Nicholas Carr

My new book, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, is out and available everywhere! Read a preview at After Babel. afterbabel.com/p/from-anxiety…

"In automated systems, human beings are placeholders for future machines. We've assumed that creative types who produce content for media systems are exceptions to that rule. They're not." newcartographies.com/p/creative-wor…

"The web wasn’t corrupted by outside forces. The corruption was there from the start, latent in its design. A vast, decentralized network that transmits data of all sorts to all people is not resistant to information monopolies; it encourages them." lareviewofbooks.org/article/tim-be…

"The web wasn’t corrupted by outside forces. The corruption was there from the start, latent in its design.” Nicholas Carr on Tim Berners-Lee’s “This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web”: lareviewofbooks.org/article/tim-be…

The famous "paperclip maximizer" scenario has arrived. The irony is that AIs are the paperclips. open.substack.com/pub/newcartogr…

"Saying that a social-media feed is the product of users is like saying that a hot dog is the product of cows and pigs." open.substack.com/pub/newcartogr…

“If the stakes weren’t so high, the texts between world leaders before the World Economic Forum would be amusing. Texting turns everyone into a semiliterate twelve-year-old, and presidents, prime ministers, and secretaries general are no exception.” newcartographies.com/p/diplomacy-by…

"The philistines have taken over the culture." My new piece at Unherd: unherd.com/2026/01/how-bi…

"If you think search engine optimization (SEO) has been a blight on the net, artificial intelligence optimization (AIO) promises to be even worse. Welcome to the slop wars." newcartographies.com/p/ai-vs-ai?r=l…

Is Google Making Us Stupid? open.substack.com/pub/newcartogr…

"The assumption of an efficient marketplace of ideas rests on the ideal of a rational consumer of ideas, a Homo philosophicus who, like his cousin economicus, turns out to be a fictional character." - Nicholas Carr @roughtype newcartographies.com

"If Robert Rauschenberg sought to show that erasure can be a generative act, AI bots have the opposite goal: to show that generation can be an erasive act." newcartographies.com/p/the-erasive-…

“One way to think about AI text-generation tools is as clairvoyants. They are mediums that bring the words of the past into the present in a new arrangement. When we talk to a chatbot, we are, in a very real way, communing with the dead.” newcartographies.com/p/the-medium-i…

"AI applies the Gates model to the entirety of culture. Let writers and musicians and artists do the hard work of actually creating the original artifacts of culture. Then have the machine flood the market with low-cost copies, with cheap derivatives." newcartographies.com/p/western-digi…

"Armed with generative AI, a B student can produce A work while turning into a C student." newcartographies.com/p/the-myth-of-…

"The real threat AI poses to education isn’t that it encourages cheating. It’s that it discourages learning." newcartographies.com/p/the-myth-of-…

Last night at our San Francisco debate on Artificial Intelligence, Nicholas Carr argued: “The problem with AI isn’t that it encourages cheating; the problem is that it discourages learning.” Full video coming soon to the FP.com.

"Zuckerberg's botverse continues the social-media model, with nonhuman disembodied voices replacing human disembodied voices. Once you separate voice from being, the next step is to mass-produce voice as a commodity, to offer friendship as a service." newcartographies.com/p/friendship-i…

"Efficiency might not, it turns out, bring about greater happiness." @AbramEngen reviews Nicholas Carr's Superbloom, about the pitfalls of our technological age, in Arc Magazine: arcmag.org/slow-down-you-…

Gimme some truthiness. newcartographies.com/p/epistemologi…