Nicholas Carr and the Techno of Doom

1) Intro: Where’s the Beef?
In his ominous chapter “iGod,” Carr predicts that more important than the possibility that “computers will start to think like us” is the possibility that “we will come to think like computers… as our minds are trained, link by link.” (228-229)  This conception of the mind must have guided his book’s structure because all he does is walk us through some anecdotes, fear-inducing facts, predictions, and harbingers.  There is no overarching structure, just one story linking to a law review article, which tells us a story, which links to a prediction, which we ought to be scared of.  That’s the formula for every chapter in the Part Two of “The Big Switch.”   From others’ recapped stories and predictions, Carr offers no conclusion and no solution and doesn’t weigh the potential benefits of a fully computerized world against the dangers he foresees.

2) The Lowest Common Denominator
If Carr takes the premises he lays out in his book seriously, there is only one logical conclusion: that we are doomed to a flat, shallow, hedonistic supply of information appealing to whatever will get us to click a link and (possibly) buy a product.  Carr chides Lewis Mumford for believing we can control technology and its consequences by exerting our will over the machines we make. (22)  By the same logic, Carr cannot deny the likelihood of his fears being realized.  Carr becomes a fatalistic Chicken Little: I will have my brain wired; I won’t even ask about a topic; the search engine in my brain will simply “tell me what I should” be looking for. (225)  He presumes that this leads to a cursory surfing of the web and an inability or inertia meaning A) I won’t learn about anything in-depth (due both to the monotony of available materials and my feeble interest and memory, i.e. “it’s easier for us to look up something twice on Google than remember it” (226)); and B) I won’t encounter interesting information outside of my immediate purview (his newspaper bundling/online news unbundling issue).

Wasn’t this same prediction made upon the advent of television and radio?  Carr’s concerns about bundled news and interesting, in-depth information that readers (in some normative sense) ought to encounter could be addressed by a Fairness Doctrine saying, “If you read the review of the big screen TV, you have to read about the Chinese human rights violations that made it possible.”  The Fairness Doctrine has since been dropped by the FCC, and no such thing is necessary for the internet either.

Carr worries that, for example, if a University of Chicago professor like Picker will pick up a tabloid in the supermarket checkout line (as he admitted in seminar last week), aren’t the less erudite and less astute entirely hopeless?  Carr thinks that our basest inclinations will take over and that no newspaper will fund an extensive investigative report of war crimes.  There is one thing Carr does extraordinarily well in Part II: communicate potential problems with internet content.  Let’s look more closely to see if there is some kind of solution to the problems as Carr formulates them or whether, perhaps, the context Carr offers them up in ought to be amended.

3) Is There a Solution?
There is no solution to Carr’s problems as he frames them.  We are barreling toward and unquestioned goal of omniscience, making technology a runaway freight train.  This follows, Carr says, from René Descartes, who sought “a model for ‘pure understanding’” because “the body is always a hindrance to the mind in its thinking.” (214)  The all-knowing brain/database in everyone’s head is what we want and what we fear; but long before Carr suggested technological boogiemen wired into our heads controlling us, Descartes worried about his perceptions and thoughts being dictated by an unknown evil demon. (First Meditation).  Descartes sat by a flame and considered whether he was being tricked into seeing a reality that simply was not there.  The reality seems “real” by firelight, and, according to Carr, this “quality of ‘reality’... is lost in electric light: objects (seemingly) appear much more clearly, but in reality [electric light] flattens them.... [T]hings lose body, outline, substance – in short, their essence.” (232)

Carr’s flat-footed fears stem from sitting in the electric light for too long. He recognizes that “progress covers its tracks, perpetually refreshing the illusion” and blotting out all memory of what came before (i.e. the previous “big switch”). (233)  Carr has flattened the world into an electric monster, eliminating the body, outline, and substance of the human users that created it and of which it consists.  I would not go so far as Mumford and claim that we can stop technological progress by force of the human mind, but I would not go so far as Carr and claim that technological progress will force itself into the human mind.

Carr’s perceptions of reality are influenced by an evil demon: they are influenced by the very computing universe in which he has immersed himself.  His time in an electric world (which world he believes to be flattened and robbed of substance) has, in fact, flattened him and robbed him of substance.  His account and recitation of fears speak to the extent to which he believes they really are a brooding cloud overhead, but the boogieman here is one of Carr’s creation, and the big thing that gets flattened is his account of users.  The cloud is not descending, the sky is not falling, and Carr’s fatalism is unmerited (even though some of his individual fears are).

4) Reframing the Problems
We should start by looking to the benefits which Carr hardly considers mentions in his laundry list of harbingers.  While Professor Picker will read tabloids in the check-out line, he will also conduct in-depth research online about his nerdy interests.  Jeanneney and Carr are as wrong to believe our interests will be flattened, homogenized, and “ideologically amplified” (164) as Jeanneney was right to say that the book would not be put out of business by the internet.  There will always be people who want in-depth knowledge, and they can click links or go to the library (that’s how they expand their knowledge).  Conversely, there will always be people who are easily lead, and to the extent that they have money, they will dictate what marketing makes sense.  The Bud Light commercials during the Super Bowl do not hit home with me even though I’m a 25 year-old male beer-drinker.  I face them because they are target the broadest base of moneyed viewers.
“You have zero privacy.  Get over it,” says the President of Sun. (190)  Honestly?  Fine.  Either there’s an expectation of privacy and some Fourth Amendment protections apply or we’re all in the same stew.  While President Clinton had to answer for possibly inhaling marijuana in 1991, the youtube generation will have to answer for this http://youtube.com/watch?v=7899CfQNTVI or for a blog post or for something else.  These things are relative.  Trent Lott didn’t expect to be videotaped at Strom Thurmond’s 100th Birthday party idiotically joking about segregation, but my generation expects to be video taped all the time (you can post videos of your friends on facebook, viewable by all of your networks, not theirs).  It’s depressing (terribly, terribly depressing) that Subscriber 1515830 searched for “how to tell your family you’re a victim of incest” and “can you adopt after a suicide attempt,” (186) but the internet repays disclosures with information about the world (and, fortunately or not, about each other).  Lexisnexis research, TV reviews, craigslist, and Google cost me some privacy, but they are not simply one soul-sucking, flattening machine.   They educate, inform, and help in ways that Carr seems to underestimate.  If you see the section above, I think you can understand why he underestimates the internet.  To reframe the problems, we have to start with a sense of the internets advantages as well as dangers.   

5) Control (195), Globalization, and “America’s” Internet (183)
Just as spammers adapt to stay ahead of spam blocking strategies, users will stay ahead of the government.  As Carr himself recognizes, “governments tend to be slow to respond to technological revolutions.” (184)  Corporations, profits, and the markets, however, are not slow to respond; rather, they seek out revolutions (wherever one might be profitable).   Carr seems to have some protectionist concerns about the state of the nation where markets will have databases and processing shipped offshore.  There are two responses to this.
First, as economists, we don’t care about wealth redistribution to poorer countries.  Call centers in India, Ford getting hybrid engine parts from Japan, and NAFTA are all water off a duck’s back, according to an economist.  Frankly, if the internet and computer applications can be run more cheaply from elsewhere, that’s great.  It makes it more widely available.  To the extent the internet is an educator and not simply a provider of droolingly stupid content, this is a good thing.  The cheaper the service, the more widely available it is.  More competition for data processing and computing services will lower the price.  Posner is happy.  We’re happy.  Carr is right, but maybe not happy.  He might say this future this is like the electric appliance revolution of the 50’s: a purported improvement in society that self-perpetuates and seems like a greater gain than it is.

Second, this kind of outsourcing has been a fear for decades in many American industries.  When there are fewer jobs in production, perhaps there are more jobs in service.  Where there are fewer jobs in computer service (in America), there other jobs created by the money that America will be saving on computing expenses.  While one can have legitimate concerns about whether the money saved will simply wind up in executives’ pockets, widening the gap between rich and poor, in the long run that gap could more easily be closed due to the increased availability of cheap computing and education online facilitated by the outsourcing in the first place.  (That may be overly optimistic.)

Finally, I would like to briefly say something about Carr’s concerns about the internet as either a libertarian, democratic device or a machine of state control.  Obviously to some extent it is each.  I have no particular recommendations for how to deal with it going forward (and neither does the E.U.), but it should start, as Carr didn’t, with an appreciation for what the internet gives and what we give each other through it rather than simply an exhaustive account of what it takes from us.

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