Nicholas Carr started his blog “Rough Type” in 2005, when MySpace was a fast-growing social networking site and Facebook was a Palo Alto startup. Now in his book “Utopia Is Creepy and Other Provocations,” he has collected the best of those posts and added influential essays such as “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Privacy,” which were published in such magazines and sites as The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and Politico. Carr’s favorite targets are zealots who believe so fervently in computers and data that they abandon common sense. Cheap digital tools, he says, do not make us all the next Fellini or Dylan. Social networks are not vehicles for self-enlightenment. And “likes” and retweets are not going to elevate political discourse.
Carr says that when we expect technologies―designed for profit―to deliver a paradise of prosperity and convenience, we have forgotten ourselves. Running through this collection are such important questions as: How does the internet affect our quality of life? Our relationships? Our ability to read deeply, to engage with art and literature, and to develop a satisfying inner life? Carr suggests that the mistake of web utopianism is its expectation that technology should create an ideal new world, rather than offer us tools to enjoy and explore the world we have. He says “we may all live in Silicon Valley now, but we can still act and think as exiles.” In “Utopia Is Creepy” he assesses of the future of work, the fate of reading, the rise of artificial intelligence and many other issues important in our digital age.
Nicholas Carr is the author of “The Class Cage” and the Pulitzer Prize finalist “The Shallows,” among other books. Former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, he has written for The Atlantic, the New York Times, and Wired. He lives in Boulder Colorado.
