Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

by Nicholas Carr

With a razor wit, Nicholas Carr cuts through Silicon Valley’s unsettlingly cheery vision of the technological future to ask a hard question: Have we been seduced by a lie? Gathering a decade’s worth of posts from his blog, Rough Type, as well as his seminal essays, Utopia Is Creepy offers an alternative history of the digital age, chronicling its roller-coaster crazes and crashes, its blind triumphs, and its unintended consequences.


Carr’s favorite targets are those zealots who believe so fervently in computers and data that they abandon common sense. Cheap digital tools do not make us all the next Fellini or Dylan. Social networks, diverting as they may be, are not vehicles for self-enlightenment. And “likes” and retweets are not going to elevate political discourse. When we expect technologies—designed for profit—to deliver a paradise of prosperity and convenience, we have forgotten ourselves. In response, Carr offers searching assessments of the future of work, the fate of reading, and the rise of artificial intelligence, challenging us to see our world anew.


In famous essays including “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Privacy,” Carr dissects the logic behind Silicon Valley’s “liberation mythology,” showing how technology has both enriched and imprisoned us—often at the same time. Drawing on artists ranging from Walt Whitman to the Clash, while weaving in the latest findings from science and sociology, Utopia Is Creepy compels us to question the technological momentum that has trapped us in its flow. “Resistance is never futile,” argues Carr, and this book delivers the proof.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Essays, Science, Psychology, Audiobook, Politics

384 pages, Hardcover

First published September 6, 2016

About the author

Nicholas Carr is the bestselling author of several books on how technology shapes our lives and thoughts, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Shallows and the new Superbloom. His other books include The Glass Cage, Utopia Is Creepy, The Big Switch, and Does IT Matter? Former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, Nick writes for The Atlantic, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Wired, among other publications. He lives in Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Jason Pettus · Rating 1 out of 5]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

To be clear, I would've loved to have read a book of insightful, thought-provoking essays about how everything we assume about the internet is in fact wrong, as Nicholas Carr promises with his new book, Utopia is Creepy and Other Provocations; so what a profound shame, then, that what this book actually consists of is a bunch of reprints of three-page blog posts from Carr's website, a whopping 95 of them in less than 350 pages, giving us the same kind of puerile, surface-level-only look at issues that he claims is what's ruining the internet in general these days. That's an entirely avoidable situation in this case, which is what makes this such a particular tragedy; for the Pulitzer-nominated Carr is obviously a smart guy, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review and a regular contributor to places like The New York Times and Wired, and I suspect he could've delivered a really intelligent book if he had just spent a year actually writing one from scratch, one that slowly and methodically builds up his arguments over the course of tens of thousands of words and a coherent single book-long outline. Instead, though, he's delivered what's essentially a series of 21st-century two-minute Andy Rooney elderly rants with no real point and certainly no solutions being offered -- "Wikipedia sure is full of mistakes, amirightfolks? 'Blog' sure is a funny name, amirightfolks? Second Life sure was overhyped, amirightfolks? AMIRIGHT FOLKS, AMIRIGHT AMIRIGHT??!!" -- thus ironically being exactly guilty himself of what he's complaining about in this book, how the internet has turned all of us into short-attention-span ADD morons who no longer possess the mental skills to follow a rational and extensively plotted argument. A book that would've already been a profoundly disappointing read on its own, it becomes even doubly so by this self-defeating, cloud-yelling aspect of its writing style; and instead of it being merely a book I don't recommend reading, today I am actively suggesting to stay far away from it, if for no other reason so to discourage publishers to continuing to offer up this kind of treacly pablum as proper intellectual fare.

Out of 10: 2.3

[Shannan · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is hard the give a single star rating to a collection. It starts in a time where MySpace was a thing and moves right up to Trump’s adept use of social media.
There is some really poignant writing about how we are changing and plenty of philosophical jumping points whether you agree or disagree. There are some great essays that hit 5 stars but I’m not sure how much I recall. Great starting points for conversations. I think an English teacher could use this in class to provoke students to dissect their world.

[Sean · Rating 2 out of 5]

More a compendium of blogs and articles than a full length book such as Nicholas Carr's The Glass Cage, Utopia is Creepy explores the often pernicious effects of technology on humanity and the individual psyche. The book only receives two stars because it does not envelop the reader in a unified overarching narrative but instead jumps from sub-theme to sub-theme. Overall, though, Carr lays out nicely the difference between a life on the screen vs one off with his trenchant commentary such as the following from page 49 on the means of creativity:


I was flipping through the new issue of the Atlantic today when I came across this nugget from Ray Kurzweil: "The means of creativity have now been democratized. For example, anyone with an inexpensive high-definition video camera and a personal computer can create a high-quality, full-length motion picture." Yep. Just as the invention of the pencil made it possible for anyone to write a high-quality, full-length novel. And just as that saw in my garage makes it possible for me to build a high-quality, full-length chest of drawers.


Or, on facebook's business model from page 107:

The desire for privacy is strong; vanity is stronger.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a collection of shallow populist articles. A Facebook page means you are a digital sharecropper for example. Who cares the poor sharecroppers were mostly black and where living in terrible conditions? I doubt Carr is a racist. He is simply an attention whore throwing words the same way a toddler throws tantrums.

[Montse Gallardo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Recopilación de las entradas del blog del autor, y algún que otro artículo breve, sobre las tecnologías y las redes sociales.

Una crítica ácida, casi antitecnológica (pero no), muy divertida en ocasiones del sonambulismo tecnológico en el que estamos inmersos, que nos lleva a aceptar como bueno cualquier avance de las tecnologías, especialmente de las de comunicación, y mucho más concretamente, las redes sociales.

Nos presenta Carr las promesas de un mundo nuevo y mejor que hacen los grandes gurús de las tecnologías (Jobs, Bezos, Zuckerberg...) y va desmontando sus argumentos, bien porque son de unos niñatos caprichosos que no conocen el mundo real (los fundadores de Google; al Zuckerger directamente lo considera estúpido), bien porque son de unos empresarios que sólo buscan enriquecerse, aun a costa de deteriorar la vida de las personas (obviamente, sin vendérselo así)

Como toda recopilación, es irregular. Algunos capítulos son ingeniosos, informativos, divertidos. Otros ya están obsoletos, o son excesivamente técnicos o sueltan demasiada mala baba que se percibe más personal que divulgativa.

En cualquier caso, es una lectura interesante que -en algunos momento- te lleva a plantearte si no deberías dejar el móvil apagado, en un cajón, durante una temporada. Muy, muy larga...

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

…and regards to Captain Dunsel.

Utopia Is Creepy is a collection of blog posts and essays touching on various aspects (some good but most problematic, at best) of our increasing reliance on technology. Carr isn’t a Luddite; he’s capable of seeing the benefits that high-tech has brought to the world. (“Technology is as crucial to the work of knowing as it is to the work of production” [p. 299].) His concern – like the actual Luddites – centers around the fear that humans are becoming servants of our tools, tailoring our lives to the needs of the machines.

Reducing everything to quantifiable (and monetizable) bits of data lessens the scope of human imagination and thought, and we are becoming much the poorer for it.

Browsing through the book preparing this review, I easily found cogent opinions about modern society, such as:

One of the keynotes of technological advance is its tendency, as it refines a tool, to remove real human agency from the tool’s workings. In its place, we get an abstraction of human agency that represents the general desires of the masses as deciphered, or imposed, by the manufacturer and the marketer. Indeed, what tends to distinguish the advanced device from the primitive device is the absence of generativity. It’s worth remembering that the earliest radios were broadcasting devices as well as listening devices and that the earliest phonographs could be used for recording as well as playback. (p. 77)

But it’s in the essay “The Love that Lays the Swale in Rows” where Carr most clearly expresses his misgivings. The title is from Robert Frost’s “Mowing,” a poem that – on its surface – describes a man scything his way through a field of grass but reflects what our relationship to technology should be. What modern technology all too often is, is alienating. It deprives us of agency in our drive to create a world of material comfort and instant gratification.

If the source of our vitality is, as Emerson taught us, “the active soul,” then our highest obligation is to resist any force, whether institutional or commercial or technological, that would enfeeble or enervate the soul….

Automation severs ends from means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing. As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face an existential question: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want? (p. 313)

As usual, one can turn to Star Trek for an apt scene (or two) that distills the problem – this from the TOS episode “The Ultimate Computer.” The M-5 has just completed a war games exercise and Kirk asks Spock for an assessment:

KIRK: Evaluation of M-5 performance. It’ll be necessary for the log.

SPOCK: The ship reacted more rapidly than human control could have maneuvered her. Tactics, deployment of weapons, all indicate an immense sophistication in computer control.

KIRK: Machine over man, Spock? It was impressive. It might even be practical.

SPOCK: Practical, Captain? Perhaps. But not desirable. Computers make excellent and efficient servants, but I have no wish to serve under them. Captain, the starship also runs on loyalty to one man, and nothing can replace it, or him.

And earlier, Kirk expresses his misgivings to Dr. Daystrom:

There are certain things men must do to remain men. Your computer would take that away.

Amen to that.

I mostly agree with Carr. I too have misgivings at the prospect of the nightmare utopias that the Ray Kurzweil’s of the world want to impose on us. My optimistic side hopes that we’re just going through the awkward phase of adopting and incorporating new things into our lives. Every revolution has its doomsayers – Plato feared that writing would ruin one’s ability to memorize. While it did largely eliminate oral culture, literacy also opened up exciting new intellectual and spiritual vistas. Perhaps a few generations on, our descendants (who may or may not be “human” as we define the term) will celebrate the stunning scientific, intellectual and aesthetic achievements that computerization and its related technologies brought (while bemoaning the stultifying effects of the latest cultural revolution).

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh look someone printed out the internet and put it into a book! and what is the book about? The internet. So meta, much irony. Seriously this book is great and thought provoking, and with short sections since it's mostly blog posts, great for those of us with short attention spans.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really just a collection of blog posts. The book is uneven but occasionally engaging.

Readers who enjoy blogs will enjoy this but fans of essays may be disappointed.

Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars

[C. Hollis Crossman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nicholas Carr is easily the most important popular voice in current discussions of digital technology and its effects on ourselves and society. It's not that he's the most technologically advanced or the most philosophical thinker around, it's that he's the most balance—he doesn't view the Internet and its many ancillary byproducts as wholly evil or wholly good. Instead, he sees digital technology as a thing to be carefully considered before giving it (and by necessity its inventors and gatekeepers) our unqualified allegiance and access to our every impulse.

That access is all too often used, as Carr demonstrates time and again, to make a cadre of rich guys even richer, at the expense of our bank accounts and our personal privacy. The utopia that is being built by the masters of Silicon Valley is contingent on the masses proffering their freedom of choice to a chosen few who promise to make life much easier for all involved. In their scenario, however, "easier" means untrammeled by the need for autonomous decision-making or any of the work that makes us truly human and gives us dignity and meaning. The glazed-eyed hordes of smartphone-using digital zombies guys like Ray Kurzweil imagine trooping into the future are indeed creepy, despite (or maybe because) such a scene is so often lauded by today's technophiles.

Most of the short essays in this volume were harvested from Carr's blog "Rough Type" and variously reworked to form a kind of flow of ideas. The longer essays from the back of the book have been previously published in places like the New Yorker and The New Republic, or in earlier books written by Carr. Some of them are quite funny ("Underwearables"), some are profound ("The Love That Lays the Swale in Rows"), some are terrifying ("Max Levchin Has Plans for Us"), and all of them are well-thought-out and impeccably written. Whether you agree with Carr's various theses or not, you'll likely enjoy reading this book.

It is an important one. Carr is one of the few even-keeled consciences of the digital pioneers and the rest of us caught in the seemingly unstoppable rush of digital proliferation. What is the world we are creating and allowing ourselves to live in? he demands. Is it a good world? Is it partly good and partly bad? Do we have any moral obligations to ourselves or future generations? How is the digital landscape changing not only the way we conduct and understand ourselves, but how we actually are in our psychological and physical being? Carr asks these questions and many more like them, all very important, and all of them questions we should contemplate as individuals and as a broader community—locally, nationally, globally, and online.

[Peter Geyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Last night I saw an advertisement of sorts for one of those machines that talk to you and apparently organise your life. The context was the Australian ABC show Gruen, which discusses, critiques and also satirises marketing and advertising, fronted by the comedian Wil Anderson and with panellists from various relevant companies who are essentially explainers, assessors and critiquers.

The person being organised and apparently liking it was Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and shown alongside his recent appearance before a committee of the US Congress. His presentation strategy and what he said was systematically dismantled by a number of the panellists.

In a not dissimilar vein, Nicholas Carr writes about the current technological age as a kind of insider critiquer and this book is a collection of observations and comments from blogs or conventional publications, essentially chronologically organised but also in sections from his blog, from tweets and some longer pieces. He's not opposed to technology per se, but critical of the claims and assertions made by its developers and proponents.

The neobehaviourism of this organisations is routinely described (not necessarily using that term), and the nature of algorithms is one of the things examined in this context as eliminators of informality, which is an interesting way to put it. I would have used the terms eliminating spontaneity and encouraging unconsciousness, but then I have a particular bent.

There's an interesting critique of comments about the music business regarding the development of LP records which displays a good deal of knowledge rather than opinion, of personal interest.

It took me a while to read this book, as there were other things were going on, and some pieces were better than others, although Carr is clearly an excellent writer. Less successful were the Twitter section and a couple of the longer pieces, the last of which I failed to finish.

Having said that, this book provides some interesting points and astute observations on the who what and why of the digital age, past present and to come from a person who is a digital user but not blindly so.

[Abdul Alhazred · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's a blog post collection from the early 00s. For those of us who were there 3000 years ago you'll be struck by thoughts like "oh yeah MySpace existed" or "Second Life was a thing". But there's no deep insight on display here, it's exactly as shallow and surface level as he himself complains about in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains - or even in blog posts contained in this book.

This could have been elevated somewhat if Carr returned to comment upon his own blog thoughts, maybe reflect on how things actually turned out, what was prescient and what was laughably gullible regarding the future of technology. But he doesn't. Blog post books were a scourge for a while and seemingly existed just to fulfil some contractual obligation to publishers. Much like you wouldn't want to see a podcast (a rare holdout from this age) transcript in book form, blog posts aren't elevated by the book format.

[Michael Doub · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had read The Shallows by this author several years ago ( which was very good), as well as his essay, Is Google Making Us Stupid? The first two thirds of this book were just reprints of some of his blog posts. This was fine, but lacked the depth of the final third of the book, which consisted of reprints of some of his essays and articles. If I could give this book two ratings I'd have given the first part three stars and the second part four. As s person with a somewhat wary view of technology, particularly social media, I appreciated his insights into how we have substituted breadth for depth with our glib online posts and our often shallow tweets. My favorite section was The Snapchat Candidate in which he explored the nature of the 2016 political campaign (prior to its outcome). Favorite line: "What Trump understands is that the best way to dominate the online discussion is not to inform but to provoke." I also enjoyed his exploration of man's relationship to his tools and how today's digital tools continually push us inward - we are "alone online, but we are alone together." I'm not a Luddite and like technology as much as the the next guy, but I do appreciate the author's thoughtful questioning of our unquestioning acceptance that technology.

[Pam Bedore · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book!

It's a series of short vignettes about technology published in various places earlier in the century. The ten+ years that have passed since the original publication has only made each short essay more important to consider.

I always enjoy Carr's writing style--journalistic, wryly humorous, and filled with allusions to literature that make clear what I believe in my own work: our understanding of science is often enhanced by literature that may or may not be directly addressing scientific or technological change.

There are many highly teachable pieces here: "Grand Theft Attention" and "The Medium is McLuhan" would work especially well in cultural theory classes. The final essay, "The Daedalus Mission" is as tragic as it is important.

Highly recommend. And I'm delighted to see that Carr has 20 books. I've only read 3 or 4 so far, but will keep reading.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've never read his blog but this is mostly a collection of blog posts.

Felt a little like I was wasting my time at first, reading 10-year-old blog posts, but I stuck with it and most of his stuff was fairly timeless.

He's a consistent perspective: Namely, that maybe this Internet-fueled future we're all welcoming isn't always perfect.

He has a book I haven't read called The Shallows and his most frequent target seems to be excessive screen time and what it does to our brains and our world. Hard to argue with any of it.

And he's not shrill or unnecessarily partisan to his cause. He admits when maybe he might be overreacting, but it's still nice to hear this perspective when the zeitgeist is always that the next tech advance is a welcome boon.

[Professor Shredder · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of prior Carr essays. I would assume that many are available online, such as his infamous “Is Google Making Us Dumber” essay. In that sense, nothing here is really new. BUT! The book is still well worth reading nonetheless as it collects Carr essays from 2005 to 2016, spanning the modern era of Web 2.0 and social (really, antisocial) media. It’s like reading snapshots of real-time reactions to the media that promised utopia and later ate democracy. As always, Carr is a great read. This time, you get to see the development of his thinking over a tumultuous decade.

[Valentín Serrano García · Rating 3 out of 5]

Recomendable como lectura ligera, aunque un poco desfasada en algunos de los artículos. Si, como es mi caso, leíste Superficiales y Atrapados (ésta segunda, más floja), no te añadirá demasiado, aunque Carr rezuma ingenio y humor, siempre con tono periodístico.

Para obras de más enjundia al respecto (aun accesibles) tras leer Superficiales, mejor leer, por ejemplo a James Williams (Clics contra la humanidad). Para aproximaciones más filosóficas, Zizek (Hegel y el cerebro conectado). Volver a ciertos clásicos también recompensa: Telepolis de Echevarría, La Bomba informática de Virilio...

[ana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesante recopilación de entradas que relatan reflexiones y hechos desde el inicio de la Web 2.0. Algunos de ellos resultan interesantes, y otros cuantos se desvían bastante del tema principal y cohesión global del conjunto.

Reflexiones puntuales interesantes y algunas otras no tanto. Me reí sobre todo con el capítulo de la última parte que habla de la biotecnología como una disciplina que busca optimizar al ser humano y convertirlo en un ciborg. Tono humorístico general muy bien recibido.

[Gabriel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have loved Nicholas Carr's previous works including the Shallows. This was more of a clip show, as it highlighted his blog posts over the years as he talks, and rants his way through how technology and the internet are changing the way we interact and think. Interesting from a certain perspective, but you are better off reading his more focused works.

[Biggus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Loved The Shallows, liked The Glass Cage, but by the end of this one, I wanted to strangle the narrator. Some of his pronunciations were cringe worthy, and these were normal words! As for the book itself... the short article format just didn't do it for me, and the longer ones towards the end were painful. Read The Shallows instead of this one.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting thoughts. Maybe it's hindsight, but I found that it suffered from a lot of scaremongering and didn't provide many solutions. For example, there's a blog post about reading attention spans getting shorter. Carr makes it a huge deal, but he never seemed to suggest just stepping back from social media for a while and getting your brain used to it again. He makes it act like everyone is forced to their phones. And sure, you can't really take a proper break from the internet anymore, but you can make a concerted effort to at least build up your attention span again. I've had to, and many other people I know have as well.

I haven't read any of his other works so many they're more well thought-out than his blog posts, but nonetheless this has some interesting ideas and calls to action.

[Nancy Herrera · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is good for anyone who wants to take a look at the technology we use in a critical lens.

[Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not sure why I never heard of Mr. Carr before, but his essays really make me think.

In all honestly, I skipped around this book, not reading some of the older works.

[Julene · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting compilation of Carr's blog posts over the years. Quotable, to be sure.

[Bari Dzomba · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just a bunch of random blogs and news articles.

[Mary · Rating 2 out of 5]

Prolix discussion of the downside of the tech explosion. Seems to have been covered elsewhere.

[Jeffrey Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just a collection of old essays.

[Tracy Brower · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of essays, articles, and blog posts. Older ones (2005, 2007) felt very dated. Also easy to see content from other books that got its start in these venues. Interesting but not riveting.

[junyan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Big disappointment. Why am I wasting my time listening to some lame sexist jokes

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hit or miss for me. Apparently this book is a collection of blog posts or articles, so some are better/ more interesting than others.

[Margaret Heller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually spent the last 7 years reading this book but it was important to read the end of it in 2024 turns out.