Silicon valley. [inaudible conversations] im director of the wisconsin book festival, welcome to what is proving to be a wonderful day at our 14th annual wisconsin book festival. Thank you for coming tonight or this afternoon. I would like to thank Nicholas Carr for his book utopia is creepy and other provocations but first i think Madison Public Library and all our sponsors for making possible, i want to thank you here in this room for coming and everyone watching on cspan booktv, cultural experiences like this are few and far between and we are honored to put one on for you in madison, wisconsin. For the past 15 years, Nicholas Carr has been giving us the real alternative history of what the information is for all of us. If you are listening to him, many Different Things about the personal things we give up every time we empty our pockets. You have heard how the internet changes our brains and fairly scary or creepy things, neck is here to give a better view of how we can live our lives, change the future of how we react to technologies. [applause] thank you, thanks very much. My thanks to everyone for putting on the wisconsin book festival. Both for hosting such the mic is not on. Is that better . No. Thanks to everyone at the wisconsin book festival both for putting on such a terrific event and for inviting me to participate in it and share some of my ideas and perspectives. This is my book called utopia is creepy and other provocations. If you dont remember the title, you can look at the cover. If you added up everything that has appeared on book covers throughout history there are more on my book than all of those combined, not something to be proud of. The book collects a lot of my shorter blog posts and essays, reviews i have written over the last thousand years or so. I started writing my blog back in 2005. In 2015 the 10 Year Anniversary i started going through what i had written and there was Something Like 1700 posts i have written so it took a while to go through. That exercise in rereading this brought home to me how much not only technology has changed in that relatively short period but how much our lives changed because of the technology but if you think back to 2005 this was a time people were talking about web 2. 0, the rebirth of the internet after the dot. Com crash and it was a time before smart phones, before the iphone, before the ipad, before social media. And was limited to a few kids at harvard. Now if you look at it come most of us who carry around smart phones the best evidence is we fool out our smartphone and do something with it somewhere between 100, 200 times a day for many people and most young people, the first thing they look at in the morning when they wake up, waking them up with this alarm and the last thing before they go to bed. If you add it all up, what we were interacting with looking at every few minutes of our waking lives, this is something new in the world, something new in media, new in technology and i am not sure we have thought deeply or critically enough about how it is influencing us, changing our behavior, the way we act, the way we think and i began to see a narrative, it was really a narrative that in one sense is a meditation on technological utopianism. Longstanding American Culture that we advance as a society through the advances of technology. There is a good part, a good element of technological utopianism. It encourages innovation, breakthroughs. We have profited from that but there is a bad side as well and that is progress is really just technological progress. And we lose sight of the fact that technology and tools really should be a means to an end, a means to some bigger idea of progress, social progress, cultural progress and only by taking that can we take the right perspective in judging technology, the way it is designed, what its intentions are. And also we can judge our own use of it. I would like to read a couple sections of the book. The first one will be an excerpt from the introduction, Silicon Valley days, gets into some of those things i am talking about, we try to put what we have seen for the past dozen years into this historical perspective. The greatest of americas homegrown religions, greater then jehovahs witnesses, greater then the church of jesus christ of latterday saints, is the religion of technology. A man from the pittsburgh sounded the trumpet in paradise within the reach of all men. By fulfilling its, quote, mechanical purposes the united the turn itself into a new eden. A state of superabundance where there will be a continual feast, part of the pleasure, novelty, instructive occupations not to mention vegetables of infinite variety and appearance, similar predictions proliferated through the 19th and 202 centuries, as perry miller rose we find the true americans sublime. We blow kisses to jefferson and 3 huggers like Henry David Thoreau but put our faith in edison and ford, zuckerberg, it is the technology that will lead us. Cyberspace with its disembodied voices and ethereal avatars seems mystical from the start. Its unearthly vastness, americas spiritual yearnings. What better way, wrote michael time in 1991 to emulate gods knowledge and generate a Virtual World constituted by bits of information. Google moved from a meadow park garage to a the yale Computer Scientist wrote a manifesto, the Second Coming of the computer. Images of cyberbodies in the computational cosmos, beautifully laid out collections of information like immaculate gardens. The millenarian and in august 2005 cover story, we are entering a new world powered not by gods grace but the electricity of participation. It would be a paradise of our own making manufactured by users, histories database would be erased, humankind it continues to this day, the technological paradigm on the horizon monkey men have taken sidelines in starry eyed futures which in 2014 venture capitalist market research, a series of tweets. About to liberate us all. Echoing John Adolphus adler and karl marx, for the first time humankind would be able to express its nature. We could be whoever we want to d, the main field of human endeavor would be culture, art, science, creativity, philosophy, exploration, adventure. The only thing he left out was the vegetables. Such prophecies, the prattle of overindulged rich guys but for one thing, they shaped public opinion. By spreading a utopian view of technology, a view that defines progress, essentially technological, they switch off critical faculties and give Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and financiers free reign in remaking culture to fit their commercial interests. If after all the technologists are creating a world of superabundance, a World Without work or ones, their interests be indistinguishable from society. Stand in the way or even question their motives would be selfdefeating. It would serve only to the they the inevitable. The webs profits have had good intentions but their assumptions, they put too much stock in the early history of the west. And social structures, a sample of the population. They failed to appreciate how the network would funnel the energies of the people into a centrally administered, tightly monitored Information System organized to enrich a small group of businesses. The network would indeed generate a lot of wealth but it would be concentrated in a few hands not widely spread. The culture that emerged on the network now extends deep into our lives is characterized by frenetic production and consumption, smart phones made media machines of us all but little real empowerment and less reflectiveness. A culture of distraction. That is not to deny the benefits of an efficient universal system, it is to deny the assumptions the system in order to provide benefits had to take its presence alone. Late in his life, John Kenneth Galbraith coined the term innocent fraud, used it to describe a lie or halftruth because it suits the needs or views of those in power, presented as fact. After much repetition the fiction becomes common with them. It is innocent because most to employ our without conscious guilt. It is fraud because it is in the service of specialinterest. The idea of the Computer Network as an engine of liberation, innocence, fraud. As a teenager i sat down at a computer for the first time, a monochromatic terminal connected to a mainframe, i was wonder struck. As soon as affordable pcs came along i surrounded myself with beige boxes, floppy disks and what used to be called peripherals with a computer, i found, with a tool of many uses but also a puzzle with many mysteries. The more time you spend figuring out how it worked, language, probing its limits, the more possibilities it opens like the best of tools, it invited, rewarded curiosity. In the early 90s i launched a browser for the first time and watched the gates of the web open. I was enthralled, so much territory, so few rules but it didnt take long for carpetbaggers to arrive, territory began to be subdivided, stripmall and as the monetary value of its databanks grew, strip mind with my excitement remained but was tempered by wariness. I sensed foreign agents were slipping into my computer, its connection to the web. What had been a tool under my own control was morphing into a medium under the control of others was the computer screen was becoming, as all mass media tend to become, and environment, a surrounding, and enclosure, at worst a cage. It seems clear those who controlled the omnipresent screen would, if in their way, control culture as well. Computing was not about computers anymore. Nicholas negroponte in his bestseller being digital. It is about living. By the turnofthecentury Silicon Valley was selling more than gadgets. It was selling an ideology. The creed is set in the tradition of american technoutopianism but with a digital twist. Fierce materialists, what couldnt be measured had no meaning yet they love materiality. The problems of the world from any efficiency and any quality to mortality emanated from the worlds physicality. From its embodiment, inflexible stuff. A panacea was virtuality. The reinvention of the redemption of society in the computer code. Not from adams but this. All that is solid would melt into the network. We were expected to be grateful and for the most part we were. Our craving for virtuality is the latest expression of photography described as the american impatience with reality, the taste for activities whose instrumentalities a machine. What we always found hard to abide is the world follows a script we didnt write. We look to technology not only to manipulate nature but possess it. Package it as a project to be consumed by pressing a light switch or gas pedal or shutter. Urine to reprogram it exists and with a computer we have the best means yet. We would like to see this project as heroic, a rebellion against an alien power. It is not that at all. It is a project born of anxiety. Behind it, that messy atomic world, what Silicon Valley sells is not transcendence but withdrawal. The screen provides a refuge, mediated world that is more predictable, more tractable and above all safer than the recalcitrant world of things. We flocked to the virtual because the real demand too much of us. I think as i thought back on my own changes in my own attitude towards technology, computer technology, what we mean by Technology Today, i came to the conclusion that all technological enthusiasts as i once was are fated to end up either disillusioned or delusional. I think delusional would be more fun but i have become disillusioned. Of the dangers of becoming disillusioned or to see that it isnt having the effect many people intended, it is having mixed impacts, encouraging this culture of distraction rather than encouraging us encouraging a more polarized view of the world rather than expanding our boundaries and encouraging us and other peoples points of view. One of the dangers of being a skeptic is it is too easy to become a cynic. A more jaded i, technological advances and in recent years i struggled more and more with this tendency, and tried to figure out to draw a distinction that works in my own mind, about the types of technology that do what we want great tools to do for us which is open the world more fully to us in our intentions, expand our horizons, give us new ways to look at society, communicate with each other, examine the natural world, technologies that have the opposite effect, technologies that close down the world, dont encourage us to explore, dont open new horizons but constrain our horizons. I fear for all the benefits we get from it, the Computer Technologies we are immersed in today, social media, smart phones, facebook and so forth, are of the latter kind. We spend so much time gazing into screens, ever shrinking screens in fact, that we do close ourselves off from richer engagement with the world and with each other. As i thought about this i began to write an essay recently, started as a part of an earlier thing called the glass cage and it is an essay inspired strangely enough by a robert frost poem more than 100 years old, it was a poem that always meant a lot to me. But as a work of art, a work of poetry. Maybe it is a way to make sense of technology. And this turns into the realization, turned into an essay that draws its name from a line in the poem, i would like to be part of this essay. It goes beyond immediately positive or negative reaction, does try to figure out what qualities of Technology Make them make that particular technology meaningful, useful to humanity. Better our lives rather than narrowing our lives down. There is a line of verse i am always coming back to that has been on my mind more than usual the last few months. The fact is the sweetest dream the labor knows. The second to last line of robert frosts best poem, a sonnet called mowing. He wrote it just after the turn of the 20th century when he was a young man in his 20s, he was working as a farmer, raising chickens and tending a few apple trees on a small plot of land his grandfather had bought for him in new hampshire. It was a difficult time in his life. He had little money and few prospects which he dropped out of two colleges without earning a degree. He had been unsuccessful in a succession of petty jobs. He had nightmares, his firstborn child had died of cholera at the age of 3. His marriage was troubled. Threw me into confusion. It was during those lonely years that he came into his own as a writer and an artist. Something about farming, repetitive days, solitary work, closeness to natures beauty and carelessness, the burden of labor ease the burden of life. If i feel timeless and immortal it is from having lost track of time for 5 or 6 years. We gave up winding cloth. Ideas got timely from not taking newspapers for a long period. Could not have been more perfect if we planned it or for seen when we got into. Frost managed to write most of the poems, have the poems north of boston. Into subsequent volumes. Mowing from a boys will degraded, a poem in which he found his distinctive voice, plainspoken and conversational. Really understand frost to understand anything including your self requires as much mistrust, as with many of his best works, and enigmatic, hallucinatory quality that the only picture paints, in this case of a man cutting a field of grass, the more you read the poem the deeper and stranger it becomes. I will read the poem now. Mowing. There was never a sound beside the woods of one. That was my long side whispering, what was it . It whispered. I knew not well myself. Perhaps it was the heat of the sun. Something for lack of sound and that was why it whispered and did not speak, was no dream of the gift of isil hours. And anything more than the truth would have seen too week to be ernest love the blade the sale and rose, not without evil pointed spikes of flowers, scared of a snake is the fact the sweetest dream labor knows. I side, whispered and left the hay to make as we rarely look to poetry for instruction anymore but here we see how a poets scrutiny of the world can be more subtle and discerning than a scientists. Frost understood the essence of what we now call embodied cognition. The meaning of that heightened mental state long before psychologists and neurobiologists delivered empirical evidence. His mower is not an airbrushed peasant, a caricature, he is a farmer, a man doing a hard job on a hot summer day. He is not the meaning of isil hours for easy gold. His mind is on his work, the bodily rhythm, the weight of the tool in his hands, stocks piling up around him. He is not seeking some greater truth beyond his work, the work is the truth. The fact that labor knows. Frost heres not romanticizing a distant pretechnological past. He was dismayed by those who allowed themselves to be, as he later writes bigoted reliance on the gospel of modern science, he felt a kinship scientists and inventors. As a poet he shared with them a common spirit, they were all explorers of the mysteries of earthly life, excavators and all engaged in work that extends human breeding. For frost, made its value of the facts, apprehended in the world or expressed in a work of art or made manifest lay in its ability to expand the scope of individual knowing, enhanced new open avenues of perception, action and imagination. The human body in its unadorned states is a feeble thing. It is constrained in its strength, dexterity, its sensory range, its memory. The body quickly reached the limits of what it can do. The body encompasses a mind that can imagine, desire and plan for achievement, the body alone cant fulfill, this tension between what the body can accomplish and the mind can envision is what gave rise to and continues to propel and shape technology. What allows the mower to do his work is the tool he wields. It is has to be enhanced. The tool makes the mower and the skill remains the world for him. It becomes a place in which he can act as a mower. It may sound trivial. Points to something elemental about life. The body is our general means of having a world. Our physical makeup the fact that we walk upright on two legs at a certain height that we have a pair of hands with opposable thumbs. We have a certain tolerance determines our perception of the world that perceived and then molds our conscious thoughts about the world. We see mountains as a lofty not because theyre lofty but because our perception of their form in tight is shaped by our own stature. Because of the particular construction of