from Wikipedia to Google Glass, and his critiques of tech writers' and CEOs' frequent hyperbole may seem curmudgeonly, but they never descend into neo-Luddite territory. He enjoys deflating grand claims and reinforces the idea that the boons of technology come with costs as well. He urges readers to consider that much of what technology offers is only the illusion of control and that human agency and choice may in fact be diminished by such inventions. Though these same themes are explored in his other books and on his blog, it is convenient to have Carr's curated writings in one volume. VERDICT This highly browsable collection will hold great appeal for anyone interested in the social aspects of technology, from tech lovers to pre-Internet nostalgists.—Wade M. Lee, Univ. of Toledo Lib.

Library Journal

2016-05-31
Popular technology guru Carr (The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, 2014, etc.) offers a skeptical chronicle of the wonders of the digital revolution.Since 2005, the author has kept running tabs on our high-tech age on his blog Rough Type, where he considers and sometimes eviscerates the latest overblown claims of the gods of Silicon Valley. In this bright, fun, telling book, he gathers 80 engaging blog posts from some 1,600 published through 2015, plus a selection of essays and reviews from the Atlantic and elsewhere. "We may blow kisses to agrarians like Jefferson and tree-huggers like Thoreau, but we put our faith in Edison and Ford, Gates and Zuckerberg," writes Carr. "It is the technologists who shall lead us." While tech leaders have promised a new world (with Bill Gates "still pitching a ‘digital lifestyle' that nobody wants"), the author makes clear his own penchant for "tools for exploring and enjoying the world that is." He takes strong exception to innumerable claims made for the internet: that it has liberated us from couch-potato lives ("horseshit"), raised us to a higher consciousness, spurred serendipity, and given us splendid gifts in Wikipedia ("a hodge-podge of dubious factoids") and Twitter ("the medium of Narcissus"). Occasioned by his own observations and a close reading of new studies and books, Carr holds forth on major issues of the past decade, including copyright, innovation, online courses, e-books, video games, artificial intelligence, privacy, online sharing, automation, raising the virtual child, and smartphones. Throughout, his emphasis is on the human side of life in a digitized world. "The desire for privacy is strong; vanity is stronger," he writes of Facebook's business model. And: "Who you are is what you do between notifications." Included are such notable essays as "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Some entries are slight, most others are nuanced and satisfying. A collection that reminds us that critical thinking is the best way to view the mixed blessings of rampant technology. A treat for Carr fans.

Kirkus Reviews