Why Tech Criticism Failed

On Nicholas Carr’s “Superbloom” and the manifesto “A Future for the Family”

Nicholas Carr hated the internet before it was cool. Back in 2010, when everyone thought we were speedrunning to cyber-utopia and Silicon Valley was the bright spot amid the ravages of the Great Recession, he published The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Although the book attacked the conventional wisdom of the era, it was well-received and made it onto the 2011 Pulitzer shortlist. But the next few years suggested his message hadn’t really gotten across. The gospel of digital “disruption” cascaded across every profession and institution, and the Arab Spring, Occupy, and other global unrest ostensibly fueled by social media further encouraged a belief in the liberating and democratizing effects of new technology.

A few other skeptics and detractors joined Carr in the early 2010s, notably Evgeny Morozov, who skewered Silicon Valley’s facile politics in The Net Delusion (2011) and To Save Everything, Click Here (2013); Jaron Lanier, a technologist and industry insider, who scrutinized the economic and psychic ravages of social media in You Are Not a Gadget (2010) and Who Owns the Future? (2013); and the sociologist Sherry Turkle, who in Alone Together (2011) and Reclaiming Conversation (2015) revealed the alienating, atomizing flipside of tech-enabled “connection.” All these books were widely read, but they didn’t make much of a dent in the prevailing view that tech was a benign force. What finally shattered that consensus was the double shock of Brexit and Trump in 2016, and especially the sci-fi narrative that emerged in their wake, which assigned an outsize role to Facebook, Russian trolls, and Cambridge Analytica. Overnight, the consensus was inverted: The internet was destroying democracy, not revitalizing it.

Carr followed up The Shallows with The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (2014) and Utopia Is Creepy (2016), but has sat out much of the intervening “techlash,” perhaps content to go from lonely dissenter to mouthpiece of common sense. He is now back with another book, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, which continues the broad line of criticism he has been developing over the past decade and a half. I wondered going into it whether he’d have anything new to add, either to his own body of work from the 2010s or to the large body of discourse that has caught up with his insights over the past decade. Although his basic humanist media-ecological outlook is largely unchanged, he does offer some novel insights, in part because further changes in the media landscape have given him new material to examine. A later chapter on artificial intelligence and the ghostly voices and quasi-religious fantasies it has generated, in which he refers back to the connections between spiritualism and earlier media revolutions like telegraphy, is perhaps the most memorable in the book.

Carr also reflects indirectly on the limited efficacy of his and other tech critics’ work in mitigating the tendencies they have documented and diagnosed. He tells the story of Frank Walsh, who became a minor celebrity in 1952 when, annoyed by the noise from the TV show his family was watching late at night, came downstairs with his gun and shot the television. He was heralded as a hero in a humorous New York Times column, after which he was invited on a TV game show, on which he won … a new television set. Carr concludes that “[t]o shoot a television set … is not to strike a blow against media and its dominion. It’s to merge into the televisual.” This point—that media criticism is frequently absorbed into the media it criticizes—has been made before, including in such media products as the 1976 film Network and the 2011 Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits.” It would be interesting to hear Carr discuss more explicitly what he makes of his own career as a Cassandra. Is the tech critic doomed to be Frank Walsh or Howard Beale?

Carr’s concluding chapter seems to suggest even if more policymakers had listened to him, it would have made little difference. He is skeptical about the potential of politics and policy to address his concerns. The European Union’s tech regulations, for example, haven’t been as dramatic in their effects as expected because users mostly don’t mind surrendering their data and sacrificing their privacy. In the end, he argues, the problem lies not with the tech companies, which are responding to the incentives of capitalism, or with insufficient political will: It lies with us, the users. We keep using tech—even those of us who read books by Carr, Morozov, Turkle, Shoshana Zuboff, and so on—because we want what it has to offer. No regulatory enterprise can change that. He concludes by proposing we look inward, “examine our desires, [and] ask ourselves whether what we choose, or what is chosen for us, is worthy of the choosing.”

Carr here comes up against a very big and very old philosophical question: What is good, or rather, what is the Good? And here we reach the limits of the sort of tech criticism he practices. I’m not sure of Carr’s political or religious affiliation, but the outlook he evinces in all of his writing is that of a secular liberal disillusioned with where technological and material progress has taken us; roughly the same is also true of most of the other prominent tech critics mentioned thus far. The basic problem all of them face is that their operative ethics, metaphysics, and ontology all tell them that it is ultimately up to individuals to make their own determinations about what they will define as “good.” If the majority of the public, as Carr concludes, have simply opted for the infinite feed of digitized information as their version of the Good, who is he to begrudge them their choice?

This conclusion seems to shift the tech critic’s task from telling the public why tech is bad to trying to tell them why other things are good, and what those things are. Carr declines to offer a robust answer, but the closing lines of his book are strikingly religious: “Maybe salvation, if that’s not too strong a word, lies in personal, wilful acts of excommunication.” The implication here is that tech is a false religion, but it’s unclear what the true creed is to which we should turn instead; again, it is left to the individual to determine the good for himself, which brings us back to the limit point of Carr’s secular humanist mode of tech criticism. What it offers, in the end, is an individual opt-out clause that, as Carr readily acknowledges, most people—even those who largely concede that he’s right—are unlikely to sign onto.

As it happens, a strikingly different mode of tech criticism was also on view this week, in a manifesto published just a day after Superbloom. The document appeared in the ecumenical journal First Things under the title, “A Future for the Family: A New Technology Agenda for the Right.” (The authors include three Compact contributors: Michael Toscano, Jon Askonas, and Brad Littlejohn; various others are signatories.) As the title indicates, the text takes as its starting point a specific view of, as Carr would put it, “what is worthy”: the institution of the family. As the authors explain their rationale:

The family plants the seed and forms the foundation of the future, through the begetting and raising of children who will carry the human project forward. As such, the family, technology, and a dynamic and fruitful future are intrinsically connected, and the present conflict between them must be overcome. To undermine the family is to undo the future; to strengthen the family is to fill the future with possibility, invention, and hope.

The emphasis on the family is unusual in tech criticism of recent years, exemplified by Carr’s work, which tends to focus on tech’s effects either on the individual or on society or the nation as a whole. This lacuna is one indication that social and religious conservatives have played a relatively minor role in recent debates about digital technology, especially compared to their major role in controversies around, for instance, biotechnology and assisted reproduction. “A Future” attempts to bring these discussions together with the digital tech debate, stating that all of “[o]ur present technologies are not … designed to serve the family.” Whether we accept this framing or not, it offers something Carr is unable to: a specific vision of what a good society should look like that is not reducible to individual choice.

I was struck by the manifesto’s framing in part because I wrote about tech’s corrosion of the family a while back, albeit from more of a psychoanalytic than religious perspective, when I reviewed the 2022 AI horror flick M3gan. The authors write that “American technology has undermined the moral authority of parents”; this was also more or less, as I took it, the lesson of M3gan, in which a single career woman working in robotics is entrusted with the care of her orphaned niece, which she outsources to the advanced AI doll she has helped design. What the film showed, I argued, wasn’t so much that technology was an inadequate parental substitute, but that it could be too adequate, and thereby short-circuit the learning of limits. As I wrote: “fantasies of omnipotence, immortality, and boundlessness are precisely what must be repressed through the process of psychic maturation. What M3gan [the AI doll] promises is a bypassing of this process”: a perfect, always-present, immoral super-parent who is also a peer and friend. The problem with tech, as Carr argues, is it gives us too much of what we want. I concluded: “Jacques Lacan summed up the lesson of Freudian psychoanalysis with a pun: ‘le père, ou pire’—‘the father, or worse.’ With a generation being raised by TikTok, we now face something definitively worse.” Although from different premises, I thus concur with the manifesto that the greatest threat posed by the latest tech isn’t AI apocalypse, but the abolition of the family.

Judging by President Trump’s reversal of the TikTok ban, a measure supported by social conservatives including Toscano, the dominant faction of the new Republican administration doesn’t share this concern. I’ve written previously about the schizoid position of liberals on technology after the 2016 techlash, but the right now has its own, arguably even more severe, internal contradictions. These are perhaps best exemplified by the GOP’s recent split—and indeed, Donald Trump’s internal split–over TikTok. There were sound conservative reasons—reasons having to do with the psychically and socially corrosive impact of addictive technologies as well as national security concerns—to support the TikTok ban. Trump’s reversal seems to have been partly a matter of mundane self-interest given his reliance on donations from TikTok investor Jeff Yass, but it also reflected a fundamental reality about his political identity and his movement: It is inextricable from the transformation of public life by social-media technology. To oppose a popular social-media platform is, in effect, to turn against MAGA’s native environment.

The alignment of Silicon Valley with the new Trump administration portends a deepening of this symbiosis. Not long ago, although it had furnished MAGA’s native habitat, the tech industry hated and feared Trump and MAGA, and hated being blamed for their rise by journalists. But now, the industry’s most powerful figures are using their White House access to push Trump in a pro-tech direction, while for his part he is pushing the industry in a more MAGA-friendly direction. (This, anyway, is how Mark Zuckerberg’s revamp of content moderation at Meta was widely perceived.) Hence, we can expect the laissez-faire side of Trump that came out against the TikTok ban he’d previously advocated to be further reinforced by his ever-cozier relations not just with Elon Musk but with Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and others.

The First Things manifesto’s authors are implicitly taking aim at the libertarian Silicon Valley faction that has the ear of the White House when they write: “Conservatives should push for policies that support economic dynamism and innovation, but we must recognize that the market has failed to produce a technological order that uplifts the family. Rather, that order too often attacks it at the root.” The manifesto concludes with “principles,” rather than specific policy recommendations, but whatever tech policy proposals might emerge out of these principles will face headwinds. The Silicon Valley defection to MAGA seems to have been propelled above all by a backlash against the regulatory efforts of the Biden administration, from social media “disinformation” oversight to antitrust to Biden’s executive order on AI. Trump’s Big Tech backers are clearly counting on a friendly regulatory environment in exchange for their largesse and ring-kissing, and judging by Trump’s TikTok reversal, they seem likely to get that.

For that reason, one hopes there will be a vigorous debate within the right and beyond about “A Future for the Family,” which provides something mostly lacking from the tech debates in the liberal sphere: an account of the good. Part of why the Biden tech agenda failed—even beyond its obvious partisan biases and censorious heavy-handedness—is because its proponents were unable to articulate a vision of what technology or its place in a good society should be, vacillating instead between moral panic and bloodless technocratic jargon. “I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is,” hyperventilated tech reporter Charlie Warzel a month before last year’s election. Perhaps Warzel’s lexicon is deficient because the terms his milieu prefers—like “misinformation”—reduce moral questions to problems of information management. Lies proliferate online partly for the same reason porn does: because the anonymity and atomization of the digital environment lower the social costs of behaviors otherwise regulated by stigma. What is needed, therefore, isn’t just a regulatory agenda, but a vision of the good, the good society, and tech’s place within it. This is what even the most insightful humanist tech critics, Carr among them, have been unable to offer.

During the 2010s, the central polarity in debates over digital media was between Silicon Valley’s liberal boosters and their liberal critics; in the coming years, the main axis is likely to pit the libertarian accelerationists in Trump’s inner orbit against the social-conservative intellectuals and lawmakers who will seek to counter their influence. If Superbloom is an elegiac coda to the tech debates of the 2010s, “A Future for the Family” is an opening salvo of a new round. Like Carr a decade ago, the manifesto’s authors deserve credit for bucking the emergent consensus of their political tribe.

This week at Compact

Compact has continued to cover the nomination battles around the new administration. Zaid Jilani wrote on on RFK and the dilemma his nomination posed for Senate Democrats; Dan McCarthy looked at the challenge Tulsi Gabbard poses for the “undead consensus” on foreign policy in both parties.

It’s been a dramatic week in other parts of DC as well. Juan Rojas covered the spat between two posters-in-chief, Donald Trump and his Colombian counterpart Gustavo Petro, which vindicated Trump’s tariff-threat tactic in the short term but points to its limitations in the longer term. Emmet Penney wrote on the escalating AI race between the United States and China, which he argues ultimately comes down to energy politics and America’s need to rebuild its electric grid and expand its energy supply. And Adam Rowe drew out the implications of Trump’s fascination with his predecessor William McKinley, and the parallels between the 1890s and the current moment.

Finally, Hamilton Craig wrote on the literary vibe shift and a book being called the “great incel novel”; Sam Kahn examined the career of the journalist and perpetual downer Robert D. Kaplan; Matt McManus challenged liberals to broaden their political horizons in response to their electoral defeat; and R.R. Reno weighed in on how Christians should understand love of the neighbor.

Thanks for reading!