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Overview
With a 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 offers an alternative history of the digital age, chronicling its roller-coaster crazes and crashes, its blind triumphs, and its unintended consequences.
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. When we expect technologies—designed for profit—to deliver a paradise of prosperity and convenience, we have forgotten ourselves. In response, Carr offers searching assessments of the future of work, the fate of reading, and the rise of artificial intelligence, challenging us to see our world anew.
In famous essays including “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Privacy,” Carr dissects the logic behind Silicon Valley’s “liberation mythology,” showing how technology has both enriched and imprisoned us—often at the same time. Drawing on artists ranging from Walt Whitman to the Clash, while weaving in the latest findings from science and sociology, 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: | 9780393254549 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/06/2016 |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.40(w) x 6.10(h) x 1.40(d) |
About the Author
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