Book

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

Jan 2016 🇺🇸 W. W. Norton & Company

Utopia Is Creepy, published in 2016, collects two decades of Carr's essays and blog posts, largely drawn from his Rough Type blog, critiquing what he characterizes as the technology industry's techno-utopian rhetoric. The pieces question claims that social media, constant connectivity, and algorithmic personalization are unambiguously improving how people relate to one another and to information, arguing instead that these systems are associated with narrower, more commercially shaped views of the world, reduced privacy, and diminished independent thought. The book is a collection of previously published shorter pieces rather than a single sustained argument, and it does not present original data. TechKids Foundation includes it as a representative sample of the broader body of tech-culture criticism this library draws on for context, distinct from Carr's book-length arguments about reading and automation specifically.

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CITATION

Carr, Nicholas. Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations. W. W. Norton & Company, 2016.

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