Excerpted from Evgeny Morozov:
“Nicholas Carr, one of America’s foremost technology critics, is far from acknowledging defeat of any sort—in fact, he betrays no doubts whatsoever about the relevance and utility of his trade. In his latest book, The Glass Cage, Carr argues that we have failed to consider the hidden costs of automation, that our penchant for delegating mundane tasks to technology is misguided, and that we must redesign our favorite technologies in such a way that humans take on more responsibility—both of the moral and perceptual varieties—for operating in the world.
Carr makes this case using his trademark style of analysis, honed in his previous book, The Shallows. Drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience and timeless meditations from various philosophers (Martin Heidegger stands next to John Dewey), he seeks to diagnose rather than prescribe. The juxtaposition of hard science and humanities is occasionally jarring: a deeply poetic section, which quotes Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Robert Frost, is abruptly interrupted to inform us that “a study of rodents, published in Science in 2013, indicated that the brain’s place cells are much less active when animals make their way through computer-generated landscapes than when they navigate the real world.”
The Glass Cage is subtitled “Automation and Us,” and Carr tries hard to direct his critique toward the process of automation rather than technology as such. His material, however, repeatedly refuses such framing. Consider just three of the many examples that appear under “automation”: the automation of driving via self-driving cars, the automation of facial recognition via biometric technologies, and the automation of song recognition via apps like Shazam, which identify a song after just a few seconds of “listening.” They do look somewhat similar, but differences abound as well. In the first example, the driver is made unnecessary; in the second example, technology augments human capacity to recognize faces; in the third example, we create a genuinely new ability, since humans can’t recognize unknown songs. Given such diversity, it’s not obvious why automation—rather than, say, augmentation—is the right framework to understand these changes. What are we automating with the song identification app?
Carr’s basic premise is sound: a little bit of technology and automation can go a long way in enabling human emancipation but, once used excessively, they might result in “an erosion of skills, a dulling of perceptions, and a slowing of reactions.” Not only would we lose the ability to perform certain tasks—Carr dedicates a whole chapter to studying how the introduction of near-complete automation to the flight deck has affected how pilots respond to emergencies—but we might also lose the ability to experience certain features of the world around us. GPS is no friend to flaneurs. “Spell checkers once served as tutors,” he laments. Now all we get is dumb autocorrect. Here is the true poet laureate of First World problems.
Carr doesn’t try very hard to engage his opponents. It’s all very well to complain about the inauthenticity of digital technology and the erosion of our cognitive and aesthetic skills, but it doesn’t take much effort to discover that the very same technologies are also widely celebrated for producing new forms of authenticity (hence the excitement around 3-D printers and the Internet of Things: finally, we are moving from the virtual to the tangible) and even new forms of aesthetic appreciation (the art world is buzzing about the emergence of “The New Aesthetic”—the intrusion of imagery inspired by computer culture into art and the built environment). Why is repairing a motorcycle deemed more pleasurable or authentic than repairing a 3-D printer?
Carr quickly runs into a problem faced by most other contemporary technology critics (the present author included): since our brand of criticism is, by its very nature, reactive—we are all prisoners of the silly press releases issued by Silicon Valley—we have few incentives to exit the “technological debate” and say anything of substance that does not already presuppose that all communications services are to be provided by the market. It’s as if, in articulating a program, Silicon Valley had also articulated all the possible counter-programs, defining a horizon of thought that even its opponents could never transcend.
As a result, Carr prefers to criticize those technologies that he finds troubling instead of imagining what an alternative arrangement—which may or may not feature the technology in question—might be like. His treatment of self-driving cars is a case in point. Carr opens the first chapter with rumination on what it was like to drive a Subaru with manual transmission in his youth. He notices, with his usual nostalgic flair, how the automation of driving might eventually deprive us of important but underappreciated cognitive skills that are crucial to leading a fulfilling life.
This argument would make sense if the choice were between a normal car and a self-driving car. But are those really our only options? Is there any evidence that countries with excellent public transportation systems swarm with unhappy, mentally deskilled automatons who feel that their brains are underused as they get inside the fully automated metro trains? One wonders if Nicholas Carr has heard of Denmark.
Note what Carr’s strand of technology criticism has accomplished here: instead of debating the politics of public transportation—a debate that should include alternative conceptions of what transportation is and how to pay for it—we are confronted with the need to compare the cognitive and emotional costs of automating the existing system (i.e., embracing the self-driving cars that Carr doesn’t like) with leaving it as it is (i.e., sticking with normal cars). Disconnected from actual political struggles and social criticism, technology criticism is just an elaborate but affirmative footnote to the status quo.
The inherent latent conservatism of Carr’s approach is even more palpable when he writes about the automation of work. He starts from the depressing premise that we are all, somehow, born alienated, and the best way for us to overcome this alienation is by . . . working. Carr draws on research in psychology—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of “flow” is crucial to his argument—to posit that challenging, engaged work does make us happier than we realize. Its absence, on the other hand, makes us depressed:
– More often than not . . . our discipline flags and our mind wanders when we’re not on the job. We may yearn for the workday to be over so we can start spending our pay and having some fun, but most of us fritter away our leisure hours. We shun hard work and only rarely engage in challenging hobbies. Instead, we watch TV or go to the mall or log on to Facebook. We get lazy. And then we get bored and fretful. Disengaged from any outward focus, our attention turns inward, and we end up locked in what Emerson called the jail of self-consciousness. Jobs, even crummy ones, are “actually easier to enjoy than free time,” says Csikszentmihalyi, because they have the “built-in” goals and challenges that “encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it.”
Thus, as our work gets automated away, we are likely to get stuck with far too many unredeemed alienation coupons! Carr’s argument is spectacular in its boldness: work distracts us from our deeply alienated condition, so we have to work more and harder not to discover our deep alienation. For Carr, the true Stakhanovite, work is a much better drug than the soma of Huxley’s Brave New World.
As with the transportation example, something doesn’t quite add up here. Why should we take the status quo for granted and encourage citizens to develop a new ethic to deal with the problem? In the case of work, isn’t it plausible to assume that we’d get as much “flow” and happiness from doing other challenging things—learning a foreign language or playing chess—if only we had more free time, away from all that work?
Were he not a technology critic, Carr could have more easily accepted this premise. This might also have prompted him to join the long-running debate on alternative organizations of work, production, and life itself. Carr, however, expresses little interest in advancing this debate, retreating to the status quo again: work is there to be done, because under current conditions nothing else would deliver us as much spiritual satisfaction. To be for or against capitalism is not his game: he just comments on technological trends, as they pop out—in a seemingly automated fashion—of the global void known as history.
And since the march of that history is increasingly described with the depoliticized lingo of technology—“precariousness” turns into “sharing economy” and “scarcity” turns into “smartness”—technology criticism comes to replace political and social criticism. The usual analytical categories, from class to exploitation, are dropped in favor of fuzzier and less precise concepts. Carr’s angle on automated trading is concerned with what algorithms do to traders—and not what traders and algorithms do to the rest of us. “A reliance on automation is eroding the skills and knowledge of financial professionals,” he notes dryly. Only a technology critic—with no awareness of the actual role that “financial professionals” play today—would fail to ask a basic follow-up question: How is this not good news? Technology criticism is just an elaborate but affirmative footnote to the status quo.
Nicholas Carr finds himself at home in the world of psychology and neuroscience, and the only philosophy he treats seriously is phenomenology; he makes only a cursory effort to think in terms of institutions, social movements, and new forms of representation—hardly a surprise given where he starts. Occasionally, Carr does tap into quasi-Marxist explanations, as when he writes, repeatedly, that technology companies are driven by money and thus are unlikely to engage in the kind of humanistic thought exercises that Carr expects of them.
But it’s hard to understand how he can square this realistic stance with his only concrete practical suggestion for human-centered automation: to push the designers of our technologies to embrace a different paradigm of ergonomic design, so that, instead of building services that would automate everything, they would build services that put some minor cognitive or creative burden on us, the users, thus extending rather than shrinking our intellectual and sensory experiences. Good news for you office drones: your boring automated work will be made somewhat less boring by the fact that you’ll have to save the file manually by pressing a button—as opposed to having it backed up for you automatically.
This user-producer axis exhausts Carr’s political imagination. It also reveals the limitations of his techno-idealism, for his proposed intervention assumes, first, that today’s users prefer fully automated technologies because they do not know what’s in their best interest and, second, that these users can convince technology companies that redesigning their existing products along Carr’s suggestions would be profitable. For if Carr is sincere in his belief that technology companies are driven by profit, there’s no other way around it: he is either a cynic for advocating a solution that he knows wouldn’t work, or he really thinks that consumers can renounce their love of automation and demand something else from technology companies.
Carr firmly believes that our embrace of automation comes from confusion, infatuation, or laziness—rather than, say, necessity. “The trouble with automation,” he explains, “is that it often gives us what we don’t need at the cost of what we do.” In theory, then, we can all live without relying on the wonders of modern technology: we can cultivate our cognitive and aesthetic skills by ditching our GPS units, by cooking our own elaborate dishes, by making our own clothes, by watching our kids instead of relying on apps (au pairs are so last century). What Carr fails to mention is that all of these things are much easier to do if you are rich and have no need to work. Automation—of cognition, emotion, and intellect—is the intolerable price we have to pay for the growing corporatization of everyday life. Thus, there’s a very sinister and disturbing implication to be drawn from Carr’s work—namely, that only the rich will be able to cultivate their skills and enjoy their life to the fullest while the poor will be confined to mediocre virtual substitutes—but Carr doesn’t draw it. Here again we see what happens once technology criticism is decoupled from social criticism. All Carr can do is moralize and blame those who have opted for some form of automation for not being able to see where it ultimately leads us. How did we fail to grasp just how fun and stimulating it would be to read a book a week and speak fluent Mandarin? If Mark Zuckerberg can do it, what excuses do we have?
“By offering to reduce the amount of work we have to do, by promising to imbue our lives with greater ease, comfort, and convenience, computers and other labor-saving technologies appeal to our eager but misguided desire for release from what we perceive as toil,” notes Carr in an unashamedly elitist tone. Workers of the world, relax—your toil is just a perception! However, once we accept that there might exist another, more banal reason why people embrace automation, then it’s not clear why automation à la Carr, with all its interruptions and new avenues for cognitive stimulation, would be of much interest to them: a less intelligent microwave oven is a poor solution for those who want to cook their own dinners but simply have no time for it. But problems faced by millions of people are of only passing interest to Carr, who is more preoccupied by the non-problems that fascinate pedantic academics; he ruminates at length, for example, on the morality of Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner.
Carr’s oeuvre is representative of contemporary technology criticism both in the questions that it asks and the issues it avoids. Thus, there’s the trademark preoccupation with design problems, and their usually easy solutions, but hardly a word on just why it is that startups founded on the most ridiculous ideas have such an easy time attracting venture capital. That this might have something to do with profound structural transformations in the American economy—e.g., its ever-expanding financialization—is not a conclusion that today’s technology criticism could ever reach.”