Nicholas Carr: If communicating too much is a problem, then the obvious solution is to not communicate so much.

Mark Oppenheimer: Greetings, friends, and welcome to the second episode of Arc: The Podcast. I’m your host, Mark Oppenheimer, and I want to bring you back to the spring of 1996. It’s the middle of the Clinton years, we’re at the end of history, everyone thinks that liberal democracy will prevail all over the world. 9/11 is still five years in the future, and I am a college senior in my last semester of my undergraduate years.

I think my hair still had some eighties feathering action going on. I was probably wearing very, very baggy khakis, and I was looking for a final science class that I needed to graduate. I was a humanities guy, a history major, but to graduate from college, I needed three STEM classes, or what my college called group four. Group four was my nightmare, my bête noire. I had taken one of them freshman year, another one sophomore or junior year, and I had waited until spring term senior year to take my third required group four class.

Of course, the hunt was on for a group four that didn’t really have any quantitative skills required. No actual mathematical skills would be required for this class, no scientific reasoning, certainly no laboratories or lab reports. I was looking for a group four that was meant for humanities majors, the proverbial “Physics for Poets,” or my college had “Baseball Physics” for non-majors, where you studied how curveballs broke at the end of the pitch or something like that.

So I found my way to a class called “Computer Science and the Modern Intellectual Agenda,” and what stood out about this class was first of all, that it promised some knowledge about computer science without ever actually having to learn to code, but also that the professor was David Gelernter, who at that time was famous, or infamous, or notorious because he had been one of the victims of the Unabomber. A bomb had arrived at Gelernter’s office, a package. He had opened it up, and it had exploded and taken off a couple fingers of his hand. He wore a black glove that covered up the other three fingers and the stumps of the two fingers that were missing. So everyone sort of knew who David Gelernter was because he had been unabombed.

Anyway, the class was kind of awesome because it turned out that Gelernter, while a very prominent computer scientist, actually didn’t really like computers, or so he said. He really loved art and poetry and religion and philosophy, and the class was really about how underlying the whole field of computer science were questions about philosophy of mind, about cognitive science, about what consciousness is, about what thinking is because of course, if you’re trying to get computers to think, you have to know what it means for a human being to think.

These of course are really prominent questions today with the rise of artificial intelligence. What would it mean for AI to become conscious? What does it mean to say that AI actually thinks? These were questions that David Gelernter was addressing in the spring of ’96. In one of the classes, I remember he had had us read something by John Ruskin about how technology actually doesn’t necessarily make your life any more interesting, that there’s as much to see in a slow walk looking at blades of grass as there is on a steamship or a locomotive. Galler said to the class, which was maybe 40 or 50 people, he said, “How many of you are temperamental conservatives?” By which he meant, how many of you think that in general that the future might not be better than the past and that we have to make sure to conserve all the good stuff that has come before us, before we leap forward into the world of utopian dreams?

“How many of you,” he asked, “are temperamental conservatives?” I was sitting with a few friends of mine and my brother, who was two years behind me in college and also took that class with me. I don’t think anyone else in that little group raised his or her hand in answer to the question, “Who here is a temperamental conservative?” And I remember the term stuck with me. I think maybe he had used the term once or twice before, but it was something that I’d gotten from him, it wasn’t a way in which I thought naturally. After that class, I always thought about temperamental conservatism as a disposition toward the world, and I realized that it described perfectly who I was. Now in my case, that didn’t necessarily lead to political conservatism, but it does mean that whenever something new comes along, I tend to approach it perhaps less with a sense of awe, less of a sense of wow, then with a little bit of fear that maybe it is going to supplant something good that came before it.

All of which is to say that as we’ve gone through revolution after computer revolution, as we’ve gone through the rise of the internet, which happened when I was in college, and then the ubiquity of email and then the smartphone and the apps and social media and now artificial intelligence, I have used all of those things. I’m not somebody who has sat out the tech revolutions, but I am somebody who has approached them all with a sense of temperamental conservatism and sometimes with a profound sense of nostalgia leading to a sense of loss. That is to say, I tend to think things were better back in the day, even as I intellectually realized that I’m often wrong.

Of course, like all people, I enjoy reading stuff that flatters the things I believe already, right? A lot of conservatives like reading conservative books, liberals like reading liberal books, sports fans who love the Raiders, love reading books about how great the Raiders are. As a temperamental conservative, I do gravitate toward literature that affirms me in my temperamental conservatism. That’s a problem. Really I should be reading stuff that challenges me, but once in a while, that hunt for books that ratify my worldview leads me to some really, really good books that I think make a really good case for the things that I’m inclined to believe.

Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows, which came out in 2010, was one such book. I knew who he was a little bit because in 2008 he had written an article for the Atlantic Magazine called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” I remember how Carr put into words some suspicions that I already had: that the internet, by giving me so much information so easily, was actually making it easier for me not to think, or read, or learn, and was dulling some of the habits of mind that as a journalist and a professor and a kind of professional thinker I had honed over many years.

Now again, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of nostalgia, but what was so great about Nicholas Carr’s article about Google and then about his subsequent book, The Shallows, is that he really built up the case for what computers were doing to us. He never denied that computers were giving us a lot of great stuff, but he was also very, very attuned to the ways in which computers change us.

I’ve been following Nicholas Carr’s work since about 2008, so coming up on 20 years. I’d never met the man, but I’ve always wanted to talk to him. He has a new book out called Super Bloom, and it’s about how the speed and mode of communication in the digital age makes our lives worse. Now again, he’s very clear that he’s on email, that he uses these forms of communication, but he’s just very attuned, in this book Super Bloom, to the ways that email, texting, and social media make us less kind as well as less thoughtful. In many ways. I feel that this new book is, more than anything else he’s written, about how we should treat not just ourselves, but each other.

Later in the show, we’re going to be talking about St. Pancras, the Birth of the Buddha, and the poet John Benjamin. And we’re going to get Nicholas Carr’s recommendations for what to watch, listen, and read. For now, here’s the first part of my interview with Nicholas Carr.

NC: My name is Nicholas Carr. I’m a writer. I’ve written several books about the human consequences of technology, including a book called The Shallows, which came out in 2010 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. My most recent book, which came out just a little while ago, is called Super Bloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart.

MO: I’ve read Super Bloom over the past week or so, and I think it’s a great addition to what I think of as your techno-skeptical canon, and you can tell me later if you think that’s a fair characterization of you as being a technos skeptic. I mean, it’s a fair characterization of me, so I’m the audience for this book. Although I’m probably not the one who needs it the most I would say.

Before we get to Super Bloom and before we even get to The Shallows, which was a book that was really for me when it came out about 15 years ago, can you say a little bit about your journey to the career that you have? You were a business reporter for a while and you edited Harvard Business Review, and these are often the kind of publications that are filled with utopian thinkers who think this stuff is all good, all the time. You pretty profoundly disagree with that. But to get to who you are today and the kind of stuff you’ve been writing, I’d love to start back in the day. You can start at age five, or ten, or whatever. How did you end up in this line of work? What drew you to it?

NC: Yeah, it’s kind of a circuitous path. I was an English major in college and went on to grad school again in English with the idea of eventually becoming an English professor. It turned out I didn’t really like grad school, so I bailed after getting my master’s and I needed a job. I found a job as an editor for a management consulting firm outside of Boston, and I ended up staying there for about 12 years, ghost writing articles, editing reports. Up until then, I hadn’t really paid much attention to the business world. I was a humanities guy, but I kind of got an education in business while working there.

Then I was recruited to be an editor at the Harvard Business Review, this is in the late 1990s, and eventually became the executive editor there. The late 1990s was, of course, the time of the big first .com bubble, and no one else among the editorial staff was particularly interested in computers. But I happened to be quite interested in computers at a personal level, and also because the consulting firm I worked for had an IT practice, and so I did a lot of editing of stuff there. I became the kind of go-to editor for articles about the internet and digital commerce and stuff, and there were a lot of them back then. As you say, they often had a very utopian view that, “Oh, this changes everything and everything’s going to get more efficient and better.” Then the.com crash happened around 2000, and I started writing both for the Harvard Business Review, rather than just editing stuff, and I also writing for some tech publications.

I was starting to be skeptical a little bit, but also was still quite enthusiastic about the internet and computers. Then I left the Harvard Business Review and wrote a book about the business use of technology. At some point around 2004, 2005, I started getting concerned about all the time I was spending in front of my computer screen and surfing the web, as we used to then say, and how it was affecting the way I think. I just found that I was having trouble concentrating on one thing for a sustained period, and I particularly noticed it when I tried to read a book or a long essay or article.

I just really had trouble focusing. Being a person who grew up with literature and deeply engaged with novels and short stories and poems and stuff, this was really disconcerting to me. It did strike me that my mind seemed to want to behave the way it would behave when I was in front of the computer, it wanted to be stimulated by lots of different things coming at me all the time. I could click on lots of links, check, email all the time. I began to hypothesize that the technology was, in a way, training my mind to think shallowly, to be constantly distracted, and that ultimately led to an essay I wrote for The Atlantic in 2008 called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” which started to get into this idea I was having based on my personal experience. That got quite a bit of notice and led to a book contract that was The Shallows. I’ve been increasingly skeptical ever since.

MO: This is all super interesting for me, not least because I remember where I was when I read that article in The Atlantic. I had a 2-year-old and maybe our second child had just been born. They were born in 2006 and 2008, and I didn’t have a lot of time to read anything, and I already felt like my brain was mush from just sleep deprivation. I was sitting at the island in my kitchen on my laptop reading that article, and it really spoke to me. I wasn’t sure, is it Google that’s made me stupid? Is it sleep deprivation? Is it parenthood? But I did feel that something was up.
I want to go back just a minute. When you say that you’d always liked computers, I mean, I feel like you must be a little older than me just based on when you were in the workforce. I was born in 1974.

NC: Yeah, I’m quite a bit older than you.

MO: When were you born?

NC: ’59.

MO: When you say you were very interested in computers, my own relationship was I came up with Atari 2600, which I didn’t have, but I made sure that I always had at least one friend who had it at his house. That was a major criterion for friendship. If you did gifted classes, the gifted room had some Commodore Pets and you could learn Basic and Logo, like early programming languages. They seemed fun. And of course the pop culture was interested in computers like movies, like Tron and War Games. There was always this sense that science fiction was becoming less and less fictional, was kind of coming down to earth. But if you were born that long ago, you didn’t come up with computers. What was your interest in them?

NC: Computers were definitely not around when I was growing up, but I went off to college in 1977 and was there from 77 to 81. So I was kind of one of the last people to graduate from college still without PCs or without email.

MO: You were typing your papers, you were writing them out and then typing them?

NC: There’s a little twist to the story. So I went to Dartmouth College, and Dartmouth College had one of the most advanced computer systems around, distributed computer systems. You could go in and sit at a terminal in the computer center and tap into their mainframe. I became intrigued by this machine and I learned word processing programs. This was before www, so you had to enter codes into your text and then wait to see it print out and see what it looked like. That was my first introduction to computers. I found it quite fascinating. The students who were really into math and computers were writing silly games that you could play and stuff like that. That’s really what first triggered my interest in computers, and then not long after I graduated and left grad school, I got one of the early Mac computers. It didn’t have a hard drive. I found it really interesting and just fascinating.

MO: Did you have a tech or what I’ll call a geek side to you? Is there also an overlap with interest in gaming, or chess, or Dungeons and Dragons, or sci-fi, or any of the other things that overlap with youthful interest in computers?

NC: I was in the chess club in high school, maybe that says something. I don’t think I’d even heard of Dungeons and Dragons, but I did enjoy from the start with the Mac playing early video games, SIM City and Mist and stuff. So yeah, it was certainly part of my life.

MO: So you’re at Harvard Business Review, and I think before you left to write your first book, you wrote this article that I went and reread, which is a wonderful time capsule, called “IT Doesn’t Matter,” and this was in 2003. Maybe you could tell us what your argument there was and why people were so mad about it.

NC: I should say, I think I’m just kind of naturally a skeptical type of person. When I hear over promises, I kind of look into them. While I was working at the Harvard Business Review, one of the people I edited was a guy named Michael Porter, possibly the most famous Harvard Business School professor. He wrote these very intricate articles, deep articles, and books about strategic advantage and how companies can distinguish themselves from each other. I was quite influenced by his work.

After the dotcom crash, there continued to be this huge push by IT companies saying that, “Every company has to build the best data center and has to buy the most expensive servers and has to install all this elaborate software costing millions and millions of dollars, and then millions more on upkeep.” I began to think about it kind of under the influence of Michael Porter’s argument to try to see how are companies really going to distinguish themselves when they’re all building the same data centers, they’re buying the same high-end servers, they’re buying the same software.

I drew an analogy between what was going on with IT then and what went on in the early days of electric power a hundred years earlier. And what happened when electricity became tamable is companies started building their own generators in their own buildings. Slowly but surely that changed to the point where once everybody had these generators, nobody was getting an advantage, but they were very, very expensive. Suddenly you had the arrival of electric utilities, all those generators went away, companies just started plugging their machines into the wall.

I predicted that something similar would happen to IT, that companies wouldn’t have to build these elaborate data centers anymore. They’d get their software, their storage capacity, their computing capacity by things like Amazon Web Services and the various other cloud computing suppliers that arrived. As you can imagine, when that came out, I was basically saying, you shouldn’t be spending as much on IT. You shouldn’t be spending as much with Oracle and HP. That really pissed off the companies.

MO: Well, it would piss off Oracle and places like that that were selling IT, but you’d think it would’ve been celebrated by small businesses to whom you were saying, “You don’t have to be spending as much, or you soon you won’t have to spend as much.”
But my sense is that people didn’t like having their narrative disrupted. Even at small companies there was this sunk cost, which is, you pointed out, that 10% of their budget had been going to it, and then it was 30%, and now it was in many cases a majority of their budget was going to it. They seemed to want to believe this was necessary, that people don’t always like being told that the narrative train that they’re on is actually the wrong train.

NC: That was certainly true in particular of IT manager set companies because they definitely bought into this narrative and saw themselves as people who are going to make a strategic difference to the business, and I was calling that into question.

MO: You pointed out that they’d been professionalized upwards. Initially, 50 years ago, the thinking was the person who ran the teletype was barely secretarial, maybe kind of some sort of technical support like a plumber, and that they’d had a rise in status, which was now they were seen as essential people, the CEO was going to consult a chief information officer on this stuff.

NC: Bureaucrats are always looking for status, and status often comes from enlarging the number of people who report to you, so it’s kind of a natural dynamic in any kind of organization. They were even positioning themselves to be in contention for the CEO job when the CEO left. There was this big gain in status that I was calling into question.

Speaking of skepticism, there was a huge amount of skepticism about whether this vision of utility computing, or cloud computing, was even possible. Because what I was saying is, “Eventually all this elaborate software that you’re running on high powered servers that you own, you’re going to be able to just plug into it coming through the internet.” Nobody believed that the internet would hold up for that kind of intensive computer processing. So there was both a kind of turf thinking, “I have to defend my turf,” but also a sense that this was a fantasy.

MO: One of the people you take on in Super Bloom, which again we will get to in a minute, is Yochai Benkler who is a law professor now at Harvard, right?

NC: Right. He was at Yale, now he’s at Harvard,

MO: He’s bopped around, but he’s a major sort of early guy in the field of law and media, law and information, really law and internet. I mean, he’s one of the first law professors who seems to have understood and taken seriously the internet and what it meant. You have a big quarrel with him in Super Bloom. But the quarrel I discovered goes back a couple decades.

I was reading about the bet you made with him sometime in the early aughts, but this was around the time that you were taking on IT. You were also criticizing the idea that the web and crowdsourcing would be super democratizing, which was something I think he believed, but I’m an amateur on this. Could explain your beef, your original beef with Yochai Benkler, or his with you?

NC: Okay, so this is going back to the early days of social media I’d say. So 2003, 2004. He had a big book coming out in I think 2005 or 2006. Anyway, his argument, and this was a very popular argument at the time, he laid out the argument in the most depth, I think by far. But the argument was that we have all these kind of bureaucracies, managerial bureaucracies, with lots of oversight of people, lots of layers of management, and this is all necessary because information doesn’t move very quickly, so you need all these people filtering information and sending it to the right place. And the idea was that the internet would overthrow that model and flatten that model. The great example everybody pointed to was Wikipedia, which was then very much discussed all the time.

Instead of having this managerial hierarchy, you’d get rid of the hierarchy altogether. People working online, sharing information between themselves over the internet would be able to, without formal oversight, create complex services and goods, things like encyclopedias. He went so far as to say that most cultural goods and informational goods would be supplied through this model, not through the old professional media model of having publishers and TV networks and stuff, but it would all flatten out. It would all be done through the internet, and there’d be new ways to make sure that quality was maintained. So you’d have, for instance, if you were exchanging information, creating kind of online newspaper, people would post stories and then other people would vote on those stories, and the ones that got the most votes would be the best stories. They’d be the ones everyone sees. He predicted that everything would go in that direction, and I predicted that no, you’d still have these formal managerial oversight, not everything was going to turn into Wikipedia.

MO: And who won?

NC: Well, it depends on who you ask. There was no money at stake.

MO: I was going to ask, was there actually a stake to the bet?

NC: No. No, so I think the bet remains open. I used to think that I won, and I still sort of do because we haven’t seen the eraser of publishers and TV networks and stuff. In fact, for a while, this was also the time when the blogosphere was a big deal and people thought all newspapers and magazines were going to go away and would just be individual bloggers. What happened was a lot of magazines, for instance, created their own blogger networks and basically took control of the market, so that kind of backed up my point of view.

On the other hand, I have to say that we’ve seen a lot of individual players, influencers, new bloggers on things like Substack and stuff kind of making a go of it on their own and having certain informal networks, which kind of backs up what Benkler was foreseeing. I think the bigger question that wasn’t part of the bet was if this happens, is it going to be a good thing? And I think it’s happened, but it’s been a bad thing in general.

MO: It occurs to me that it’s hard to answer from a kind of thousand foot conceptual level. Everything’s different, right? Wikipedia is actually a pretty good encyclopedia, whereas the Substack community of writers to me is inferior to the days when you could subscribe to three or four or 10 magazines and get your diet. It’s too crowded. Too many people who are good start and then stop. It’s actually more expensive. Paying for 10 Substacks could be a thousand dollars a year.

It was cheaper to get time in Newsweek, the Nation, and the New York Review. I’m just thinking of what my parents got back in the day. It seems to have been good for Wikipedia, that crowdsourcing model basically works. I would say 99% of the sites I look at are not trolled, are not being problematized by infighting among the writers of them. They’re pretty clean. Whereas the thing I wanted from Rolling Stone magazine doesn’t exist at all anymore. There’s no magazine I subscribe to that tells me what a 50-year-old white guy with pretty standard classic rock tastes should be listening to today at all. It doesn’t exist.

NC: One thing that happened is that, because I’m a freelance writer and I’ve been for a long time so I’m highly conscious of this, when the internet came along, all these magazines had to also set up online publications that would, at first it was thought that it would supplement the print edition and the print stuff would be also distributed online. But what happened is they had to staff up these online publications, and in the meantime, print advertising was shrinking. And so they began to use this, their new on staff people from the web operation to write the articles and essays that were also in the print publication, even as the print publication was shrinking. So for freelancers, the market for long intelligent essays or even reported pieces shrank enormously. And I think you’re right, that some really interesting forms of writing that were in places like Rolling Stone and Esquire and the others just kind of disappeared.

MO: I fluctuate between thinking maybe nobody ever wanted those, maybe people were always subscribing to Rolling Stone for the record reviews and never really would’ve paid for long form stuff if it were just disaggregated. So I fluctuate between thinking that and thinking actually, there’s probably a community of, let’s call it a 100,000 or 500,000 people out there who really like that stuff and they miss it, and there’s a massive market failure it it’s a human American market failure that nobody’s figured out how to sell that product right now that a lot of people actually would still pay for. What do you think about that?

NC: I think that’s right. Both of your visions of the magazines, how the magazines work are partly accurate because what always happened in print publishing is that there would be some popular stuff that would subsidize the longer investments. And that was certainly true in newspapers where people read the comics in the sports section, but then you also got The New York Times book review or something. And I think it was also true in Rolling Stone, I’m sure a lot of people came for the short snippets about their favorite bands and the record reviews, but I think there was a significant number who were reading Hunter Thompson’s articles and stuff. I think there is an audience for that. The economics of pain for that kind of stuff have become problematic for magazines. So it becomes tough to see how you reinvent it, because I don’t think it translates very well to the Substack model. I think every once in a while, somebody who’s going to publish something really long, really good, really interesting on Substack, and I think it’s happening, but you don’t have the kind of institutional momentum required.

MO: And it turned out that the really smart, early people who tried to create environments for it, they failed. They couldn’t make it work financially, and they were smart people.

NC: Right, I mean, similar to for instance, local news online. I think there’s been some successes, but mainly it’s been failures, even though I think you could argue also there is an audience for local news.

MO: Absolutely. You wrote at one point, again, I think this may be in the late aughts, you talked about what you call digital sharecropping. You wrote: “What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content, but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook and many other businesses have realized they can give away the tools of production, but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing not in making money. And besides the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial.”

I wonder if you think that’s still true. A lot of those individuals figured out how to monetize some piece of their creative expression. I mean, not a lot in the percentage wise sense, but in the absolute sense there are thousands of people, I suppose, who make a living or a good chunk of their living from their YouTube content or whatever. So has it gotten a little more democratic? Is it a little bit rosier in terms of the distribution of the economic rewards of the internet? Or is it still really, when you look at it, millions of people giving away free content to Facebook and Google Analytics and stuff that they then just monetize?

NC: Yeah, I think it’s still fundamentally a sharecropping system where people are supplying the vast majority of content that these new media companies, like Meta and Google and stuff, require and are not getting compensated for it and don’t really care because they don’t see themselves as content creators. They see themselves as people using social media and talking to their friends and stuff. But it’s also true, this was probably inevitable in retrospect, that some people would start to build audiences and they would start demanding a piece of the pie. And that has certainly happened. So there are plenty of people making a very good living on YouTube or TikTok.

I think that’s an important phenomenon. But I still think these companies, social media companies, unlike any media companies before, need an enormous amount of content to push through to their millions and billions of users, and the users themselves supply the main pool of that content for free, so it’s a very nice situation for the companies. You get enormous amounts of content for free from the same people who are actually looking at the ads and generating revenue for you.

MO: Is there anything that could be done, in some ideal world where we had better legislators and people thinking more thoughtfully about this, to redistribute that wealth back to the content creators a little bit? Is there something at the statutory level or the regulatory level that would just make it seem fairer?

NC: I think it’s possible to imagine something like that. Jaron Lanier has quite a long time ago kind of argued that you could have a system that would kind of track micro transactions, so would track the monetary value of every time somebody posts something and it gets looked at by lots of other people and maybe goes viral and kind of calculate some distribution of revenue between the company and the individual. You can imagine that kind of system, but certainly the companies wouldn’t want it, and I don’t think that most of the people who are contributing the content, it doesn’t even cross their mind and it would probably be a trivial amount of money. You have influencers who have made businesses who are getting a cut already. I don’t see where the motivation would come that would be necessary to overcome the self-interest of the companies and also build a very complicated system. It’s possible, but it would be quite complicated.

MO: So one of the things that just occurred to me right now is that for lack of a better term, the smarter, or more intellectually or creatively ambitious content creators have built audiences, or they’ve offloaded to Substack or other platforms that allow them to monetize. And what gets left behind on say, Facebook, which I’m always shocked to remember, lots of people are still on because I got off at ages ago, is people posting about their cats or their own personal politics, or it’s purely social. It’s people without a creative or intellectual ambition to what they’re doing. But that’s okay if you’re Meta. I mean, that’s what Facebook needs is just cat memes and people complaining about the noise in their neighborhood and kind of low value transactions.

NC: So we’ve seen a kind of split in social media where you have a TikTok that is really becoming professionalized, and you still have a Facebook, which is still the kind of an amateur production of people just talking to each other.

MO: And then you have Blue Sky, which is just lefty professors as far as I can tell. I’ve never been on it.

NC: I’ve never been on it either. I think I have an account, but I think, I mean, it’s an important point because my own feeling is that the fundamental nature of Twitter, or X, kind of discussion boards or whatever you want to call ’em, are kind of sociopath logical to begin with. So whatever the motivations of people setting those things up, I think it turns into crap.

MO: It always goes bad. You quote in Super Bloom, you quote my WashU colleague Ian Bogost saying that, “Social media gives us a sociopathic rendition of human sociality.” And that is actually, I think, pretty close to stating the thesis of Super Bloom. You never put it quite that way, but that there’s something inherent in these mass open channels of communication that tends towards sociopathy rather than towards democracy and happiness and puppies and rainbows and stuff. Is that fair?

NC: Yeah, I mean, I suppose the main difference is that I think Ian situates the problem in the technology itself, and I think I situate the problem as being a matter of both the technology itself and human nature.

MO: Hey, friends, if you’re enjoying this episode, will you please make sure to subscribe and rate and review us on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube. If you subscribe, of course you’ll be the first to know that coming up on the next show is Molly Worthen. She’s the author of Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump. In another upcoming episode, we’ll be talking with Anna Levy Lyons, a Unitarian minister now going to Rabbinic School who has written the new book, The Secret Despair of the Secular Left.

In between these podcasts, I would invite you to check out Arc magazine. It’s at arcmag.org. That is the web magazine that gave birth to this podcast. It’s the magazine of the John Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. And we have posted some terrific stuff lately. Lee Konstantinou has written a new piece about Tolkien and how the MAGA right loves The Lord of the Rings.

Now, I have to say, as somebody who was never so interested in science fiction or fantasy, which I know are different, but they’re often lumped together because they sometimes share the same fan base as somebody who never cared about either. I’ve never read Tolkien, and I could not have told you why the maga, right, why people like Peter Thiel and JD Vance so love The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Fortunately, now I know because Lee Konstantinou has explained it in a new piece over at arcmag.org.

We also published a piece this week by Judah Iserroff on Peter Beinart, who is the lefty that so many Zionist righties love to hate. There’s been a lot of criticism of Peter Beinart’s new book as well as a lot of love for it. What’s interesting about Judas piece is that he looks at what’s good about Peter, but also where Beinart should go from here. What are the things that Peter Beinart keeps promising to tell us but doesn’t deliver on.

Critic Naomi Kanakia has an essay up at arcmag.org about how to read Huckleberry Finn today. She basically says, look, the book is super racist, and she used to not even understand why people liked it, but on a recent rereading, she kind of decided that it is a super racist book that is also a lovable classic. All of this and more over at Arc magazine, at arcmag.org, A-R-C-M-A-G.org. And now back to my interview with Nicholas Carr.
So what is the Superbloom? Tell us about the new book, and why don’t you start with the metaphor of the Superbloom.

NC: Yeah, so I started thinking about this around 2017, 2018, but really this topic of looking at our kind of utopian view of communication and juxtaposing it with what we actually see when new communication technologies come along. Then in 2019, there was a super bloom in Southern California, and this is a rare natural phenomenon. This is an arid region, generally an arid region of the country, the mountains kind of to the east of Los Angeles and San Diego. On the rare occasions when you have a wet winter, you have this incredible bloom of flowers, often poppies, on the hillsides, and it’s really a spectacular sight. I mean, I haven’t seen in person, but I’ve seen lots of photos. 2019, this happens, and there’s a place, an environmentally sensitive area in these mountains southeast of Los Angeles, called Walker Canyon. Walker Canyon had a particularly spectacular bloom of poppies.

This happens in early March. As you can imagine, these pictures start circulating because people are out there looking at it, and influencers start saying, “Gee, I have to get out there because this is the backdrop I need for my selfies, for my videos, for pitching the fashions I’m wearing.” You start having lots of influencers, particularly from Instagram, but also from YouTube and stuff coming out there. So they start publishing these pictures and then all their followers say, “Oh, gosh, we have to get out there too because we want our selfies with this spectacular backdrop.” And so you have this influx of thousands and thousands of people all carrying their phones, often carrying lighting equipment and stuff going up these hillsides, trampling the flowers, pulling the flowers out of the ground so they can get their pictures. And then of course, as all these photos begin to circulate, particularly on Instagram, you get the counter reaction where people start laying into not only the influencers, but just the average people posting these selfies and attacking them for making a mess of this natural area. The comments, as you can imagine, become very vile, very personal.

I live in Massachusetts, so I’m watching it play out through social media and through other media across the country, but it suddenly struck me that this is kind of a microcosm of the kind of society that social media creates online. And more than that, the super bloom itself struck me as a metaphor for how we live today. We live in a super bloom of messages, we’re surrounded by messages, by information coming at us all the time. I suddenly saw that as kind of the hook, but also the governing metaphor for a book about the social consequences of social media.

MO: And you go back to the 1800s, you go back to the guy who first said social media, a guy named Charles Horton Cooley. In general, the people who wrote about communication, about the overthrow of distance which is really what we’re talking about here, that it’s no longer about taking horse and carriage. It’s no longer about taking a ship. Then it becomes highways, then it becomes airplanes, telegraphs, telephones, then we get down to computer email messages. Now it’s really about as fast as it can be. It’s as fast as we can think.

You write about how in the history of this overthrow of distance and heightened communication, most people have been pretty positive about it. Most people have thought this is going to be a good thing. I mean, there were skeptics along the way. You talk about Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan and some of the people who had concerns about television and about how different mediums affect us and change us.

But largely the thinking with every new technology, the predominant thinking initially is utopian and pretty rosy. And you have been arguing, I think for a couple decades now that this tends to be wrong. What is it that, in the case of messages, right? And the book is really about the internet really email onwards into social media, into text messages and so forth. What is it about messages, which we do tend to think of as probably a kind of democratic good thing, more communication, more human empathy and sympathy? What is it that actually goes wrong that makes it more of a super bloom part two in the second epoch, when people are trampling the flowers rather than the first one where people are just kind of admiring from afar?

NC: Yeah, I think at a technical level, it comes down to the speed and volume of messages and information flowing in that the human psyche is simply ill-equipped to deal with the speed and volume. What happens is we feel compelled to stay on top of all of this, and that means we’re dealing with everything very superficially, instinctively, our primal emotions are triggered because we just have to just have to react so quickly to so many things. So it triggers all sorts of negative aspects of the human psyche: defensiveness, fear, anger, a kind of clannishness. When you feel overwhelmed by information, people collect into different groups and they become kind of warring tribes.

I think that at a psychological level, we were under the impression, and we’ve been under this impression, as you say, going back to at least the telegraph, that if communication is something that’s good, and certainly talking to each other seems to be a good thing we learn about other people, maybe we fall in love with them, make friends with them, we understand them more. But our assumption was, if communication is good, then more communication must be better. In the book, I call that assumption into question. I argue that actually more communication is not necessarily better. In fact, beyond a certain amount of communication, we become so inundated by messages and information that a reversal takes place. All the good things that we thought would happen with more communication get turned on their head, and instead of triggering understanding and empathy and all those good things, it triggers animosity, bias, and all the bad parts of our character.

MO: It’s almost like if you look at anyone long enough, you like them less. Maybe that’s not true of your spouse, maybe it’s not true, although who knows, right? If you knew all of their thoughts, maybe you’d like them less, right? If you knew what they were thinking when you wore that pair of ripped jeans again, or if you were showering at night instead of the morning, and who knows what little habits you actually don’t want to know that they’re thinking. But in general, outside the circle of people, we’re pretty much commanded to love spouses, children, our dogs. Knowing too much about people is a problem.

I think about this all the time because growing up in Springfield, Massachusetts, what one of the things I remember is how little we knew about our neighbors. We had friendly relations with them, but we didn’t necessarily know if they were Republicans or Democrats, partly because the local races were nonpartisan. So when there were city council races, you might see that they had a sign up for Bob Markle and you had one up for Bill Bennett and whatever, but that didn’t necessarily connote who was right wing and who was left wing. Those were almost more just tribal preferences. You played little league with so-and-so, and so you put his mom’s sign up when she ran for school committee, but it wasn’t politicized. There might’ve been people around me with antisemitic views, with super reactionary views, and I wouldn’t have known. And surely there were people who were not treating their spouses well, and if I knew how they were behind closed doors, I would’ve liked them less. But I didn’t know how they were behind closed doors. I knew them in this pleasantly superficial, neighborly way.

It makes me wonder, is there a kind of optimal level of intimacy where we do want to be around people? One of the points of your book is we want to hang out with people. You don’t want to be lonely, but you don’t want to hang out in their brain. I mean, you talk about media as a penetrative technology. We don’t want to be penetrated too much.

NC: Exactly. And again, we have this assumption that the more I learn about somebody else, the more I’ll understand them and the more I’ll like them. And there’s plenty of psychological studies that show that that just isn’t true. That in fact, as you learn more about someone, at some point you’ll see a dissimilarity between yourself and them. It could be your political views, it can be in your musical tastes, it can be in anything. Once you start seeing dissimilarities or differences, you start to place more weight on differences, on further differences as they manifest themselves, as you gain more information about them and less weight on similarities.

Certainly one thing we know about how we like people is it’s very tied up in how we think they’re similar to us or dissimilar to us, which is maybe itself kind of sad, but it’s true. And so before the net came along, when you’re living in a neighborhood, as you said, the dynamic was you’d meet people on the street and you’d talk about the weather, or the local baseball team, or football team and how they were doing, and you’d basically avoid kind of probing their deeper thoughts because it was kind of embarrassing.

As soon as we start socializing online, it’s no longer embarrassing to talk about yourself. In fact, you’re constantly encouraged to talk about yourself. You’re rewarded for talking about yourself with likes and with followers and with friends and stuff. Suddenly, we create this environment where we’re not seeing people face to face and kind of seeing, “Oh, this is another human being.” I can look into their eyes and stuff. So we’re creating a sense of distance in our social relations, even as we’re encouraging people to divulge tons of stuff about themselves. And so there’s this phrase, dissimilarity cascade, that psychologists have come up with that describes what happens, that the more information we gather about other people, the more emphasis we put on dissimilarities on differences that kind of cascades. And so you make a lot more enemies as a result. A lot of people have neighbors they don’t like in the physical world because their neighbors let their dog poop on your lawn, or they leave their garbage cans out. So it’s always been there, but it’s much, much tempered in local neighborhoods, and it’s exactly the opposite happens online.

MO: Yeah, I remember having the thought that my dad and mom, again growing up when I was growing up in Springfield, Massachusetts in the seventies, eighties, nineties, they didn’t have any enemies. I don’t think there was anyone who really disliked them in a sort of active sense. I don’t know that for sure. Maybe somebody did, but I don’t think they knew if anybody did.
At the time I got off Facebook seven, eight years ago, I remember thinking, there are a dozen people who I think are sick of me, or despise me, or think, “Oh, there’s Mark with his opinions again.” And I had a dozen people who I thought, “Oh, Jesus, if she or he is posting, it’s going to be insane.” And there was a kind of antipathy there, even though in some cases these were fellow moms and dads in the neighborhood whom I liked, whom I saw being ethical people and good parents and who would lend me a cup of sugar or an onion if I needed one for cooking. But I knew too much about their politics, and I thought they were insane. I thought they were just insane.

NC: And it just underscores this fact that knowing more about other people does not necessarily lead to liking them more or understanding them more. In fact, more often than not, it has the opposite effect.

MO: One of the cool things about your book is that you talk about how contingent a lot of this is and how it can depend on little tweaks of software along the way. I was very intrigued when you talked in just a couple paragraphs about the guy who coded the retweet, that taking tweeting to the next level of retweeting, and that seemed hugely important, right?

NC: Yeah. And in one way, it’s a trivial thing, and we take it for granted now that retweets, those were always there. But if you think back to when Twitter started, the users themselves began to create retweets, and you did it by typing capital RT, and then the person who’s tweet you were going to retweet and then cutting and pasting the tweet and then sending them out. Eventually Twitter realized, well, everybody wants this, so let’s make it automatic. And so they hired a guy to create the button that does this all automatically, and this is something that would’ve seemed obvious thing you want to do. I’m sure most users said, “Oh, great. I don’t have to retype all this stuff or cut and paste this stuff.”

And yet, as became clear to a lot of longtime Twitter users, immediately it backfired horribly. People suddenly used it as an attack mechanism. You’d either retweet something that attacks other people, so you wanted the attack to keep going, or you retweet something from somebody you didn’t like and put a nasty comment on it, and then it would create this trail of nasty comments. Just that little act of automation, which I think you can characterize as, and this is one of the themes of the book, taking friction out of communication, making it just easier rather than forcing people to take a couple of seconds to think about what they were doing can have really big effects.

MO: One of the things that I like about your work, it showcases a virtue I lack myself, is that you don’t seem to be highly nostalgic. That is to say you don’t look back at a specific point in time and exalt it or valorize it as the good old days, which is basically what I spend all my time doing is arguing that civilization peaked in 1996, which happened to be the year I got out of college. That was the good time. But you write on page 54, you write in a moment that I think may reveal a little bit of a nostalgic impulse: “Equally important, the analog system”–and this was when people had multiple devices for multiple things, so you had a TV and you had a stereo, and you had a typewriter, and you had magazines coming in the mail and letters, all those different media– “imposed discipline on and encouraged discretion in reading, viewing and listening habits, giving people a sense of control over the media products that were proliferating so quickly. An individual had to make a conscious decision to pick up a magazine or switch on a TV or stick a dime in a jukebox. It was impossible to do everything all at once and no one would’ve wanted to. The friction, the cost, the effort, the act of choosing was part of the pleasure. Drop the coin right into the slot saying, Chuck Berry, in school days, his ecstatic 57 single, you’ve got to hear something that’s really hot.”

You don’t say, “Let’s go back to pick your year, 1956, 76, 91, whatever,” but you are expressing a kind of optimism about, or a preference for, the old analog when there were different devices. There was friction. You had to be more conscious. It made me think of a book I really love, which you probably know, which is David Sax’s book, The Revenge of Analog. He was arguing, and this was right before the pandemic, that some analog technologies, like the book, were durable and that others, and he talked about vinyl records, he talked about wristwatches we’re making a comeback, and that’s been true of both of those technologies up to a point. I was very optimistic when I read that book that maybe people were choosing more and different frictional technologies for a time. My sense is the pandemic set a lot of that back by driving people back to Amazon for all their purchases rather than into retail, and stores, and different things that analog depends on. Is it your sense that there will be any return to the old world of multiple devices and what you call more friction?

NC: I hope so. I don’t think so. I do think that there are subsets, subcultures of people who appreciate vinyl records for various reasons, sometimes just for status reasons, but sometimes for real actual cultural reasons or prefer the discipline of a film camera and feel that that actually makes the act of photographing things more intentional. I see that those kind of movements being quite small and not really gaining the momentum or the mass needed to change the culture in general.
I don’t rule such a countercultural movement out. In fact, in some ways, I think if there’s going to be a massive change to how we use the technology and how we live, it’ll be because a new generation of young people sees phones and social media as this kind of oppressive adult system that’s being imposed on them and rejected outright.

MO: We’ve seen that before. And as you point out, teenagers have rejected sex and illegal drinking and driver’s licenses, three of the best things in the world. If that, why not reject smartphones? I don’t know.

NC: I think those two things might be connected, that at some point you realize, do I want to sit here in my room on Instagram, or gaming, or something? Or maybe it actually is fun to go out and drive around and have fun.

MO: I’d like to end on something of an optimistic note. I’ve been moved by Jonathan Haidt, writing on kids getting off smartphones. This was actually something I saw coming five or six years ago and now seems to be coming. I just thought schools are going to realize education’s better without smartphones, and there’s going to be some early adopting schools. They’ll have good results and then it’ll happen. It seems like that’s true. He has also pushed a very clear program for breaking the addiction cycle for kids, which involves not giving them phones until 14, not letting ’em have social media until 16, or something like that. And that’s all really terrific I think.

You weighed into this idea of where to go from here a little bit at the end of your book. You don’t have much faith in tweaks to the algorithms. You don’t think that Meta or Alphabet are going to save us from ourselves. You don’t seem to have much faith in legislation, in statutory reform, but you end on a kind of nomic esoteric note. You say maybe salvation lies in personal, willful acts of excommunication. What does that mean?

NC: Well, at one level, I deliberately use the word excommunication to get across that, and I’m certainly not the first person to argue this, that modern society has come to see technology as a kind of religion, that we put our faith in it and it leads us to a better life, a better world. So that’s part of it, but really it’s more of a literal excommunication that actually, if communicating too much is a problem, then the obvious solution is to not communicate so much. And I think I hope that we just get kind of sick of the social sickness of social media and we say, I’m not going to spend as much time on my phone, or maybe I’m not even going to have a smartphone and I’m going to close a lot of my social media accounts and I’m actually going to make an effort to have neighbors over for a picnic or something, or gather with old friends, or write a letter sometime to a friend rather than getting onto a text chain or something.

Also importantly, and this is something I talk about, having time in your life where you’re not socializing, where you’re not communicating. Because one of the big changes that the internet has wrought for kids, but also for adults, is the kind of natural rhythm of people’s lives. You used to be you’d be in social situations and then you’d be by yourself and you’d be alone with your thoughts and you’d have to figure out, what do I do now that’s going to make me happy or whatever. As soon as you have your phone with you, you’re socializing all the time. It never has to stop.
My argument is that there are certain regulatory changes that would be good. There are changes to the software that would be good, but ultimately it comes down to individual people and groups of people making conscious choices about how they want to live. And as part of those choices, kind of reject the frenzy of online media and online communication.

MO: Certainly if everyone read your book, if we could sell 330 million copies to every American, that would be progress.

NC: That would be good for me.

MO: Friends, a lot of religious holidays coming up in the next two weeks, they include St. George’s Day as celebrated by the Serbian Orthodox Church and also by the Bulgarian honoring the martyr, St. George. May 12th is Vesak, or Buddha Day, which is observed by Buddhist worldwide. It commemorates the birth, enlightenment, and death of the Buddha. On May 15th, Jews around the world celebrate Lag BaOmer. It is a holiday marking the 33rd day of the omer, which is the 49 days between Passover and Shavuot. Or as the Yiddish speakers say, shvues. Lag BaOmer is celebrated with campfires and also with singalongs. May 12th is the Feast of St. Pancras.
I know St. Pancras not as the martyr that he surely was because the saints all seem to be martyrs, but as a train station in London, which brings me to John Betjeman, the late English poet. He was widely loved in his day. I would say he’s little read outside of England now, but among his great accomplishments was saving St. Pancras station. I know this because I picked up for about a dollar a biography of John Betjeman thinking. I’ve always read his name and I’ve always wondered who he was, but I haven’t the faintest idea what he did or how he lived his life. I didn’t get all the way through the book, but I got far enough to know that he became fairly obsessed with preserving Victorian architecture. And one of his big projects was saving St. Pancras station from demolition. In honor of May Twelfth’s Feast of St. Pancras, here is John Betjeman reading “Henley on Thames”:

John Betjeman: “I see the winding water make/ A short and then a shorter lake / As here stand I, / and houseboat high / Survey the upper Thames. / By sun the mud is amber-dyed in ripples slow and flat and wide, that flap against the house-boat side / and flow away in gems. // In mud and elder-scented shade / A reach away the breach is made / By dive and shout that circles out / To Henley Tower and town; / And “Boats for hire” the rafters ring / And pink on white the roses cling / And red the right geraniums swing / In baskets dangling down. // When shall I see the Thames again? / The proud promoted gems again, / as beefy ATS/ Without their hats / Come shooting through the bridge? / And “cheerioh” and “cheeri-bye” / Across the waist of waters die, / And low the mists of evening lie / And lightly skims the Midge.”

MO: And now back to my interview with Nicholas Carr.

Alright, Nicholas Carr, author of Superbloom. I have a lightning round of questions for you. How do you make a living?

NC: I have been a freelance writer since 2003, so mainly from writing. Also, not so much after Covid, but before Covid, I also did a lot of public speaking based on what I was writing. Between those two things, I’ve been able to sustain myself economically.

MO: That is heroic. You must have very few needs or charge a lot.
If you could have any other career, I mean realistically, not like being Aquaman or an Olympic sprinter though, I don’t know what your sprinting times were, but a realistic career that would’ve been doable had you made different choices, what would it be?

NC: This is going to be a very odd answer because in some ways I’m pretty sure I would’ve made a good software programmer and I used to do a little bit of it, and I found it fascinating to make a machine do what you want it to do. And so I could certainly have imagined myself if I had shown more interest in mathematics when I was younger, becoming a software programmer.

MO: That is interesting and I don’t think so counterintuitive. I mean, you’re interested in that world. What’s a big regret you have?

NC: Way back when Apple computers seemed to be going out of business and Steve Jobs was brought back, I bought 200 shares for an obscenely low price and then made some money. But right before the iPhone came out, I decided Apple’s going to screw it up, so I’m going to sell this stock and I sold it. I’ve never gone back and calculated what it would be worth now, but it would’ve been a mountain of money. So I hate to use a monetary regret, but that really sticks in my craw.

MO: If a college student asked you for one piece of advice on living, what would you tell her?

NC: Try to be conscious of what all your senses are telling you about the world as you go through the day.

MO: Is there a song that invokes for you, an intense feeling of nostalgia?

NC: This is going to be a funny one, but I would say “Go All The Way” by The Raspberries, which was the second single I ever bought and seems to tap into what it felt like to be like a 14-year-old or whatever at the time.

MO: Okay. Now finally, I’d like you to recommend a TV show, a book, and a song or album.

NC: Can it be a movie instead of a TV show? Okay. There’s a movie that I really love that not many people have seen called Two-Lane Blacktop, directed by Monty Helman came out around 1970. It stars James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, the drummer from the Beach Boys. They play hot rodders who are driving out from Los Angeles to make money by drag racing on public streets.

MO: James Taylor, the singer?

NC: Yes, he’s the star.

MO: Was he famous yet? I know he sent his demo to Apple, right? To the Beatles, who made him famous, but around 1970, right?

NC: Yeah, it was just when that was happening. I mean, his first album came out on Apple, but it was poorly recorded, so he ended up basically rerecording it. I think the director, Monte Helman, if I’m remembering this correctly, saw a picture of James Taylor on a billboard somewhere in LA promoting his first record and said, I want that guy to be in the movie. And so that’s how it happened. It was before he became really famous, but he was known.

MO: Alright, a book?

NC: I’m going to suggest a book of poems, The Witson Weddings by Philip Larkin.

MO: For sure. Right on. And a song, or album, or musical experience?

NC: An album that kind of came out in 1967, so the same year as Sgt. Peppers, and was kind of, at least in the United States, kind of overlooked because it was in the shadow. It’s an album called Odyssey and Oracle by The Zombies.

MO: Right on. Nicholas Carr, thank you so much for your time.

NC: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

MO: Arc: The Podcast is hosted by me, Mark Oppenheimer, and I would love feedback. Please write to me at mark.o@wustl.edu. The show is produced and edited by David Sugarman. Audio Consulting by Robert “Robbie” Scaramuccia. Intern help by Caroline Coffey and Aaryan Kumar. Our head of communications at the Danforth Center is Deborah Kennard and the leadership of the Danforth Center includes Mark Valeri and Abram Van Engen. Our music is by Love Cannon Web, designed by Cause+Effect online at causexeffect.com. Until next time, I’m Mark Oppenheimer.