Another week, another Nicholas Carr book. This week, his 2014 book The Glass Cage. It nicely complements The Shallows, which I mentioned several times in Agency Not Agents.
I think this paragraph nicely summarises the The Glass Cage:
Out of ignorance or laziness or timidity, we’ve turned the Luddites into caricatures, emblems of backwardness. We assume that anyone who rejects a new tool in favor of an older one is guilty of nostalgia, of making choices sentimentally rather than rationally. But the real sentimental fallacy is the assumption that the new thing is always better suited to our purposes and intentions than the old thing. That’s the view of a child, naive and pliable. What makes one tool superior to another has nothing to do with how new it is. What matters is how it enlarges us or diminishes us, how it shapes our experience of nature and culture and one another. To cede choices about the texture of our daily lives to a grand abstraction called progress is folly.
That’s a mouthful, but worth chewing on. I’ve been guilty of that assumption, that new technologies are inherently good. I’ve also often found it hard to publicly question flashy new things, probably in fear of being labelled a Luddite.
I listened to a 2020 interview of Carr on The Ezra Klein Show whilst reading this book. It’s not about The Glass Cage but they reach a broader, related, conclusion about technology and knowledge which I hadn’t fully considered before:
We often treat reading a book like a means to an end; to ‘download’ the information into our brains. But it’s process of wrestling with an idea for an extended period of time that forms new connections.
Getting an answer more easily can (and often is) to our detriment. Think getting turn-by-turn directions via Google Maps instead of studying a printed map, or consulting ChatGPT instead of asking a few friends. Skipping the hard stuff hurts us.
Choose tools that respect and work with our plastic brains and feeble bodies. The tools that positively shape “our experience of nature and culture and one another”.
We’re happiest when we’re absorbed in a difficult task, a task that has clear goals and that challenges us not only to exercise our talents but to stretch them.
By taking over difficult or time-consuming tasks, or simply rendering those tasks less onerous, the software makes it even less likely that we’ll engage in efforts that test our skills and give us a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. All too often, automation frees us from that which makes us feel free.