Evgeny Morozov

no. 27
March 2015

The Taming of
Tech Criticism

SALVOSS
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BOOK REVIEWED
The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, by Nicholas Carr, W. W. Norton,
$26.95
What does it mean to be a technology critic in today’s America? And
what can technology criticism accomplish? The first question seems
easy: to be a technology critic in America now is to oppose that bastion
of vulgar disruption, Silicon Valley. By itself, however, this opposition
says nothing about the critic’s politics—an omission that makes it all
the more difficult to answer the second question.

Why all the political diffidence? A critical or oppositional attitude

toward Silicon Valley is no guarantee of the critic’s progressive agenda;
modern technology criticism, going back to its roots in Germany at the
turn of the twentieth century, has often embraced conservative causes.
It also doesn’t help that technology critics, for the most part, make a
point of shunning political categories. Instead of the usual left/right
distinction, they are more comfortable with the humanist/anti-
humanist one. “What if the cost of machines that think is people who
don’t?”—a clever rhetorical question posed by the technology author
George Dyson a few years ago—nicely captures these sorts of concerns.
The “machines” in question are typically reduced to mere embodiments
of absurd, dehumanizing ideas that hijack the minds of poorly educated
technologists; the “humans,” in turn, are treated as abstract, ahistorical
émigrés to the global village, rather than citizen-subjects of the
neoliberal empire.

Most contemporary American critics of technology—from Jaron Lanier

to Andrew Keen to Sherry Turkle—fall into the cultural-romantic or
conservative camps. They bemoan the arrogant thrust of technological
thinking as it clashes with human traditions and fret over what an
ethos of permanent disruption means for the configuration of the
liberal self or the survival of its landmark institutions, from universities
to newspapers. So do occasional fellow travelers who write literary
essays or works of fiction attacking Silicon Valley—Jonathan Franzen,
Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith, and Leon Wieseltier have all penned
passionate tracts that seek to defend humanistic values from the
assault of technology. They don’t shy away from attacking Internet
companies, but their attacks mostly focus on the values and beliefs of
the companies’ founders, as if the tech entrepreneurs could simply be
talked out of the disruption that they are wreaking on the world. If
Mark Zuckerberg would just miraculously choose a tome by Isaiah
Berlin or Karl Kraus for his ongoing reading marathon, everything
could still go back to normal.

Meanwhile, a more radical strand of tech criticism, confined mostly to

university professors, barely registers on the public radar. Those—like
Robert McChesney or Dan Schiller or Vincent Mosco—who work on
technology, media, and communications within Marxist analytical
frameworks, hardly get any attention at all. The last radical critics to
enrich the broader public debate on technology were probably Murray
Bookchin and Lewis Mumford; for both, technology was a key site for
struggle, but their struggles, whether for social ecology or against
hierarchical bureaucracy, were not about technology as such.

That radical critique of technology in America has come to a halt is in

no way surprising: it could only be as strong as the emancipatory
political vision to which it is attached. No vision, no critique. Lacking
any idea of how sensors, algorithms, and databanks could be deployed
to serve a non-neoliberal agenda, radical technology critics face an
unenviable choice: they can either stick with the empirical project of
documenting various sides of American decay (e.g., revealing the power
of telecom lobbyists or the data addiction of the NSA) or they can show
how the rosy rhetoric of Silicon Valley does not match up with reality
(thus continuing to debunk the New Economy bubble). Much of this is
helpful, but the practice quickly encounters diminishing returns. After
all, the decay is well known, and Silicon Valley’s bullshit empire is
impervious to critique.

Why, then, aspire to practice any kind of technology criticism at all? I

am afraid I do not have a convincing answer. If history has, in fact,
ended in America—with venture capital (represented by Silicon Valley)
and the neoliberal militaristic state (represented by the NSA) guarding
the sole entrance to its crypt—then the only real task facing the radical
technology critic should be to resuscitate that history. But this surely
can’t be done within the discourse of technology, and given the steep
price of admission, the technology critic might begin most logically by
acknowledging defeat. Changing public attitudes toward technology—at
a time when radical political projects that technology could abet are
missing—is pointless. While radical thought about technology is
certainly possible, the true radicals are better off theorizing—and
spearheading—other, more consequential struggles, and jotting down
some reflections on technology along the way.

The Self-Driving Critic

Nicholas Carr, one of America’s foremost technology critics, is far from
acknowledging defeat of any sort—in fact, he betrays no doubts
whatsoever about the relevance and utility of his trade. In his latest
book, The Glass Cage, Carr argues that we have failed to consider the
hidden costs of automation, that our penchant for delegating mundane
tasks to technology is misguided, and that we must redesign our
favorite technologies in such a way that humans take on more
responsibility—both of the moral and perceptual varieties—for
operating in the world.

Silicon Valley’s bullshit empire is

impervious to critique.
Carr makes this case using his trademark style of analysis, honed in his
previous book, The Shallows. Drawing on the latest findings in
neuroscience and timeless meditations from various philosophers
(Martin Heidegger stands next to John Dewey), he seeks to diagnose
rather than prescribe. The juxtaposition of hard science and
humanities is occasionally jarring: a deeply poetic section, which
quotes Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Robert Frost, is abruptly
interrupted to inform us that “a study of rodents, published
in Science in 2013, indicated that the brain’s place cells are much less
active when animals make their way through computer-generated
landscapes than when they navigate the real world.”

The Glass Cage  is subtitled “Automation and Us,” and Carr tries hard
to direct his critique toward the process of automation rather than
technology as such. His material, however, repeatedly refuses such
framing. Consider just three of the many examples that appear under
“automation”: the automation of driving via self-driving cars, the
automation of facial recognition via biometric technologies, and the
automation of song recognition via apps like Shazam, which identify a
song after just a few seconds of “listening.” They do look somewhat
similar, but differences abound as well. In the first example, the driver
is made unnecessary; in the second example, technology augments
human capacity to recognize faces; in the third example, we create a
genuinely new ability, since humans can’t recognize unknown songs.
Given such diversity, it’s not obvious why automation—rather than,
say, augmentation—is the right framework to understand these
changes. What are we automating with the song identification app?

Carr’s basic premise is sound: a little bit of technology and automation

can go a long way in enabling human emancipation but, once used
excessively, they might result in “an erosion of skills, a dulling of
perceptions, and a slowing of reactions.” Not only would we lose the
ability to perform certain tasks—Carr dedicates a whole chapter to
studying how the introduction of near-complete automation to the
flight deck has affected how pilots respond to emergencies—but we
might also lose the ability to experience certain features of the world
around us. GPS is no friend to flaneurs. “Spell checkers once served as
tutors,” he laments. Now all we get is dumb autocorrect. Here is the
true poet laureate of First World problems.

Carr doesn’t try very hard to engage his opponents. It’s all very well to
complain about the inauthenticity of digital technology and the erosion
of our cognitive and aesthetic skills, but it doesn’t take much effort to
discover that the very same technologies are also widely celebrated for
producing new forms of authenticity (hence the excitement around 3-D
printers and the Internet of Things: finally, we are moving from the
virtual to the tangible) and even new forms of aesthetic appreciation
(the art world is buzzing about the emergence of “The New Aesthetic”—
the intrusion of imagery inspired by computer culture into art and the
built environment). Why is repairing a motorcycle deemed more
pleasurable or authentic than repairing a 3-D printer?

Carr quickly runs into a problem faced by most other contemporary

technology critics (the present author included): since our brand of
criticism is, by its very nature, reactive—we are all prisoners of the silly
press releases issued by Silicon Valley—we have few incentives to exit
the “technological debate” and say anything of substance that does not
already presuppose that all communications services are to be provided
by the market. It’s as if, in articulating a program, Silicon Valley had
also articulated all the possible counter-programs, defining a horizon of
thought that even its opponents could never transcend.

As a result, Carr prefers to criticize those technologies that he finds

troubling instead of imagining what an alternative arrangement—
which may or may not feature the technology in question—might be
like. His treatment of self-driving cars is a case in point. Carr opens the
first chapter with rumination on what it was like to drive a Subaru with
manual transmission in his youth. He notices, with his usual nostalgic
flair, how the automation of driving might eventually deprive us of
important but underappreciated cognitive skills that are crucial to
leading a fulfilling life.

This argument would make sense if the choice were between a normal
car and a self-driving car. But are those really our only options? Is there
any evidence that countries with excellent public transportation
systems swarm with unhappy, mentally deskilled automatons who feel
that their brains are underused as they get inside the fully automated
metro trains? One wonders if Nicholas Carr has heard of Denmark.
Note what Carr’s strand of technology criticism has accomplished here:
instead of debating the politics of public transportation—a debate that
should include alternative conceptions of what transportation is and
how to pay for it—we are confronted with the need to compare the
cognitive and emotional costs of automating the existing system (i.e.,
embracing the self-driving cars that Carr doesn’t like) with leaving it as
it is (i.e., sticking with normal cars). Disconnected from actual political
struggles and social criticism, technology criticism is just an elaborate
but affirmative footnote to the status quo.

The inherent latent conservatism of Carr’s approach is even more

palpable when he writes about the automation of work. He starts from
the depressing premise that we are all, somehow, born alienated, and
the best way for us to overcome this alienation is by . . . working. Carr
draws on research in psychology—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of
“flow” is crucial to his argument—to posit that challenging, engaged
work does make us happier than we realize. Its absence, on the other
hand, makes us depressed:

More often than not . . . our discipline flags and our mind wanders when
we’re not on the job. We may yearn for the workday to be over so we can
start spending our pay and having some fun, but most of us fritter away our
leisure hours. We shun hard work and only rarely engage in challenging
hobbies. Instead, we watch TV or go to the mall or log on to Facebook. We
get lazy. And then we get bored and fretful. Disengaged from any outward
focus, our attention turns inward, and we end up locked in what Emerson
called the jail of self-consciousness. Jobs, even crummy ones, are “actually
easier to enjoy than free time,” says Csikszentmihalyi, because they have the
“built-in” goals and challenges that “encourage one to become involved in
one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it.”

Thus, as our work gets automated away, we are likely to get stuck with
far too many unredeemed alienation coupons! Carr’s argument is
spectacular in its boldness: work distracts us from our deeply alienated
condition, so we have to work more and harder not to discover our
deep alienation. For Carr, the true Stakhanovite, work is a much better
drug than the soma of Huxley’s Brave New World.
As with the transportation example, something doesn’t quite add up
here. Why should we take the status quo for granted and encourage
citizens to develop a new ethic to deal with the problem? In the case of
work, isn’t it plausible to assume that we’d get as much “flow” and
happiness from doing other challenging things—learning a foreign
language or playing chess—if only we had more free time, away from all
that work?

Were he not a technology critic, Carr could have more easily accepted
this premise. This might also have prompted him to join the long-
running debate on alternative organizations of work, production, and
life itself. Carr, however, expresses little interest in advancing this
debate, retreating to the status quo again: work is there to be done,
because under current conditions nothing else would deliver us as
much spiritual satisfaction. To be for or against capitalism is not his
game: he just comments on technological trends, as they pop out—in a
seemingly automated fashion—of the global void known as history.

And since the march of that history is increasingly described with the
depoliticized lingo of technology—“precariousness” turns into “sharing
economy” and “scarcity” turns into “smartness”—technology criticism
comes to replace political and social criticism. The usual analytical
categories, from class to exploitation, are dropped in favor of fuzzier
and less precise concepts. Carr’s angle on automated trading is
concerned with what algorithms do to traders—and not what
traders andalgorithms do to the rest of us. “A reliance on automation is
eroding the skills and knowledge of financial professionals,” he notes
dryly. Only a technology critic—with no awareness of the actual role
that “financial professionals” play today—would fail to ask a basic
follow-up question: How is this not good news?
Technology criticism is just an
elaborate but affirmative footnote to the
status quo.
Nicholas Carr finds himself at home in the world of psychology and
neuroscience, and the only philosophy he treats seriously is
phenomenology; he makes only a cursory effort to think in terms of
institutions, social movements, and new forms of representation—
hardly a surprise given where he starts. Occasionally, Carr does tap into
quasi-Marxist explanations, as when he writes, repeatedly, that
technology companies are driven by money and thus are unlikely to
engage in the kind of humanistic thought exercises that Carr expects of
them.

But it’s hard to understand how he can square this realistic stance with
his only concrete practical suggestion for human-centered automation:
to push the designers of our technologies to embrace a different
paradigm of ergonomic design, so that, instead of building services that
would automate everything, they would build services that put some
minor cognitive or creative burden on us, the users, thus extending
rather than shrinking our intellectual and sensory experiences. Good
news for you office drones: your boring automated work will be made
somewhat less boring by the fact that you’ll have to save the file
manually by pressing a button—as opposed to having it backed up for
you automatically.

This user-producer axis exhausts Carr’s political imagination. It also

reveals the limitations of his techno-idealism, for his proposed
intervention assumes, first, that today’s users prefer fully automated
technologies because they do not know what’s in their best interest and,
second, that these users can convince technology companies that
redesigning their existing products along Carr’s suggestions would be
profitable. For if Carr is sincere in his belief that technology companies
are driven by profit, there’s no other way around it: he is either a cynic
for advocating a solution that he knows wouldn’t work, or he really
thinks that consumers can renounce their love of automation and
demand something else from technology companies.

Carr firmly believes that our embrace of automation comes from

confusion, infatuation, or laziness—rather than, say, necessity. “The
trouble with automation,” he explains, “is that it often gives us what we
don’t need at the cost of what we do.” In theory, then, we can all live
without relying on the wonders of modern technology: we can cultivate
our cognitive and aesthetic skills by ditching our GPS units, by cooking
our own elaborate dishes, by making our own clothes, by watching our
kids instead of relying on apps (au pairs are so last century). What Carr
fails to mention is that all of these things are much easier to do if you
are rich and have no need to work. Automation—of cognition, emotion,
and intellect—is the intolerable price we have to pay for the growing
corporatization of everyday life.

Thus, there’s a very sinister and disturbing implication to be drawn

from Carr’s work—namely, that only the rich will be able to cultivate
their skills and enjoy their life to the fullest while the poor will be
confined to mediocre virtual substitutes—but Carr doesn’t draw it.
Here again we see what happens once technology criticism is decoupled
from social criticism. All Carr can do is moralize and blame those who
have opted for some form of automation for not being able to see where
it ultimately leads us. How did we fail to grasp just how fun and
stimulating it would be to read a book a week and speak fluent
Mandarin? If Mark Zuckerberg can do it, what excuses do we have?

“By offering to reduce the amount of work we have to do, by promising

to imbue our lives with greater ease, comfort, and convenience,
computers and other labor-saving technologies appeal to our eager but
misguided desire for release from what we perceive as toil,” notes Carr
in an unashamedly elitist tone. Workers of the world, relax—your toil is
just a perception! However, once we accept that there might exist
another, more banal reason why people embrace automation, then it’s
not clear why automation à la Carr, with all its interruptions and new
avenues for cognitive stimulation, would be of much interest to them: a
less intelligent microwave oven is a poor solution for those who want to
cook their own dinners but simply have no time for it. But problems
faced by millions of people are of only passing interest to Carr, who is
more preoccupied by the non-problems that fascinate pedantic
academics; he ruminates at length, for example, on the morality of
Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner.

Carr’s oeuvre is representative of contemporary technology criticism

both in the questions that it asks and the issues it avoids. Thus, there’s
the trademark preoccupation with design problems, and their usually
easy solutions, but hardly a word on just why it is that startups founded
on the most ridiculous ideas have such an easy time attracting venture
capital. That this might have something to do with profound structural
transformations in the American economy—e.g., its ever-expanding
financialization—is not a conclusion that today’s technology criticism
could ever reach.

From There and Thou to Here and

Now
A personal note is in order, since in surveying the shortcomings of
thinkers such as Nicholas Carr, I’m also all too mindful of how many of
them I’ve shared. For a long time, I’ve considered myself a technology
critic. Thus, I must acknowledge defeat as well: contemporary
technology criticism in America is an empty, vain, and inevitably
conservative undertaking. At best, we are just making careers; at worst,
we are just useful idiots.

Since truly radical technology criticism is a no-go zone for anyone

seeking a popular audience, all we are left with is debilitating faux
radicalism. Some critics do place their focus squarely on technology
companies, which gives their work the air of anti-corporate populism
and, perhaps, even tacit opposition to the market. This, however, does
not magically turn these thinkers into radicals.

In fact, what distinguishes radical critics from their faux-radical

counterparts is the lens they use for understanding Silicon Valley: the
former group sees such firms as economic actors and situates them in
the historical and economic context, while the latter sees them as a
cultural force, an aggregation of bad ideas about society and politics.
Thus, while the radical critic quickly grasps that reasoning with these
companies—as if they were just another reasonable participant in the
Habermasian public sphere—is pointless, the faux-radical critic shows
no such awareness, penning essay after essay bemoaning their
shallowness and hoping that they can eventually become ethical and
responsible.

In a sense, it’s just a continuation of the old battle between materialism

and idealism. At the very start of my career as a technology critic, I fell
into the idealistic trap, thinking that, with time, good ideas could crowd
out bad ones. As Silicon Valley was extending its reach into domains
that were only lightly touched by information technology—think of
transportation, health, education—these fields were suddenly
overflowing with half-baked, stupid, and occasionally dangerous ideas.
Those ideas could and should be documented, studied, and opposed.
This, I thought, was the true calling of the technology critic.

Serious technology criticism, I thought, could tie the tongues of our

digital gurus, revealing their simplistic sloganeering for the cheap dross
that it is. All that hankering for frictionlessness and eternal bliss, the
cult of convenience and total transparency, the thoughtless celebration
of self-reliance and immediacy: so much in Silicon Valley’s master plan
smacked of teenage naiveté. Instead of waxing lyrical about the utility
of apps—the bailiwick of conventional technology criticism—the
technology critic could reveal the political and economic programs that
they helped to enact. Thus, I thought, it was possible to be neither
romantic nor conservative while keeping politics and economics front
and center.

To pick an example from my own work: A smart trashcan that uploads

snapshots of its contents to Facebook—yes, it exists—might be read as
an experiment in getting our online friends to police our behavior. Or it
might be read as an extension of political consumerism to the most
banal domestic chores. Placed under the right theoretical lens, even
mundane objects could help illuminate the contemporary condition.
Moving between such objects and ideologies, the technology critic
could reveal how important, critical questions are not being asked and
how certain marginal interests are being sidelined. To recover these
lost perspectives and continue a debate that would otherwise be closed
prematurely: this is what the best kind of technology criticism could
accomplish.

Well, goodbye to all that. Today, it’s obvious to me that technology

criticism, uncoupled from any radical project of social transformation,
simply doesn’t have the goods. By slicing the world into two distinct
spheres—the technological and the non-technological—it quickly
regresses into the worst kind of solipsistic idealism, paying far more
attention to drummed-up, theoretical ideas about technology than to
real struggles in the here and now.

The rallying cry of the technology critic

—and I confess to shouting it more than
once—is: “If only consumers and
companies knew better!”
In a nutshell, the problem is this: given enough time, a skilled
technology critic could explain virtually anything, simply by assuming
that somebody, somewhere, has confused ideas about technology. That
people have confused ideas about technology might occasionally be the
case, but it’s a case that ought to be made, never taken for granted. The
existence of Facebook-enabled trashcans does not necessarily mean
that the people building and using them suffer from a severe form of
technological false consciousness. Either way, why assume that their
problems can be solved by poring over the texts of some ponderous
French or German philosopher?

Alas, the false consciousness explanation is the kind of low-hanging

fruit that no technology critic wants to pass up, as it can magically
transport us from the risky fields of politics and economics to the safer
terrain of psychology and philosophy. It’s so much easier to assume
that those trashcans exist due to humanity’s inability to peruse
Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty than to investigate whether the
inventors in question simply tapped into available subsidies from, say,
the European Commission.

Such investigations are messy and might eventually prompt

uncomfortable questions—about capital, war, the role of the state—that
are better left unasked, at least if one doesn’t want to risk becoming
that dreadful other type of critic, the radical. It’s much safer to
interpret every act or product as if it stemmed from some erroneous
individual or collective belief, some flawed intellectual outlook on
technology.

Take our supposed overreliance on apps, the favorite subject of many

contemporary critics, Carr included. How, the critics ask, could we be
so blind to the deeply alienating effects of modern technology? Their
tentative answer—that we are simply lazy suckers for technologically
mediated convenience—reveals many of them to be insufferable,
pompous moralizers. The more plausible thesis—that the growing
demands on our time probably have something to do with the uptake of
apps and the substitution of the real (say, parenting) with the virtual
(say, the many apps that allow us to monitor kids remotely)—is not
even broached. For to speak of our shrinking free time would also mean
speaking of capital and labor, and this would take the technology critic
too far away from “technology proper.”

It’s the existence of this “technology proper” that most technology

critics take for granted. In fact, the very edifice of contemporary
technology criticism rests on the critic’s reluctance to acknowledge that
every gadget or app is simply the end point of a much broader matrix of
social, cultural, and economic relations. And while it’s true that our
attitudes toward these gadgets and apps are profoundly shaped by our
technophobia or technophilia, why should we focus on only the end
points and the behaviors that they stimulate? Here is one reason:
whatever attack emerges from such framing of the problem is bound to
be toothless—which explains why it is also so attractive to many.

If technology criticism were solely about aesthetic considerations—Is

this gadget well made? Is this app beautiful?—such theoretical
narrowness would be tenable. But most technology critics find
themselves in a double bind. They must go beyond the aesthetic
dimension—they are decidedly not  mere assessors of design—but they
cannot afford to reveal the existence of the rest of the matrix, for that,
too, risks turning them into something else entirely.

Their solution is to operate with real technological objects—these are

the gadgets and apps we see in the news—but to treat the users and
manufacturers of those objects as imaginary, theoretical constructs.
They are “imaginary” and “theoretical” inasmuch as their rationale is
imposed on them by the explanatory limitations of technology criticism
rather than grasped ethnographically or analytically. In the hands of
technology critics, history becomes just a succession of wise and foolish
ideas about technology; there are usually no structures—social or
economic ones—that get in the way.

Unsurprisingly, if one starts by assuming that every problem stems

from the dominance of bad ideas about technology rather than from
unjust, flawed, and exploitative modes of social organization, then
every proposed solution will feature a heavy dose of better ideas. They
might be embodied in better, more humane gadgets and apps, but the
mode of intervention is still primarily ideational. The rallying cry of the
technology critic—and I confess to shouting it more than once—is: “If
only consumers and companies knew better!” One can tinker with
consumers and companies, but the market itself is holy and not to be
contested. This is the unstated assumption behind most popular
technology criticism written today.

Well, suppose consumers and companies did  know better. This would

mean, presumably, that consumers would change their behavior and
companies would change their products. The latter does not look very
promising. At best, we might get the technological equivalent of fair-
trade lattes on sale at Starbucks, a modern-day indulgence for the rich
and the doubtful.

The first option—getting consumers to change their behavior—is much

more plausible. But if the problem in question wasn’t a technology
problem to begin with, why address it at the level of consumers and
not, say, politically at the level of citizens and institutions? The lines
demarcating the technological and the political cannot be drawn by
those forever confined to think within the technological paradigm; one
needs to exit the paradigm to get a glimpse of both alternative
explanations and the political costs of framing the issue through the
lens of technology.

Thus, technology critics of the romantic and conservative strands can

certainly tell us how to design a more humane smart energy meter. But
to decide whether smart energy meters are an appropriate response to
climate change is not in their remit. Why design them humanely if we
shouldn’t design them at all? That question can be answered only by
those critics who haven’t yet lost the ability to think in non-market and
non-statist terms. Technological expertise, in other words, is mostly
peripheral to answering this question.

But most of our technology critics are not really interested in answering
such questions anyway. Liberated from any radical inclinations, they
take the institutional and political reality as it is, but, sensing that
something is amiss, they come up with an ingenious solution: Why not
ask citizens to internalize the costs of all the horror around them, for
that horror probably stems from their lack of self-control or their poor
taste in gadgets? It is in this relegation of social and political problems
solely to the level of the individual (there is no society, there are only
individuals and their gadgets) that technology criticism is the
theoretical vanguard of the neoliberal project.

Even if Nicholas Carr’s project succeeds—i.e., even if he does convince

users that all that growing alienation is the result of their false beliefs in
automation and even if users, in turn, convince technology companies
to produce new types of products—it’s not obvious why this should be
counted as a success. It’s certainly not going to be a victory for
progressive politics (Carr is extremely murky on his own). Information
technology has indeed become the primary means for generating the
kind of free time that, in the not so distant past, was at the heart of
many political battles and was eventually enshrined in laws (think of
limits on daily work hours, guaranteed time off, the free weekend).
Such political battles are long gone.

In the past, it was political institutions—trade unions and leftist parties

—that workers had to thank for the limited breaks they got from work.
Today, these tasks fall squarely on technology companies: the more
Google knows about you, the more time you will save every day, as it
personalizes everything and even completes some tasks (like retrieving
boarding passes) on your behalf. At best, Carr’s project might succeed
in producing a different Google. But its lack of ambition is itself a
testament to the sad state of politics today. It’s primarily in the
marketplace of technology providers—not in the political realm—that
we seek solutions to our problems. A more humane Google is not
necessarily a good thing—at least, not as long as the project of
humanizing it distracts us from the more fundamental political tasks at
hand. Technology critics, however, do not care. Their job is to write
about Google.