Four decades on from the origin of the Internet, and more than twenty years from the birth of the Web, discussions of these technologies retain a strong mystical odour. Prophecies about a coming ‘information society’, or of new technological ruptures comparable to the Industrial Revolution, have long served to conceal any realistic sense of what they most immediately are; the computer can still be portrayed as a thing of magic, a portal onto some other plane of Being; the Net even more so. Mainstream technology pundits have typically played a propaganda role for American hi-tech industries: ‘we have a moral obligation to increase the amount of technology in the world’, Wired magazine ‘Chief Maverick’ Kevin Kelly once declared, while Stewart Brand—founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue and a pioneer of the libertarian Californian tech culture with which the Net has been associated since the start—has come out as an advocate for biotech and nuclear energy.footnote1 At the same time such figures have been central in making a literary genre of the Web’s mystification.
Carried away on theological flights of fancy, they have interpreted it as a great World Mind in gestation.footnote2 Treating technical progress in the microelectronics industry as an independent variable against which humanity in general may be measured, they have extrapolated from Moore’s law—the observation that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every eighteen months—a future quantity-into-quality point of ‘singularity’ at which an ineffable synthetic superintelligence emerges, subsuming and transcending the human mind.footnote3 In a postmodern reincarnation of the divine watchmaker analogy, they have even suggested that the universe itself may not only resemble, but actually be a giant computer, predictably prompting speculations of a neo-Aristotelian cast: if the universe is a giant computer, what ‘platform’ does it run on, and which divine programmer could be its unmoved mover?footnote4 Even in its more secular mode such literature has repeatedly forecast the technological transcendence of traditional economic norms.footnote5
What is obfuscated in the mystification of these technologies is not ultimately a technical matter: it is the relations of ownership and power that lend themselves a body within this complex. Appearing primarily as technological matters, which enswathe the globe in an indifferent and universalizing technical logic, concretely these technologies are inseparable from the relations of the late 20th-century American capitalism which produced them. An analysis that pushed against this obfuscation might attempt what Adorno called a ‘reductio ad hominem’, exposing the social roots of this technological complex to grasp it as a key mediation in the reproduction of late capitalist society.
The delirium of utopian technology literature has typically summoned its opposite in a complement of naysayers and sceptics. Even in the early days of the Web, when the predominant tone was rapturous, Wired found its counterparts in bubble-bursters such as Clifford Stoll and Kirkpatrick Sale.footnote6 Today, amid increasing media noise about such things as Facebook addiction and Twitter trolling, the sceptical literature has taken on a new prominence, with books pouring from the trade presses and a steady stream of articles fretting about the deleterious effects of technology. If we are to attempt a disillusioned, materialist critique of current technology, an interrogation of such existing negative literature may be a useful step, helping us at least to deflate the grander claims of Silicon Valley’s chief boosters. Within this huge literature, the work of Nicholas Carr stands out for the clarity and breadth of historical vision he has brought to bear. With its expansive interdisciplinary scope, weaving economic and technological history, neuroscience and McLuhanist media theory, Carr’s project offers a particularly fertile basis for reflection. Carr is best known for his 2008 Atlantic Monthly article, ‘Is Google Making us Stupid?’ and its 2010 book-length extension in The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember.footnote7 In these works Carr recapitulated longstanding worries of technology commentators about the fate of the book in an electronically mediated world; the concerns of figures like Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman are buttressed by accounts of recent developments in neuroscience and research on technology use, to support an argument that the Internet may be changing the very structure of our brains for the worse. But Carr made significant interventions prior to these works—The Shallows was the third book in a steady stream of publications on technology, running over more than a decade, all exhibiting a markedly negative perspective defined primarily against the grandiose claims of the tech industry and its advocates. The coherence of this broader output makes it worth surveying as a whole.
As distinct from most technology pundits, who often have at least one foot in the tech industry, Carr’s affiliations have lain primarily with print media, high-end business journalism in particular. Following an ma in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard and a stint in management consultancy, he began his career as a professional technology sceptic while employed in a senior editorial capacity at the Harvard Business Review. Carr joined the journal in 1997, just as the dot.com bubble was beginning to inflate. By 1998 he was already writing on the potential ill effects of the new economy on the inner lives of individuals and companies. Alongside a generic business journalism portfolio, Carr covered the destabilizing potential of email for organizations, the corrosive effects of the contemporary labour process on individuals’ characters, the effects of information piracy, the ‘hypermediation’ of economic transactions occurring on the Internet.footnote8 By 1999 he was already wondering whether ‘our days toiling in virtual companies’ might make of us ‘virtual men and women, efficient and adaptable but without substance’.
In 2003 Carr published his career-making article ‘it Doesn’t Matter’ in the Harvard Business Review. Directed at a business audience, ‘it Doesn’t Matter’ argued that information technology should not be considered a reliable source of competitive advantage, since it tended to become a mere commodity input and thus a simple operating cost for businesses. Carr had initiated the project after his editorial bullshit detector was triggered by hyperbolic claims, then common in business, about the virtues of it investment. The title was a provocation for the industry, which obligingly howled in response: Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer (Microsoft ceo and President), Paul Flessner (Microsoft Senior Vice President), Craig Barrett (Intel ceo), Brad Boston (Cisco cio), and many others felt sufficiently stung to reply to Carr’s article in tones sometimes verging on outright denunciation. A year later he had left his editorial post at the Harvard Business Review to publish an expanded version of the same argument in book form as Does it Matter? with the Harvard Business School Press.footnote9 Here Carr characterized it as an ‘infrastructural’ rather than ‘proprietary’ technology, and attempted to offer a more sober perspective by focusing on long-term social and technological trends. He set his book on a sceptical foundation: if it was so important to productivity, why had it spent four decades exerting negligible influence, before suddenly manifesting itself in the Clinton boom? Why did some industries and regions seem to benefit from it and others not? Why were the clear winners from technological development confined to a small set of companies while it appeared to have had a negative or limited effect on the rest? There seemed to be—as economists had been noting for decades—a certain ‘trouble with computers’ when it came to productivity figures.footnote10
On an abstract political-economic level, the extensive argumentation of Does it Matter? was a sledgehammer for a rather small nut: it is a truism that no individual company will succeed in securing for itself significant long-term advantage over competitors solely through the purchase of goods that are also available to those same competitors. But the burden of Carr’s book was to provide an integrated economic and historical elaboration of the dynamics through which it had been increasingly commoditized, making the transition from a prohibitively expensive endeavour for most companies—something only taken on at great risk by particular capitals in pioneering efforts, such as J. Lyons & Co’s late 1940s leo (Lyons Electronic Office)—to an increasingly standardized, widely available, mass-produced good with a rapidly deflating price tag coupled to its exponentially improving performance.footnote11 With this commoditization, Carr argued, it had made the transition from a particular asset of the individual company to something ‘shared’ by companies, a commodity generally available to all. In the process it had become a standard aspect of infrastructure, a prerequisite for most businesses; it was thus clearly meaningless to appeal to it spending as a primary basis for ‘competitive advantage’.