The Last Humanist: Nicholas Carr on What the Digital Age Can't Replace

My review of Superbloom by Nicholas Carr

Hi everyone,

Nicholas Carr has a new book out: Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. I’ve followed Carr for years and was thrilled to write this review. I initially sent it to the editors at the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), but they’d already assigned the title to science writer Philip Ball. (Still—worth a shot: they’ve since invited me to review another book, presumably because they liked this one.)

So I’m posting the Superbloom review here, free for all to read. I encourage you to pick up the book—Carr remains one of the great cultural critics of the old-school variety, and he’s well worth your time.

—Erik

The Last Humanist: Nicholas Carr and the Loss of the Poetic in the Digital Age

The Last Critic Standing

In an era where “content” is measured less by substance than by shareability, Nicholas Carr remains a rare figure: a cultural critic who engages the digital age without succumbing to its tempo. His work resists the attention economy even as it dissects it, a kind of elegant irony that seems increasingly scarce. Carr writes not to provoke but to understand—a posture that feels almost antique in the age of the algorithm. If most Internet writing today is tuned to the viral frequency of outrage or affirmation, Carr’s essays hum at a different register: explanatory, deliberate, steeped in a long view.

Reading Carr, one is reminded of an earlier generation of critics—Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, Susan Sontag—figures who treated technology not merely as a suite of tools but as a cultural atmosphere. Like them, Carr asks how our instruments change us. And like them, he brings a literary sensibility to his diagnosis, eschewing jargon for prose that is as precise as it is lucid. If Carr sometimes seems out of step with the dominant cultural tempo, it’s because he's marching to a longer rhythm. That’s exactly what makes him so essential.

Finding Carr

I first stumbled upon Nicholas Carr’s writing in 2008, in his now-famous Atlantic essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” It was the early era of social media—Google and Facebook had achieved hegemony, but Twitter was still nascent and Instagram didn't yet exist. Even then, Carr was asking the critic’s question: not what these new tools could do, but what they were doing to us.

Tellingly, for someone who seems to have resisted the new "scan and emoji" writing style of the internet, Carr located himself early on as a casualty of Silicon Valley’s breathtaking transformation of media. “Over the past few years,” he wrote, “I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think.”

In a kind of existential proof of his critical acumen, Carr followed that essay with The Big Switch (2008), a sweeping, highly readable history of electrification—moving from the world-transforming arrival of electrical grids to the 21st century’s embrace of computation, cloud networks, and smartphones. The Big Switch was not merely technical history; it was an early cultural warning that even then felt prophetic. It's no exaggeration to say that I tried to follow the path Carr was tracing, tuning my ear to the subtle but profound transformations he was charting.

I read everything he wrote. In 2010, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains anticipated by a decade the later wave of concern over the digital environment’s effects on children, attention, and mental health. Carr’s book complemented early critics like MIT’s Sherry Turkle, who examined the psychological distortions of social media. At the time, Carr stood nearly alone, spearheading a rare countercultural warning signal—joined by figures like Andrew Keen, Jaron Lanier, and a few others.

With The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us (2014), Carr expanded his critique into a broader humanist defense. By then, digitalism had not only infiltrated work and leisure; it had reshaped them into an endless choreography of app-based interactions. As with his earlier work, Carr’s arguments in The Glass Cage were illuminated by history—reminding readers of our perennial struggles with technology and our deep, often submerged, hunger for agency, the very thing that automation imperils.

The Tragedy of Automation

Who could have predicted that Inuit hunters—long masters of Arctic terrain—would one day find themselves dependent on GPS to navigate their ancestral lands? Or that airline pilots, trained in both technical and embodied knowledge, would be overridden by cockpit software they scarcely understood? In The Glass Cage, Carr documented these unsettling shifts in human skill and agency, drawing on psychological studies and real-world tragedies to illuminate what automation quietly takes from us.

The examples still haunt: In 2019, two Boeing 737 Max aircraft crashed under eerily similar conditions. At the heart of both disasters was a now-infamous software system—MCAS—that effectively wrested control from the pilots. What Carr had foreseen in earlier cases—the slow substitution of human judgment with algorithmic control—played out in the sky with catastrophic results. It wasn’t a failure of intelligence, but of misplaced trust: a human-machine misalignment with fatal consequences.

Carr’s view in The Glass Cage is not technophobic, but cautionary. He doesn’t reject automation outright; rather, he asks what happens to us when we build systems that optimize for efficiency at the expense of experience. He writes not with panic, but with pathos. Again and again, he reminds us that our tools don’t just extend our capacities—they reshape our expectations, alter our relationships, and rewire our minds.

And then, unexpectedly, he seemed to vanish. After The Glass Cage, Carr’s presence in the cultural conversation faded. I later learned he had taken up teaching at the University of Massachusetts, an admirable path but, to my mind, a retreat from the critical vanguard he had helped define. For a time, it felt like the digital counterculture Carr had galvanized was left without its most articulate voice.

Then came Superbloom.

Superbloom and the Disappearance of the Poetic

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart (2025) is media criticism in the tradition of Neil Postman and Lewis Mumford—serious, historically literate, and unafraid to diagnose not just the excesses of technology, but its erosion of the poetic, the deep, and the humanly profound. As with Carr’s earlier work, the book’s power lies in its backward gaze: a careful excavation of the ideas and inventions that paved the path to our current digital predicament.

Carr opens with the ancient worry about the privacy of communication—a concern as old as civilization. Cicero fretted about the interception of his letters, and the same anxiety would echo down the ages, reshaped by each new medium. The telegraph raised legal questions about whether messages sent over wires deserved the same protections as sealed mail. Eventually, courts decided they did. But with the advent of radio, the boundaries blurred again—messages now floated freely, and ownership of the airwaves became the organizing principle for control, not privacy.

The sinking of the Titanic, Carr reminds us, was worsened by radio chaos: unregulated amateur chatter that obscured urgent signals. From there, the doctrine of the "secrecy of correspondence"—which criminalized wiretapping and once protected Cicero’s scrolls—underwent steady erosion as communication moved from radio to television, then into the domestic sphere. Phones migrated from office desks to bedroom nightstands, and long-distance communication became an intimate daily ritual, scratching an ancient human itch.

The internet, too, began under the veil of protected exchange: a Cold War project (ARPANET) designed for resilient, private communication. But email, its first killer app, quickly pulled the network into public life. By the 1990s, the web—first through Mosaic and Netscape, then Yahoo!—had become a commercial playground. In a landmark 1996 ruling, courts declined to impose old media standards on the internet, seeing it instead as a radically democratizing force. “The public interest” no longer meant curation or standards—it meant participation. Everyone could speak. No one was in charge.

Out of that post-Cold War exuberance emerged a strange new world—one where Google opens our mail, our digital lives are endlessly scraped and monetized, and the very concept of “ownership” over one’s speech or image has grown hazy.

Carr recounts all of this not with alarmism, but with sober, scholarly force. He unearths early visionaries like Charles Horton Cooley—now largely forgotten—who anticipated later theorists such as Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and Neil Postman. Cooley’s insight was that communication media shape human behavior not by what they say, but by how they structure the act of saying. Walter Lippmann, too, looms large in Carr’s genealogy: Lippmann feared that mass media would create a public of spectators, overwhelmed by unverifiable information, passively absorbing signals they lacked the time or tools to verify.

In Superbloom, Carr doesn’t simply cite these figures—he revives their concerns, reframing them for an age of feeds, platforms, and ambient digital noise. The book is not a polemic. It is a reckoning—a slow walk through the labyrinth that brought us here.

We Chose This

When Carr turns to the present-day blitz of social media, he acknowledges the dominant critical narrative—most notably, Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, a blistering indictment of Big Tech’s relentless efforts to mine our attention and sell it back to us through algorithmic manipulation. By now, the critique feels familiar: companies like Facebook, Google, and TikTok build behavioral prediction engines, optimize for outrage, and reduce users to lab rats pulling levers for dopamine hits.

But Superbloom doesn’t stop at blaming the machines or their masters. Instead, Carr shifts the lens back onto us. That pivot is what makes his critique not only more original but also more unsettling. Citing psychological research, Carr notes that while proximity in the physical world may foster affection—bumping into neighbors, exchanging pleasantries—it more often reveals petty grievances: the trash cans not brought in, the dog that poops on the lawn. Online, the neighborhood is global. Suddenly, everyone’s dog is a problem. Suddenly, the whole world’s garbage is in plain view. Carr’s metaphor of the internet as a kind of overgrown, boundaryless suburbia—one with infinite nosy neighbors and no zoning laws—is grimly apt.

Unlike the surveillance capitalism crowd, Carr doesn’t just rail against Big Tech’s designs; he interrogates our willing participation. We chose this, he suggests—not as victims of coercion but as eager adopters. And we’ll keep choosing it, again and again. It’s one of the strongest arguments in Superbloom, and one that I’ve echoed (perhaps unknowingly under Carr’s influence) in my own cultural commentary: large language models like ChatGPT, for instance, are not going away, nor is there any serious movement to dismantle the networked world we’ve built. The genie, once out, is rarely put back in the bottle.

There’s a note of finality in Superbloom, but not fatalism. Carr isn’t cynical. He doesn’t predict doom, but he does suggest something deeper and harder to face: that the simulated world may simply be more fun—more titillating, more responsive, more endlessly novel—than the real world, where things settle, grow familiar, and sometimes feel boring.

And yet, it’s in that boredom, Carr hints, that something essential emerges. The real world, with its quiet repetitions and constraints, offers something the digital cannot: room for contemplation. The possibility of meaning. Familiarity, unlike novelty, is the ground from which philosophy grows. It is where depth takes root.

Carr ends Superbloom with a quiet concession: the simulated world may well be more gratifying than the real one—not because it is richer, but because it is frictionless. It flatters us, accelerates us, erases the awkward pauses and dull moments that once gave shape to reflection. Yet it is precisely in those pauses—in the stutters of conversation, the silences between thoughts, the slow thickening of experience—that reality asserts its claim. Carr doesn’t mourn what’s been lost so much as remind us what forgetting it costs.

The real world, with its resistances and repetitions, is not less because it is boring. It is more because it endures. That, he seems to say, is where attention belongs now: not in the stream, but in the pause between scrolls. Not in the feed, but in the place where nothing updates.

If the simulated world is where we now immerse ourselves—where we join the global conversation—then it is still the world out there, our world, where meaning is made. And where, if we’re willing to return to it, a life might still be lived.

Erik J. Larson