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.
…How, the critics ask, could we be so blind to the deeply alienating effects of modern technology? Their tentative answer—that we are simply lazy suckers for technologically mediated convenience—reveals many of them to be insufferable, pompous moralizers. The more plausible thesis—that the growing demands on our time probably have something to do with the uptake of apps and the substitution of the real (say, parenting) with the virtual (say, the many apps that allow us to monitor kids remotely)—is not even broached. For to speak of our shrinking free time would also mean speaking of capital and labor, and this would take the technology critic too far away from “technology proper.”
I don’t have the breadth of knowledge to be an actual critic, so it pleases me when someone who does have it says what I’ve been saying all along. It makes me feel a bit like the kid who first noticed the emperor’s danglies swinging in the breeze.
Leaving aside the whole difficult question of whether most people actually want to live up to Carr’s ideal vision of the contemplative, literate citizen, or whether they just dimly recognize that it makes them look good to at least profess to want it, the simple fact remains that most people simply don’t have the fucking time and energy after a long day of work to relax by reading modernist literature before bed instead of scrolling aimlessly through Facebook (or to go for a walk according to the exacting standards of another elitist twat). People who actually, you know, work for a living have bigger and more urgent problems to worry about than whether their brains are getting the correct sort of exercise by sending text messages instead of composing letters with quill and inkwell.
And so fretting about one’s technological consumption habits is becoming just one more trivial class signifier, one more way for people with the money to afford artisanal, free-range, handcrafted leisure time to conspicuously signal their status. The revolution is over, or, rather, it was stillborn to begin with. The bums, as always, are the ones who lose.
March 26, 2015 @ 3:27 pm
I thought this was interesting:
"Changing public attitudes toward technology—at a time when radical political projects that technology could abet are missing—is pointless."
Because there IS a "radical" political project out there that is actually successfully using technology-Salafi Islam (ISIS et al)
March 26, 2015 @ 3:32 pm
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.”
I find this so ridiculous. Obviously, as a well-paid "critic", his understanding of how enervating most jobs are is pathetic.
I would say my situation is 180 degrees opposite of Mr. Carr.
March 27, 2015 @ 12:01 am
At my main "day" job last year, the higher-ups decided that we needed to electronically duplicate all of the paperwork we were already doing. Thus we were issued smartphones to carry, which promptly began fucking up left and right, frequently needing to be rebooted at the most inopportune times. "Here, guys. We're going to issue you these cheap pieces of shit which won't do a thing to make your job easier, quite the opposite, in fact, and as an extra, we're going to pass the cost on to you by taking a percentage out of your check every week, because, hey, what are gonna do, take it out of the board's bonuses? Hahaha! Anyway, you're welcome!"
I see now that I should actually be grateful for being given the chance to exercise my brain and use my problem-solving abilities and rudimentary IT skills to get my stupid fucking scanner working again. If it worked like it's supposed to, I might become a mindless zombie!