Utopia Is Creepy

Utopia Is Creepy and Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr, 342 pages

The promise of the Digital Age, restated again and again, is the liberation of the individual human being from economics, politics, and even matter itself.  Yet according to Nicholas Carr the reality is "not transcendence but withdrawal", a liberation from society that leaves the individual isolated, trapped in a solipsistic hall of mirrors.  Utopia Is Creepy collects the best of Carr's RoughType blog as well as some aphoristic tweets and longer pieces.

Instead of a world in which economics have been transcended, Carr foresees a world in which every human interaction has been commodified, and every experience manufactured.  The difference between the resulting artificial culture and the old organic culture is analogous to the difference between learning to play a guitar and learning to play Guitar Hero.  Correspondingly, politics are impoverished as the soundbite gives way to the tweet, knowledge as the trivial becomes more and more indistinguishable from the profound, and humanity as personality is reduced to a data set.

Carr is no Luddite - to the contrary, he is very aware of the positive benefits of new technologies, but he is also aware of their limitations, and the limitations of the men who make them.  More importantly, he is conscious of their power to change our perceptions of ourselves and our relationships to others in unexpected ways.  The book has the flaws to be expected of any collection of blog posts - not only are some no longer topical, the reader may sometimes wish that Carr would elaborate on a point or draw out the consequences of his conclusions, only to be frustrated by the concessions to digital attention spans.  Yet the short pieces on diverse topics also provide an ideal vehicle for Carr's combination of insight and humor, which in turn makes Utopia Is Creepy pleasurable as well as provocative.