Nicholas Carr's blog
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Read 23 hours ago and current, but nothing has been published for 23 months.
Rough Type has had a twenty-year run. That seems like long enough, particularly seeing as the blog has been pretty much dormant in recent years. So this will be the last Rough Type post. But don’t shed too many tears. I’m going to continue blogging, maybe even at a faster clip, through a Substack I’ve […]
I was reading Joanna Stern’s report in the Wall Street Journal about the new AI features that Apple is rushing to complete for the iPhone 16s. (Can’t LLMs debug their own code? I thought that was a done deal.) Among the promised features is a Rewrite function that will translate your messages and other writings […]
The poppies come out every March in Walker Canyon, an environmentally sensitive spot in the Temescal Mountains seventy miles southeast of Los Angeles, but the show they put on in early 2019 was something special. Thanks to a wet winter in the normally arid region, seeds that had long lain dormant germinated, and the poppies […]
I’m not tearing up over Elon Musk’s termination, with extreme prejudice, of Twitter. Kill the blue bird, gut it, stuff it, and stick it in a media museum to collect dust. Think of all the extra time journalists will now have for journalism. But there is something ominous about a superbillionaire taking over what had […]
At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much to connect Meta’s $500 Quest 3 face strap-on for gamer-proles with Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro face tiara for elite beings of a hypothetical nature, but the devices do share one important thing in common: redundancy. Both offer a set of features that lag far behind our […]
“Liquid Death”: Whenever the metaverse gets rebranded into something more consumable, I would suggest that for its new name. It’s edgy, it’s memorable, and it hits the bullseye. Liquid Death, the edgy canned water, has already proclaimed itself, in one of its edgy TikToks, the “official water of the metaverse.”* @liquiddeath The official water of […]
Leo Marx has died, at the mighty age of 102. His work, particularly The Machine in the Garden, inspired many people who write on the cultural consequences of technological progress, myself included. As a small tribute, I’m posting this excerpt from The Shallows, in which Marx’s influence is obvious. It was a warm summer morning […]
Through deep-learning algorithms, computers are learning to simulate us — the way we look, the way we speak, the way we move, the words we use. They are becoming experts at pastiche. They collect the traces of ourselves that we leave behind online — the data of beingness — and they weave that data into […]
The metaverse promises to bring us an abundance of realities. There’ll be the recalcitrant old status-quo-ante reality — the hard-edged one that Dr. Johnson encountered when he kicked that rock to refute Bishop Berkeley’s theory of radical solipsism. (Let’s call that one “OG Reality.”) Then there’ll be Virtual Reality, the 3-D dreamscape you’ll enter when […]
In the fall of 1917, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, now in middle age and having twice had marriage proposals turned down, first by his great love Maud Gonne and next by Gonne’s daughter Iseult, offered his hand to a well-off young Englishwoman named Georgie Hyde-Lees. She accepted, and the two were wed a […]
In 1987, two years before James Beniger wrote The Control Revolution, his seminal study of the role information systems play in society, he published an article called “Personalization of Mass Media and the Growth of Pseudo-Community” in the journal Communication Research. Beniger’s subject was the shift from “interpersonal communication” to “mass communication” as the basis of […]
In “Beautiful Lies: The Art of the Deep Fake,” an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, I examine the rise and ramifications of deep fakes through a review of two books, photographer Jonas Bendiksen‘s The Book of Veles and mathematician Noah Giansiracusa‘s How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News. As Bendiksen’s work shows, […]
