Nicholas Carr, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart (2025)

This book came out the same day that Chris Hayes's The Sirens' Call did (see my previous post). Generally overlapping in their critical assessments of the digital revolution and even in the responses they recommend, the two books are still different enough to make them both well worth reading. While Hayes is perhaps flashier and more conversational, Carr - as in a previous book of his which I also highly recommend, The Shallows - argues more carefully and writes in sharper prose. One of the threads of Superbloom is the belief that more and more universal communication will knit ever-widening circles of humanity together. With antecedents in Enlightenment thought, this idea animated the early American sociologist Charles Cooley and, in the wake of WWII, Margaret Mead. In a section that I wish Carr had expanded a little, he shows that the same confidence lay behind the fateful lack of regulation of the internet in its 1990s infancy. In the 1996 Telecommunications Act, two key doctrines that had governed communications previously were quietly abandoned: secrecy of correspondence (the Faustian bargain we enter with Google and its ilk is that we get their services for free in exchange for allowing the content of our messages to be mined for opportunities to advertise to us) and the obligation of "broadcasters" to serve the public interest, which had been established in the original 1934 Communications Act but had already been eroded when it came to radio and cable TV in the 1970s. Interestingly, like both Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing) and Hayes in The Sirens' Call, Carr doesn't place great hope in legal or policy remedies for the damage being inflicted by digital technologies. All three emphasize individual action, which may eventually inspire collective action. On the last page of his book, Carr recommends "the taking up of positions, first as individuals and then, perhaps, together, not outside of society but at society's margin, not beyond the reach of the information flow but beyond the reach of its liquefying force." This is almost exactly what Odell means by "standing apart." And it's how I'm trying to live my life.