Nicholas Carr has a bee in his bonnet, and given his susceptibilities this might well be a cybernetic insect, cunningly constructed by a giant tech company with the express purpose of irritating him — a likely culprit might be the Tyrell Corporation in Ridley Scott’s future-dystopic film Blade Runner.
In 2012 Carr — whose name has homophonic overtones of Cassandra — published a minatory work on the internet and the web called The Shallows. The title does indeed say it all: Carr’s view was that our increasing use of these technologies is having an impact on our cognitive and other physical faculties, and that by and large it’s a negative one.
Now Carrsandra is back to tell us that lurking behind the glassy screens we love to pet, prod and goggle at, there lies a glass cage of automated systems, ones that increasingly manage the extraction of raw materials, their processing, the manufacture of goods, the provision of services and the intellectual labour of their overall control. Two telling phrases sum up Carrsandra’s attitude to the emergent technologies of the 21st century: ‘Software programmers are our unacknowledged legislators’; and, ‘Ergonomists are our metaphysicians.’
These two functions are the polarities of automation for Carr. On the one hand, computer coding is a form of arcane knowledge that renders the increasingly invisible technology inscrutable and unmanageable, while on the other hand is, well, the hand: for inasmuch as Carr is a technophobic nay-sayer, he is also a yea-sayer when it comes to human manipulation of the natural world. To achieve stability between two such powerful attractors is a tricky business, and although Carr undertakes a Sisyphean struggle, I don’t think he pulls it off.
Beginning with the glass cage of the title, which refers to the virtualised environments of contemporary jet airliners, Carr proceeds to prise us psychically apart from the steely embrace of automation.
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