The Writings of Scriptor Adorans

Book in the spotlight: Superbloom by Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr is the Cassandra of the digital age. In 2010 he published The Shallows, a contrarian bestseller that examined the deleterious effects of the Internet on our brains. In Superbloom, his latest book, Carr examines the deleterious effects of digital technology on our souls. The first two-thirds of the book, whose title was inspired by a 2019 social media craze surrounding a Californian poppy phenomenon, outline the evolution from the option-rich mass media era to the digital one, in which texting apps have supplanted all the other options to become the only medium. While there are interesting morsels for trivia enthusiasts (it was edifying to learn that the term “social media” was coined by a 19th-century sociologist beset by stomach problems, and many readers will be relieved to learn that the propensity to look at their own images on Zoom is not a sign of narcissism), the material is aridly presented and has little new to impart. Even Carr’s welcome discussion of the atrophy of language, one of the major adverse effects of textspeak and a personal hobbyhorse of mine, is not original. Carr is surely right to observe that, by promoting brevity and linguistic minimalism (“the curt style of the engineer and the mathematician”), digital technology impoverishes language and, by extension, thought. But this has been known for years; at the risk of tooting my own horn, I wrote an essay about it back in 2012. For the first 150 pages or so, Carr is preaching to the choir. 

The last part of Superbloom, however, redeems a book that would have worked much better as an essay. Focusing on the current moment, Carr takes aim at virtualization and artificial intelligence (AI), those twin basilisks of our time. He enumerates the pernicious effects of the new technologies. They make people lonelier, including those who choose to opt out of the technologies, since withdrawing is tantamount to invisibility. They erase boundaries and do away with the compartmentalization of social situations in time and space by exposing individuals to a large number of people on a constant basis, thus undermining the cohesion of the individual’s psychological state. They deprive people of the ability to have a variety of selves, reducing them to one single identity. They feed the so-called seeker instinct by perpetually bombarding people with novelty, leaving no room for the kind of contemplation and introspection required for art, science, and philosophy. They blur the line between the real and the fake, causing people to doubt reality itself, and making them more susceptible to mythmaking and conspiracy theories. They are even capable of propagating disease through “mass social media-induced illness,” a term introduced by a group of German psychiatrists following a bizarre outbreak of Tourette’s syndrome in various countries among fans of popular social media influencers. And of course they are inimical to privacy. In short, digital technology produces anomy and mental misery, redefining the human experience and making us a lot less human in the process.

You might say that these criticisms are not particularly new either, and you’d be right. What makes this part so interesting is that Superbloom is a post-pandemic book, and Covid inevitably makes cameo appearances throughout – not as often as I would have liked, but you take what you can get. The global reaction to the pandemic can only be understood in the context of digital technology, which defined the collective response to the virus. Carr grasps the relationship between the new technologies and the pandemic measures. He correctly points out that when the real world went into abeyance in March of 2020, the virtual one exploded with action. He notes that “the metaphor of contagion has always shaped the way we think and talk about social media,” things “go viral” in the digital world, and the word “influencer” has the same etymological root as influenza (conspiracy theorists will be delighted to learn that, long before Covid, Mark Zuckerberg chose Pandemic as a code name for Facebook’s automated advertising system). Carr observes that “a full fifteen years before the arrival of Covid, people were already choosing lockdown” – a discovery I made myself a few months into the lockdown, when a woman in her twenties told me most of her life had been virtual for a while and the “new normal” had had minimal impact on her. Unfortunately, while Carr makes all the right connections, he doesn’t always translate them into the right conclusions. He writes:

If there was anything fortunate about Covid’s arrival, it was the timing. The disease appeared after social media had already trained us in the art of social distancing. Our phones and laptops proved our most valuable pieces of personal protective equipment.

This is putting the cart before the horse. It wasn’t that the lockdowns arrived, and we then used “our most valuable pieces of personal protective equipment” to protect ourselves; the personal protective equipment was what made the lockdowns possible. Covid was destructive, but it is highly unlikely millions of people would have been confined to their homes if they were unable to work remotely and have virtually everything dropped off on their doorstep. Covid has claimed between 19.1 and 36 million lives worldwide – about 0.24-0.45% of the global population. The Spanish Flu killed anywhere between one and five percent of the global population, but the measures taken against the Spanish Flu were nowhere near as egregious as what we saw during Covid (for those interested in something more recent, check out the Hong Kong Flu of 1968, now virtually forgotten). The Covid pandemic was the first one to have taken place against the backdrop of social media – if symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome can spread sociogenically, then surely so can mass hysteria, and this applies as much to policymakers as to the public at large. Carr argues that “technologies of connection” tear people apart (literally the subtitle of Superbloom) and dehumanize us; the anti-Covid measures did the same. While they were designed to protect us, they struck at the essence of what it means to be human. Man is a social animal; by preventing people from seeing their loved ones for extended periods of time and condemning many to total solitude, they decoupled our physical dimension from the social one. In the name of physical safety, they drove people apart. The face mask, that ubiquitous symbol of the pandemic years, is quite perfect for the faceless age of emojis and emoticons. The pandemic turned out to be just the pandemic for our times. We will never know whether the measures had the intended results, though I suspect the answer would diverge markedly from consensus opinion.

The collective reaction to the Covid pandemic was a harbinger of the redundancy of man with which AI threatens us. Featuring eerily empty public spaces and “social distancing” protocols, the pandemic was a civilizational trial run for the world prefigured in Superbloom. Carr – who, as a regular contributor to such august publications as the Atlantic and New York Times, is as mainstream as it gets – mentions a strange but fascinating 2021 interview that would be grist for the mill for anyone who likes to imagine the world is ruled by a shadowy cabal of plutocrats. The interviewee, Marc Andreessen, is almost a postcard villain. Fast-talking and intensely smart, with a balding egg-shaped pate, Andreessen was the man behind the first Internet browser and, through a venture capitalist company, invested in just about every social media company that is now a household name. He is on the Forbes list of billionaires. Yet he is not as well known as some of the other tech moguls, and the interview, given to an obscure Substacker when the pandemic was in full swing, went virtually unnoticed. Fortunately, Carr unearths it for the reader’s benefit, and with good reason – the interview offers a fascinating glimpse of how some of the top digital technology minds see our future. It is worth quoting Andreessen at length: 

A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. These are also *all* of the people who get to ask probing questions like yours. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege – their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.

The Reality Privileged, of course, call this conclusion dystopian, and demand that we prioritize improvements in reality over improvements in virtuality. To which I say: reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build – and we are building – online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.

Here’s a thought experiment for the counterfactual. Suppose we had all just spent the last 15 months of COVID lockdowns *without* the Internet, without the virtual world. As bad as the lockdowns have been for people’s well-being – and they’ve been bad – how much worse would they have been without the Internet? I think the answer is clear: profoundly, terribly worse. (Of course, pandemic lockdowns are not the norm – for that, we’ll have to wait for the climate lockdowns.)

In this revelation from Marc, the world will be divided into two groups: reality-privileged elites (of whom Andreessen is one, naturally, along with the Substack interviewer he deftly flatters) enjoying rich, fulsome lives, and indigent masses that must make do with the ersatz existence of the digital world because they are unable to afford the “quote-unquote real world.” Far from a bad thing, Andreessen believes that this is a fantastic way of resolving economic inequality (note that, like Carr, apropos of the Covid lockdowns he also confuses cause and effect). Andreessen’s vision sounds like a dystopian nightmare to me; even so, I must admit that there is a certain logic to it. The world’s population has almost doubled in the past forty years, while available resources have not. Scientists promise that climate change will be a catastrophe if we don’t change our way of life; if their doomsday predictions are correct (a big if), policymakers will be tempted to disincentivize, if not curtail, mass tourism and meat consumption (the production of meat has a greater carbon footprint than air travel). As if climate change weren’t enough, AI threatens to lay waste to scores of jobs, and should it fail to produce new jobs to replace the ones it will have made obsolete, vast swathes of the population might find themselves, economically speaking, redundant. In that scenario, elites will need to reckon with the prospect of large numbers of idle and potentially restive citizens, and with the question of what to do with them. The idea of migrating the masses to the digital world to keep them at bay makes sense – especially to those who created that digital world and benefited from it. 

If Andreessen is right, the future is inauspicious for most of us. People will spend their time in a virtual universe, where they will eat synthetic meat, consume AI-produced entertainment, travel to digital replicas of world-famous destinations, and socialize with other “reality-deprived” unfortunates. The “new normal” unveiled in March of 2020 – the one that was supposed to last two weeks while the curve flattened – will have become just that: normal. But perhaps it is not even real people the “reality-deprived” will socialize with. In a chapter called “Machines Who Speak” (note Carr’s intentional use of “who” instead of “that”), we find out about Luka, a Californian company that offers “AI companionship” for the lonely. Luka’s clients are able to engage in texting and (this one costs extra) sexting with “friendbots” that are specifically designed based on users’ individual preferences. Who would want that? A lot of people, it turns out. According to Carr, at least 10 million users had signed up at the time of writing. One female client gushingly reported she had never had a better mate, and the absence of the need to deal with a man’s corporeal presence was one of the highlights of her user experience. Another satisfied user said she was “happily retired from human relationships.” While it is hard to see how this kind of “companionship” can catch on with the general public, Luka is part of a wider trend that sees the blurring of the line between man and machine. Technology replaces human relationships as alternative lifestyles proliferate and people withdraw from traditional bonds. What they are really withdrawing from is real life. The ultimate purpose of the human race is procreation; the opposite of procreation is extinction. The growing popularity of the “child-free lifestyle” in modern society suggests that man has given up on real life. Indeed, why bother propagating in a world where humans will be redundant? It is as if modern society is rehearsing for the “reality-deprived” world promised by Andreessen et al. The Covid pandemic was its first serious drill. 

The culprit is not Andreessen, Zuckerberg, or Luka, though they make for convenient scapegoats. Ultimately, they are just giving the people what they want. That is one of Carr’s most sobering messages. Carr argues – correctly – that we have voluntarily ceded our personal autonomy to digital technology. He writes, “The technology industry is a worthy target but also an easy one. In placing the blame for the internet’s failings on social media companies, we let the net itself off the hook while also absolving ourselves of complicity.” No one is herding the public into the virtual ghetto. On the contrary, people are happy to exhibit themselves on social media, turn over their personal data to predatory companies, and wallow in the paludinal waters of virtuality; they are happy to do all that because digital technology is convenient, easy, and fun. It delivers instant gratification and rescues users from boredom. It is the ultimate path of least resistance. “People routinely say they worry about how the internet distracts them from their surroundings,” writes Carr. “But their behavior suggests the reverse is probably closer to the truth. Reality has become a distraction from media.” People have gone virtual of their own volition; no amount of regulations and legislation will protect a public that is unwilling to be protected. 

Perhaps that was one of the reasons why people embraced pandemic measures such as lockdowns so eagerly: it offered an opportunity to get away from reality. It is easy to blame the politicians who, in March of 2020, suddenly discovered they had a chance to play the Schmittian sovereign. While some of these politicians showed malice in the implementation of the measures, I am convinced that others were just desperately trying to prevent frantic crowds from hoarding toilet paper. I remember the provincial government of a Canadian province conducting a poll to sound out the population about lockdowns at one point, which should tell you all you need to know. To paraphrase Carr, people routinely say they cherish freedom, but their behavior suggests they will quickly abandon it in the right circumstances. During the pandemic, people seemed to relish the restrictions that had been placed on them, while polls indicated that many wanted the lockdowns to last longer than they did. Anecdotally, I observed that more than half the people continued to wear masks inside public spaces even after the government had lifted the mandate, and many still do in crowded settings. Where I live, the government appeared to be more willing to go back to normal life than those whose fundamental freedoms said government had trammeled upon.

A dead Russian philosopher might seem like a strange segue at this point. Nikolai Berdyaev, a prolific religious thinker who died in France in 1948, will strike most readers as a fossil. Yet I couldn’t help but think of his writings while reading Superbloom. Berdyaev would not have been surprised by the modern society Carr describes, a society that, thanks to AI, might succumb to a “revolution in perception that overthrows the shared values of reason and rationality we inherited from the Enlightenment.” Berdyaev foresaw it all, though he would have been cooler towards the Enlightenment’s “shared values of reason and rationality.” Berdyaev distinguished between culture and civilization: he viewed the former as the cultivation of the inner spirit and the latter as the cultivation of one’s external world, and he set the two in opposition. He felt that every culture carries within itself a toxin that eventually transfers the culture’s creative powers to the material improvement of the world, thus ushering in the civilization’s growth and, concomitantly, the culture’s demise. Times of cultural flourishment tend to be a terrible time in which to live, while extraordinary civilizational advancement means cultural bankruptcy (an apt way to describe modern society, one might say, even if Minerva’s owl has not yet spread her wings). Berdyaev argued that, by replacing God with man, Humanism brought about anti-Humanism – the absence of a godly image to aspire to stripped individualism of its boundaries and eroded it. As for the Enlightenment, its rejection of the divine distanced man from God and the cosmos, and contributed to his spiritual isolation. Berdyaev saw the rise of technology as a turning point in the history of man, one of its greatest revolutions, and held a dim view of what it betokened. He was convinced that in an anti-humanist framework, technology will eventually enslave us. Progress was for Berdyaev the “religion of death.” Berdyaev predicted that the apex of the modern, technology-driven civilization might lead to barbarism – but, while barbarism in bygone times came from primitiveness, the barbarism of the future will emanate from civilization itself. If, Berdyaev wrote, barbarity smelled of forests in the past, in the future it will smell of machines. He would have taken Carr’s description of our return to pre-Enlightenment mythmaking to be of a piece. Berdyaev once referred to the human face as a gateway to the soul; I can only imagine what he, with his mustache and pointy beard, would have made of face mask mandates.

The problem is not with technology as such but that, unmoored from a higher purpose, it becomes the higher purpose itself. The story of man as told by the Bible begins with the loss of paradise; man tasted from the Tree of Knowledge, and the acquisition of knowledge precipitated his fall. It would be wrong to interpret this parable as a paean to ignorance; the meaning of the episode is that, without God, knowledge confers no happiness upon man and may in fact make him miserable. This theme recurs in other places in the Bible (nor is it confined to Christianity – the story of Prometheus in Greek mythology is a variation on the theme). Some of the greatest thinkers and writers have grappled with this problem. The philosopher of Ecclesiastes: “For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow” (Ecclesiastes 1:18). Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought primitives were superior to sophisticates. The Russian playwright Griboyedov called his most famous play Woe from Wit (“wit” is an inaccurate translation; the Russian word um means “intelligence” or “smarts”). In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Prince Bolkonsky tells Pierre just before the great slaughter of Borodino that the business of living has become a burden: “I see that I understand far too much. But it is unbecoming for man to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” Bolkonsky’s affliction affected his creator; Tolstoy’s bizarre last days were a testament to the curse of knowledge. Ravelstein, the brilliant hero of the eponymously named novel by Saul Bellow, is an expert on Plato but, succumbing to AIDS, he turns from Plato and Thucydides to Scripture.

None of this is to praise ignorance. For better or for worse, knowledge is our cross to bear. But, as Berdyaev would argue, in the absence of a transcendental ideal, knowledge becomes destructive. Without a godly image to aspire to, man turns hubristic; he sets out to build Babylonian towers or fashions himself wings out of wax (if the provenance of SARS-CoV-2 was indeed a lab, a hypothesis that was originally dismissed but has now gone mainstream, we hardly need to resort to the Bible and Greek mythology to make the point). AI epitomizes hubris. It seeks to redefine human existence by making the virtual world more real than reality itself (Carr writes that making “the virtual feel more authentic than the real” is the greatest objective of AI’s architects). What’s more, man won’t need to know very much or think about anything; the all-knowing AI will have all the answers. By liberating man from the burden of knowledge, an AI tool such as ChatGPT circumvents the story of the fall of mankind, promising to restore man to his prelapsarian state. It offers the illusion of an earthly paradise. But, Berdyaev wrote, the tragedy of human history is that there can be no paradise here on earth. Every utopian ideology that sought to create one eventually ran aground. The earthly paradise of AI is less likely to turn us into denizens of God’s paradise than into dimwitted lotus-eaters.

Is this all gloom and doom? Through no fault of the authors, books like Superbloom inevitably read like something written by aging fogeys rhapsodizing about the halcyon days of yore, when the sun was brighter and the milk did not curdle as fast. All paradigm shifts give rise to apocalyptic forebodings. The automobile displaced the carriage and the coachman, but the world did not end. There is no denying it: we owe a lot to digital technology. Dating apps and online services such as Meetup have made it possible for people to meet kindred spirits in large soulless conurbations. Platforms like WhatsApp and FaceTime have helped users connect with loved ones dispersed around the globe. As a force of democratization, digital technology has greatly empowered people: whether discovering iconic music recordings, learning foreign languages, or trading stocks, we have extraordinary resources that we can access cheaply and without leaving our homes. In fact, it was thanks to digital technology that I found out about Carr’s Superbloom. Admittedly, Carr does not deny any of this. He does not propose that the baby get thrown away with the bathwater, as if such a thing were even possible. Instead, he argues for reorientation: digital technology should be a means to an end and not the end itself. Carr sees salvation in “personal, willful acts of excommunication” that will help us sail through the Scylla of Luddism on the one hand and the Charybdis of transhumanism on the other. The alternative is domination by the virtual world, in which humans will live and talk like chatbots – a world in which humans will no longer be human. Carr concludes Superbloom with a stark warning: “If you don’t live by your own code, you’ll live by another’s.” 

Carr understands that his exhortations are a cry in the wilderness. He is also aware that no one has a crystal ball when it comes to the future, all the more so in “interesting times” like ours. His tone is therefore one of resignation and cautious pessimism. Berdyaev, on the other hand, insisted his reading of history was not at all pessimistic (as history is by its nature tragic, pessimism is irrelevant as a category). The solution he proposed for man’s salvation, however, seems no more effective than Carr’s “acts of excommunication.” Berdyaev believed that the way to God is through a creative act; God waits for man to return to the cosmos through creativity. This is a somewhat nebulous concept, but it explains why Berdyaev venerated artists of genius and thought that the greatest works of art were a window on paradise. He advocated a kind of asceticism in which man will withdraw from his pursuit of worldly domination to reestablish the pursuit of a godly image and conserve his powers for a new era of cultural magnificence (“the new Middle Ages”). This all sounds very lofty but, as he wrote himself, great art is necessarily aristocratic and cannot be a universal solution; as for asceticism, good luck selling it. 

And yet, I’d like to think there is reason to be more sanguine. AI might be able to create art – that most human of concepts – and it might do so better than humans. Perhaps it already can. It is also possible, as Carr says, that consumers of entertainment will not only be unable to tell the difference between a human creator and an automated one, they won’t really care to. If so, even Berdyaev’s creative acts might have already been outsourced to machines. (Though this is not yet a certainty. Reaching the end of this piece, I asked Google Gemini to produce a review of Superbloom, weaving Covid and God into Carr’s thesis. The result was a highly polished, professional article utterly devoid of an engaging human voice.) But if people accept art created by AI, will they let it pray on their behalf in times of crisis and despair? AI can solve all of our problems, but it will not serve the problem of our mortality. Being mortal implies a longing for something greater than we are. It means looking up at the sky, contemplating the cosmos, and addressing the creator of all that splendor. The need to grapple with our mortality is what sets us apart from machines. Paradoxically, in the face of an increasingly dehumanized society, the tragedy inherent in our mortality and our need to overcome it offer hope for both humanity and our humanness.