Read e-book online Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations PDF

A freewheeling, sharp-shooting indictment of a tech-besotted culture.

With a razor wit, Nicholas Carr cuts via Silicon Valley’s unsettlingly cheery imaginative and prescient of the technological destiny to invite a troublesome query: Have we been seduced by way of a lie? collecting a decade’s worthy of posts from his web publication, tough kind, in addition to his seminal essays, Utopia Is Creepy bargains an alternate heritage of the electronic age, chronicling its roller-coaster crazes and crashes, its blind triumphs, and its unintentional consequences.

Carr’s favourite ambitions are these zealots who think so fervently in desktops and information that they abandon logic. affordable electronic instruments are not making us the entire subsequent Fellini or Dylan. Social networks, diverting as they are, usually are not cars for self-enlightenment. And “likes” and retweets aren't going to raise political discourse. after we anticipate technologies—designed for profit—to bring a paradise of prosperity and comfort, now we have forgotten ourselves. In reaction, Carr deals looking tests of the way forward for paintings, the destiny of studying, and the increase of man-made intelligence, demanding us to determine our international anew.

In recognized essays together with “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Privacy,” Carr dissects the common sense at the back of Silicon Valley’s “liberation mythology,” exhibiting how expertise has either enriched and imprisoned us—often while. Drawing on artists starting from Walt Whitman to the conflict, whereas weaving within the most up-to-date findings from technological know-how and sociology, Utopia Is Creepy compels us to query the technological momentum that has trapped us in its movement. “Resistance is rarely futile,” argues Carr, and this publication provides the proof.