Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog

Screenage wasteland

Fri, 25 May 2012 13:59:10 -0500

In 1993, the band Cracker released a terrific album called Kerosene Hat - the opening track, "Low," was an alternative radio staple - and I became a fan. I remember checking out the group's message board on America Online at the time and being pleasantly surprised to find the two founding members - David Lowery and Johnny Hickman - making frequent postings. Lowery, who had earlier been in Camper Van Beethoven, turned out to be one of the more tech-savvy rock musicians. He'd been trained as a mathematician and was as adept with computers as he was with guitars. When the Web came along, he and his bands soon had a fairly sophisticated network of sites, hosting fan conversations, selling music, promoting gigs. In addition to playing, Lowery runs an indie label, operates a recording studio, produces records for other bands, teaches music finance at the University of Georgia, and is married to a concert promoter. He knows the business, and much of his career has been spent fighting with traditional record companies. That's all by way of background to a remarkable talk that Lowery gave in February at the SF MusicTech Summit, a transcript of which has been posted...

The hierarchy of innovation

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:11:56 -0500

"If you could choose only one of the following two inventions, indoor plumbing or the Internet, which would you choose?" -Robert J. Gordon Justin Fox is the latest pundit to ring the "innovation ain't what it used to be" bell. "Compared with the staggering changes in everyday life in the first half of the 20th century," he writes, summing up the argument, "the digital age has brought relatively minor alterations to how we live." Fox has a lot of company. He points to sci-fi author Neal Stephenson, who worries that the Internet, far from spurring a great burst of creativity, may have actually put innovation "on hold for a generation." Fox also cites economist Tyler Cowen, who has argued that, recent techno-enthusiasm aside, we're living in a time of innovation stagnation. He could also have mentioned tech powerbroker Peter Thiel, who believes that large-scale innovation has gone dormant and that we've entered a technological "desert." Thiel blames the hippies: Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost....

Social production guru, heal thyself

Fri, 11 May 2012 11:39:01 -0500

I was pleased to see that Yochai Benkler launched a blog on Monday - and, since the first (and as yet only) post was a response to my claim of victory in the Carr-Benkler Wager, I think I can even take a bit of credit for inspiring the professor to join the hurly-burly of the blogosphere. Welcome, Yochai! Long may you blog! I fear, however, that no one explained to Yochai the concept of Comments. You see, on Monday I scribbled out a fairly long reply to his post, and submitted it through his comment form. I was hoping, as a long-time social producer myself, to spur a good, non-price-incentivized online conversation. But, now five days later, my comment has not appeared on his blog. In fact, no comments have appeared. Perhaps it's a technical glitch, but since Yochai's blog is one of many Harvard Law blogs, I have to think that the Comment form is working and that the fault lies with the blogger. (I even resubmitted my comment, just in case there was a glitch with the first submission.) Memo to Yochai: social production begins at home. Fortunately, I saved a copy of my comment. So, while waiting...

FarmVille: a Gothic fantasia

Tue, 08 May 2012 16:13:17 -0500

"You built it yourself, with play-labor, but politically it’s a slum." -Bruce Sterling 1 Hardware is a problem. It wears out. It breaks down. It is subject to physical forces. It is subject to entropy. It deteriorates. It decays. It fails. The moment of failure can't be predicted, but what can be predicted is that the moment will come. Assemblies of atoms are doomed. Worse yet, the more components incorporated into a physical system - the more subassemblies that make up the assembly - the more points of failure the apparatus has and the more fragile it becomes. This is an engineering problem. This is also a metaphysical problem. 2 One of Google's great innovations in building the data centers that run its searches was to use software as a means of isolating each component of the system and hence of separating component failure from system failure. The networking software senses a component failure (a dying hard drive, say) and immediately bypasses the component, routing the work to another, healthy piece of hardware in the system. No single component matters; each is entirely dispensable and entirely disposable. Maintaining the system, at the hardware level, becomes a simple process of replacing...

The economics of digital sharecropping

Fri, 04 May 2012 10:11:36 -0500

With a reported 900 million active members, Facebook is, by far, the largest digital-sharecropping operation that the internet has yet produced. About one out of every eight people on the planet sharecrops for Facebook today - and their collective labor is expected to put a billion dollars of cash into CEO Mark Zuckerberg's pocket when the company goes public in a few weeks. In a 2006 post, I explained why sharecropping is such a powerful business model for social networks and other online businesses: One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It's a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It's only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale - on a web scale - that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the...

Pay up, Yochai Benkler

Tue, 01 May 2012 12:28:55 -0500

My reservoir of patience, deep as it may be, is running dry. Nearly a year has passed since the culmination of the fabled Carr-Benkler Wager, and Yochai Benkler has yet to pay his debt to me. Dude, have you heard of PayPal? I haven't even received a simple acknowledgement of my triumph. What, you ask, is the Carr-Benkler Wager? Well, that's hard to say definitively. But here's how Benkler defined it back in July of 2006, when Web 2.0 was still an innocent babe cooing happily in its mother's arms: We could decide to appoint between one and three people [that never happened] who, on some date certain - let's say two years from now, on August 1st 2008 [this was later extended to five years, so the operative date was August 1, 2011] - survey the web or blogosphere, and seek out the most influential sites in some major category: for example, relevance and filtration (like Digg); or visual images (like Flickr). And they will then decide whether they are peer production processes or whether they are price-incentivized systems. While it is possible that there will be a price-based player there, I predict that the major systems will be...

First-person hoer

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 10:56:12 -0500

Galleycat notes that a team at USC has nabbed a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to, as the grant states, "support production costs for a video game based on the writings of Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond. The player will inhabit an open, three-dimensional game world which will simulate the geography and environment of Walden Woods." This game is going to kick some serious ass. Check out the trailer: Right after that bass-fishing mission, there's a killer bean-field mission where you do battle with a gang of woodchucks using a two-handed hoe as your only weapon. I also hear that - spoiler alert - the game culminates in an insane melee with the local tax collector that begins in the Concord jail and ends in the kitchen of Emerson's house. And, no, there's no multiplayer option....

The DPLA and the quest for a universal library

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:56:56 -0500

Ever since the Library of Alexandria burned to the ground two thousand years ago, people have yearned to rebuild it. Today, thanks to the internet, the dream of a universal library seems closer to fulfillment than ever before. But as Google's ill-fated Book Search project has revealed, the challenges to creating a comprehensive online library remain great - and they have little to do with technology. In the new issue of Technology Review, I report on the latest and perhaps most ambitious effort to create "the library of utopia": the Digital Public Library of America, or DPLA. Led by Harvard luminaries, the DPLA has big plans, big names, and big contributors, but it, too, faces big obstacles, not least of which is its hesitancy to define what it wants to be. Here's a bit from the article: If you were looking for Larry Page's opposite, you would be hard pressed to find a better candidate than Robert Darnton. A distinguished historian and prize-winning author, a former Rhodes scholar and MacArthur fellow, a Chevalier in France's Légion d'Honneur, and a 2011 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the 72-year-old Darnton is everything that Page is not: eloquent, diplomatic, and embedded in...

A debate on the substance of nothing

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:50:48 -0500

Ross Andersen has a superb interview with the theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss at the Atlantic's site. Krauss's recent book A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing has, by design, kicked up a controversy. Krauss argues in the book that science is now "addressing the question of why there is something rather than nothing" and that, indeed, recent scientific discoveries in this area "all suggest that getting something from nothing is not a problem." In his afterword to the book, Richard Dawkins writes, “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages." In a New York Times review last month, the Columbia University philosopher David Albert begged to differ, writing that Krauss is "dead wrong." Albert argued that what Krauss claims is "nothing" - in short, "empty space" - is actually something and that, therefore, Krauss's explanation does not "amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing." In the Atlantic interview, Krauss calls Albert "a moronic philosopher." Fun stuff. But important stuff, too. As Andersen writes, "To see two academics, both versed in theoretical physics,...

Social networks as recreational drugs

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 16:44:52 -0500

This morning I had cause to look at Tim Carmody's tweetstream. Man, that cat can tweet. Anyway, it got me thinking about whether you might be able to categorize social networks according to their resemblance to recreational drugs. If a sharing site were an abusable substance, which abusable substance would it be? Here's my first cut: Twitter = Black Beauties [symptoms of abuse: hyperactivity; increased awareness of surroundings; increased interest in repetitive or normally boring activities; decreased appetite; decreased ability to sleep*] Facebook = Pot [symptoms of abuse: red, watery eyes; fuzzy-mindedness; inexplicable laughter; weight gain; self-absorption; suspicious changes in friendships] Pinterest = Quaaludes [symptoms of abuse: slowed heart rate; drowsiness; indiscriminate displays of affection; regrettable decisions; stupidity] YouTube = Cocaine [symptoms of abuse: dilated pupils; accelerated heart rate; public blathering; manic episodes; impotence] MySpace = LSD [symptoms of abuse: colorful hallucinations; bad taste in clothes; psychosis] Google+ = Ambien [symptoms of abuse: sleep, drooling]...

Technology and culture: a test case

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 11:01:06 -0500

Which is stronger: technology's power to shape local culture, or local culture's power to influence the way technology is adopted and used? If it's the former, as I suspect it is, then technology becomes a homogenizing force, tending in time to erase cultural differences. If it's the latter, then technology plays a subservient role; the uniformity of the tool does not impose uniformity on the tool's use. Culture prevails. We're going to get some insight into this question over the next decade or so as e-readers - in the form of both devices and apps - spread and become even cheaper. As Caroline Winter of Bloomberg Businessweek reports, in two of the most prosperous Western countries - the U.S. and Germany - the adoption of electronic books has so far taken very different routes. E-books are booming in the U.S. Less than five years after the introduction of Amazon's Kindle, e-book sales already account for about a quarter of all U.S. book sales, and that percentage continues to rise sharply. In Germany, where e-readers are also readily available, e-books still represent just 1 percent of overall book sales. The difference is largely a cultural one. Germany, the birthplace of Gutenberg...

Flame and filament

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:01:34 -0500

One of man's greatest inventions was also one of his most modest: the wick. We don’t know who first realized, many thousands of years ago, that fire could be isolated at the tip of a twisted piece of cloth and steadily fed, through capillary action, by a reservoir of wax or oil, but the discovery was, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch writes in Disenchanted Night, “as revolutionary in the development of artificial lighting as the wheel in the history of transport.” The wick tamed fire, allowing it to be used with a precision and an efficiency far beyond what was possible with a wooden torch or a bundle of twigs. In the process, it helped domesticate us as well. It’s hard to imagine civilization progressing to where it is today by torchlight. The wick also proved an amazingly hardy creation. It remained the dominant lighting technology all the way to the nineteenth century, when it was replaced first by the wickless gas lamp and then, more decisively, by Edison’s electricity-fueled incandescent bulb with its glowing metal filament. Cleaner, safer, and even more efficient than the flame it replaced, the light bulb was welcomed into homes and offices around the world. But along...

Pinball CPU

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:52:18 -0500

Here's an ingenious contraption: The creator, Lior Elazary, provides a full explanation of the clock here, along with instructions for building your own. Here's my favorite part of the instructions: Start by creating a 12” diameter disc and attach a Flip-Flop to it. A Flip-Flop is a device that alternates its state with a given input. For example, a politician might change his stance on a specific issue based on some event, and then will change it back based on another event. In that case, we say he is a Flip-Flop, and we might be able to build a computer out of him. [via Slashdot]...

The Shallows: the album

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:39:49 -0500

Now this is pretty cool: The U.K. band I Like Trains has a new album coming out called The Shallows, which was inspired, at least in part, by my book of the same name. The album is an eerily propulsive work - heavy and light at the same time - and it's one that's easy to get lost in. The record comes out on May 7, but if you order a physical copy now - from here - you can download a digital copy immediately. And take a listen to the first single, "Mnemosyne":...

The web expands to fill all boredom

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:34:12 -0500

Clay Shirky says: The reading experience is so much more valuable now than it was ten years ago because it’s rarer. I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!” It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.” The endless gratification offered up by our devices means that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we have to choose to do. "Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment": that's well put. We don't like being bored because boredom is the absence of engaging stimulus,...