DOES anyone remember what the internet was supposed to be? I have hazy memories of a limitless prospect, complete with William Gibsonās consensual hallucinations. Before we knew how connecting the world would play out, there was a low-res, mythical quality to our cyberspace future.
Two decades on, and Nicholas Carrās Utopia is Creepy reveals the reality into which these promises have crystallised. Curated from his blog posts over the past 10 years, the book is full of wry vignettes and articles lampooning the motivated enthusiasm and game-changing promises of Silicon Valleyās tech bro elite.
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Carrās targets of ādisruptionā range from music and cars to breakfast and bras. And what have we reaped after 20 years of this disruption? Well, itās not utopia.
Then again, Carr has never been much of an enthusiast. Heās probably best known for The Shallows, a 2011 Pulitzer finalist, in which he discussed how access to an infinitely broad but infinitely shallow information landscape has changed our brains. Not for the better, he fears. As Microsoftās smart bra suggests, instead of utopia, our petty oppressions have just been projected into a new dimension. The bra monitors emotions and heart rate. Why? To detect stress and stop emotional eating, of course.
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Itās all a far cry from Donna Harawayās āA Cyborg Manifestoā, an essay celebrating technologyās potential to free us from the constraints of gender roles. Carrās book isnāt a polemic, but a mosaic with individual tiles, by turns cute, funny or chilling. And itās more than the sum of its parts, as two big themes emerge.
The first concerns the steady drumbeat of criticism for web 2.0 and user-generated #content. The bookās 10-year span shows the transition from promise to millstone. Content has become like a second job ā we update Facebook, Twitter or Instagram to ensure our self-representation is polished and generating clicks.
Carr broadens the context: disguising unpaid labour as āfun! content! web 2.0!ā lets Silicon Valley shift its overheads to ācustomersā and clutter up their lives. It also allows the amateur to be monetised, as the efforts of volunteers are turned into āthe raw material for profit-making companiesā.
āDisguising unpaid labour as āfun! content! web 2.0!ā lets Silicon Valley shift its overheads to ācustomersāā
A quieter theme is the fear of freedom. A memorable takedown by Carr features Facebookās first TV ad in 2012. Called āThe Things That Connect Usā, itās a montage of cosy objects and welling music, ending with a childlike voice-over: āThe universe. It is vast and dark. And it makes us wonder if we are alone. So maybe the reason we make all of these things is to remind us that we are not.ā
Perhaps this explains our drive to taxonomise things to death because we fear just experiencing them. In a telling example, Carr pokes fun at a famous criticās notion that the internet improved poetry by ādisruptingā its elitist allusions. The critic cites T. S. Eliot, who had to append notes to The Waste Land to allow readers to keep up with its many allusions. Today, he writes, āno poet could outwit a reader who has an internet connectionā.
You can hear Carrās heavy sigh. The more you Google the poem, he says, the less you hear it: āMuch of whatās most subtle and valuable in cultureā¦ is too blurry to be read by machines.ā
This is an uncompromising portrait of the internet as a vulgar, cramped, unpleasant marketplace run by marketers, surveillance states and people shouting at you. But Carr acknowledges its upside: in 2014, the Pew Research Center showed 90 per cent of US citizens thought the internet was a force for good. Another statistic had the internet population spending $83,000 on Amazon per minute. Utopia perhaps, but an extraordinarily narrow vision of it.
Swallow the book in a few gulps and you sense we had the chance to create something new but that we let marketers and advertisers move in. Paradise lost indeed.
[book_info title=āUtopia is Creepy and Other Provocationsā author=āNicholas Carrā publisher=āW.āW. Nortonā title_link=āhttp://books.wwnorton.com/books/Utopia-Is-Creepy/ā]
