Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

Fantastic meditation on the ways society has rewired its thinking and its ways of being to our technology. A natural companion piece to The Anxious Generation, Carr wrestles with the choices and non choices that have led us to this moment. While lighter on solutions than Anxious Gen, for me Carr's additional time on the psychological and sociological causes of our social media addiction is time we'll spent.

Hard to understand how to give this engaging, deeply researched and multifaceted argument less than 4 stars. It's a very accessible introduction to the field and generously cites the authors and works on whose shoulders it stands.

Author Carr details how the psychological theory of relationships explains how device-mediated interactions, unlike face-to-face dealings, create more instances of interpersonal antipathy than ones of empathy. And this is partly due to machine-forced ruptures of individuals' privacy. So there's a link, I gather, between social media's societal divisiveness and the general problem of digital tech's gross neglect of people's privacy rights. Carr also starkly details how AI, by actually *creating* some of social media's content, may now reshape the internet and the larger world into a deepfake-soaked dystopia. Some of the other things he provides: the history of how most emailers adopted slapdash habits, paving the way for show more instant-messaging chitchat and "textspeak" to arise; a credible claim that Facebook's introduction of microtargeted "news feeds" was a critical milestone; an analysis showing that social media, far from being democratizers, are amplifiers of polarization and hostility; and the "dislocated I" effect, whereby users must take care to manage their various online identities. All important aspects of today's problematic world, splendidly laid out. show less

Lots of correlation, not a lot of causation. Carr seems to believe that every innovation in communications technology past telling stories around a campfire in a cave has made things worse. Sure, he goes after the usual soft targets of Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman, Andreesen, etc., but his rejection of technology goes far beyond AI and social media. He all but blames the telegraph for the devastation in WWI, and his innate disgust at the entire concept of virtual reality is palpable.

Despite the author's prejudice the book is still worth reading, as the current state of things obviously leaves much room for improvement, and he does a good job of laying out the problems and the challenges in finding viable solutions.