Nicholas Carr

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“We Now Cede Even Moral Choices To Our Technology”

January 13, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A debate (by proxy) between Nicholas Carr and Andrew McAfee, two leading thinkers about the spreed of automation, takes place in Zoë Corbyn’s Guardian article about Carr’s most-recent book, The Glass Cage. I doubt the proliferation of Weak AI will ultimately be contained much beyond niches despite any good dissenting arguments. An excerpt:

As doctors increasingly follow automated diagnostic templates and architects use computer programs to generate their building plans, their jobs become duller. “At some point you turn people into computer operators – and that’s not a very interesting job,” Carr says. We now cede even moral choices to our technology, he says. The Roomba vacuum cleaning robot, for example, will unthinkingly hoover up a spider that we may have saved.

Not everyone buys Carr’s gloomy argument. People have always lamented the loss of skills due to technology: think about the calculator displacing the slide rule, says Andrew McAfee, a researcher at the MIT Sloan School of Management. But on balance, he says, the world is better off because of automation. There is the occasional high-profile crash – but greater automation, not less, is the answer to avoiding that.

Carr counters that we must start resisting the urge to increase automation unquestioningly. Reserving some tasks for humans will mean less efficiency, he acknowledges, but it will be worth it in the long run.•

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“People Thought They Were About To Evolve, To Become Something Wholly New”

January 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

Via Nicholas Carr’s blog, Rough Type, I came across “HAL, Mother, and Father,” Jason Z. Resnikoff’s Paris Review post about his father’s generation, who, in 1968, viewed Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi future, even his rogue computer, with techno-optimism, a feeling that short-circuited within a decade. An excerpt:

2001 is the brainchild of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, who intended the film as a vision of things that seemed destined to come. In large part this fact has been lost on more recent generations of viewers who regard the movie as almost entirely metaphorical. Not so. The film was supposed to describe events that were really about to happen—that’s why Kubrick and Clarke went to such lengths to make it realistic, dedicating months to researching the ins and outs of manned spaceflight. They were so successful that a report written in 2005 from NASA’s Scientific and Technical Information Program Office argues that 2001 is today still “perhaps the most thoroughly and accurately researched film in screen history with respect to aerospace engineering.” Kubrick shows the audience exactly how artificial gravity could be maintained in the endless free-fall of outer space; how long a message would take to reach Jupiter; how people would eat pureed carrots through a straw; how people would poop in zero G. Curious about extraterrestrial life, Kubrick consulted Carl Sagan (evidently an expert) and made changes to the script accordingly.

It’s especially ironic because anyone who sees the film today will be taken aback by how unrealistic it is. The U.S. is not waging the Cold War in outer space. We have no moon colonies, and our supercomputers are not nearly as super as the murderous HAL. Pan Am does not offer commercial flights into high-Earth orbit, not least because Pan-Am is no more. Based on the rate of inflation, a video-payphone call to a space station should, in theory, cost far more than $1.70, but that wouldn’t apply when the payphone is a thing of the past. More important, everything in 2001 looks new. From heavy capital to form-fitting turtlenecks—thank goodness, not the mass fashion phenomenon the film anticipated—it all looks like it was made yesterday. But despite all of that, when you see the movie today you see how 1968 wasn’t just about social and political reform; people thought they were about to evolve, to become something wholly new, a revolution at the deepest level of a person’s essence.•

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“Automation’s New Wave Is Hitting Just About Everyone”

November 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I love reading Nicholas Carr, so bright he is and such a blessedly lucid writer, though I don’t always find myself agreeing with him. I won’t blame him for the headline of his latest WSJ piece, “Automation Makes Us Dumb,” but I do take issue with his idea that we should be alarmed that AI is causing “skill fade” in airline pilots, making it dangerous to fly. It’s no less scary for a plane to crash by human hand rather than because of a computer failure (or because of some combined failure of the two). It’s bad regardless. But accidents on domestic airlines in America have become almost non-existent as the crafts have become more computerized and we’ve learned to navigate wind shears. That wouldn’t be the case without machines aiding planes, which are, you know, machines. I think Carr’s enthusiasm for “adaptive automation” makes sense, at least in the short and medium terms, though ultimately I favor whatever most often prevents plane noses from touching earth. From Carr:

“In the 1950s, a Harvard Business School professor named James Bright went into the field to study automation’s actual effects on a variety of industries, from heavy manufacturing to oil refining to bread baking. Factory conditions, he discovered, were anything but uplifting. More often than not, the new machines were leaving workers with drabber, less demanding jobs. An automated milling machine, for example, didn’t transform the metalworker into a more creative artisan; it turned him into a pusher of buttons.

Bright concluded that the overriding effect of automation was (in the jargon of labor economists) to ‘de-skill’ workers rather than to ‘up-skill’ them. ‘The lesson should be increasingly clear,’ he wrote in 1966. ‘Highly complex equipment’ did not require ‘skilled operators. The ‘skill’ can be built into the machine.’

We are learning that lesson again today on a much broader scale. As software has become capable of analysis and decision-making, automation has leapt out of the factory and into the white-collar world. Computers are taking over the kinds of knowledge work long considered the preserve of well-educated, well-trained professionals: Pilots rely on computers to fly planes; doctors consult them in diagnosing ailments; architects use them to design buildings. Automation’s new wave is hitting just about everyone.”

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“We’ve Designed A System That Discards Us”

October 12, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

With computers so small they all but disappear, the infrastructure silently becoming more and more automated, what else will vanish from our lives and ourselves? I’m someone who loves the new normal of decentralized, free-flowing media, who thinks the gains are far greater than the losses, but it’s a question worth asking. Via Longreads, an excerpt from The Glass Cage, a new book by that Information Age designated mourner Nicholas Carr:

“There’s a big difference between a set of tools and an infrastructure. The Industrial Revolution gained its full force only after its operational assumptions were built into expansive systems and networks. The construction of the railroads in the middle of the nineteenth century enlarged the markets companies could serve, providing the impetus for mechanized mass production. The creation of the electric grid a few decades later opened the way for factory assembly lines and made all sorts of home appliances feasible and affordable. These new networks of transport and power, together with the telegraph, telephone, and broadcasting systems that arose alongside them, gave society a different character. They altered the way people thought about work, entertainment, travel, education, even the organization of communities and families. They transformed the pace and texture of life in ways that went well beyond what steam-powered factory machines had done.

The historian Thomas Hughes, in reviewing the arrival of the electric grid in his book Networks of Power, described how first the engineering culture, then the business culture, and finally the general culture shaped themselves to the new system. ‘Men and institutions developed characteristics that suited them to the characteristics of the technology,’ he wrote. ‘And the systematic interaction of men, ideas, and institutions, both technical and nontechnical, led to the development of a supersystem—a sociotechnical one—with mass movement and direction.’ It was at this point that what Hughes termed ‘technological momentum’ took hold, both for the power industry and for the modes of production and living it supported. ‘The universal system gathered a conservative momentum. Its growth generally was steady, and change became a diversification of function.’ Progress had found its groove.

We’ve reached a similar juncture in the history of automation. Society is adapting to the universal computing infrastructure—more quickly than it adapted to the electric grid—and a new status quo is taking shape. …

The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once asked, ‘Can the synthesis of man and machine ever be stable, or will the purely organic component become such a hindrance that it has to be discarded?’ In the business world at least, no stability in the division of work between human and computer seems in the offing. The prevailing methods of computerized communication and coordination pretty much ensure that the role of people will go on shrinking. We’ve designed a system that discards us. If unemployment worsens in the years ahead, it may be more a result of our new, subterranean infrastructure of automation than of any particular installation of robots in factories or software applications in offices. The robots and applications are the visible flora of automation’s deep, extensive, and invasive root system.”

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“Automation Complexity Comes With Side Effects That Are Often Unintended”

September 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The robot-aided piloting of airplanes has been around longer than many people may realize. And soon it will be in cars as well. For the most part, that’s a great thing. Plane crashes in U.S. commercial airliners aren’t exactly a thing of the past, but almost, as the autonomous function combined with knowledge of wind shears has reduced dangers markedly. Roboplanes also wrestled the controls from often-autocratic lead pilots, whose refusal to listen to dissent led to many air crashes.

But there’s a new peril attendant to autonomous steering: As Nicholas Carr outlined last year, pilots are no longer as practiced should a technological glitch happen (and they will occur, if rarely).

The question is: Since the big-picture of safety has been greatly improved in aviation, how concerned should we be about technology causing some human pilot skills to atrophy? The same question can be applied to robocars and drivers going forward.

From “The Human Factor,” William Langewiesche’s Vanity Fair article about the safety measures that can occasionally making flying unsafe:

“These are generally known as ‘fourth generation’ airplanes; they now constitute nearly half the global fleet. Since their introduction, the accident rate has plummeted to such a degree that some investigators at the National Transportation Safety Board have recently retired early for lack of activity in the field. There is simply no arguing with the success of the automation. The designers behind it are among the greatest unheralded heroes of our time. Still, accidents continue to happen, and many of them are now caused by confusion in the interface between the pilot and a semi-robotic machine. Specialists have sounded the warnings about this for years: automation complexity comes with side effects that are often unintended. One of the cautionary voices was that of a beloved engineer named Earl Wiener, recently deceased, who taught at the University of Miami. Wiener is known for ‘Wiener’s Laws,’ a short list that he wrote in the 1980s. Among them:

  • Every device creates its own opportunity for human error.
  • Exotic devices create exotic problems.
  • Digital devices tune out small errors while creating opportunities for large errors.
  • Invention is the mother of necessity.
  • Some problems have no solution.
  • It takes an airplane to bring out the worst in a pilot.
  • Whenever you solve a problem, you usually create one. You can only hope that the one you created is less critical than the one you eliminated.
  • You can never be too rich or too thin (Duchess of Windsor) or too careful about what you put into a digital flight-guidance system (Wiener).

Wiener pointed out that the effect of automation is to reduce the cockpit workload when the workload is low and to increase it when the workload is high. Nadine Sarter, an industrial engineer at the University of Michigan, and one of the pre-eminent researchers in the field, made the same point to me in a different way: ‘Look, as automation level goes up, the help provided goes up, workload is lowered, and all the expected benefits are achieved. But then if the automation in some way fails, there is a significant price to pay. We need to think about whether there is a level where you get considerable benefits from the automation but if something goes wrong the pilot can still handle it.’

Sarter has been questioning this for years and recently participated in a major F.A.A. study of automation usage, released in the fall of 2013, that came to similar conclusions. The problem is that beneath the surface simplicity of glass cockpits, and the ease of fly-by-wire control, the designs are in fact bewilderingly baroque—all the more so because most functions lie beyond view. Pilots can get confused to an extent they never would have in more basic airplanes. When I mentioned the inherent complexity to Delmar Fadden, a former chief of cockpit technology at Boeing, he emphatically denied that it posed a problem, as did the engineers I spoke to at Airbus. Airplane manufacturers cannot admit to serious issues with their machines, because of the liability involved, but I did not doubt their sincerity. Fadden did say that once capabilities are added to an aircraft system, particularly to the flight-management computer, because of certification requirements they become impossibly expensive to remove. And yes, if neither removed nor used, they lurk in the depths unseen. But that was as far as he would go.”

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“It Gets Harder For Any One Individual To Opt Out”

September 10, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Mattathias Schwartz’s largely negative Technology Review critique of Nicholas Carr’s latest book, The Glass Cage, which focuses on the dark side of automation, some smart commentary about the real nature of Facebook:

“Carr spends most of The Glass Cage treating automation as though it were a problem of unenlightened personal choices—suggesting that we should often opt out of technologies like GPS in favor of manual alternatives. Yet the decision to adopt many other innovations is not always so voluntary. There is often something seductive and even coercive about them. Consider a technology that Carr himself discusses: Facebook, which seeks to automate the management of human relationships. Once the majority has accepted the site’s addictive design and slight utility, it gets harder for any one individual to opt out. (Though Facebook may not look like an example of automation, it is indeed work in disguise. The workers—or ‘users’—are not paid a wage and the product, personal data, is not sold in a visible or public market, but it does have a residual echo of the machine room. Personal expression and relationships constitute the raw material; the continuously updated feed is the production line.)

Carr flirts with real anger in The Glass Cage, but he doesn’t go far enough in exploring more constructive pushback to automation. The resistance he endorses is the docile, individualized resistance of the consumer—a photographer who shoots on film, an architect who brainstorms on paper. These are small, personal choices with few broader consequences. The frustrations that Carr diagnoses—the longing for an older world, or a different world, or technologies that embody more humanistic and less exploitative intentions—are widespread. For these alternatives to appear feasible, someone must do the hard work of imagining what they would look like.”

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“He Predicted That The Machines Eventually Would Be Deployed To Fine-Tune Society’s Workings”

April 16, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In the new Technology Review article “The Limits of Social Engineering,” Nicholas Carr looks at the potential and pitfalls of Big Data, which can tell us where things are going but can also bury the lead. In the piece, Carr references a 1969 Playboy interview with Marshall McLuhan, which was both really wrong and really right. The opening:

“In 1969, Playboy published a long, freewheeling interview with Marshall McLuhan in which the media theorist and sixties icon sketched a portrait of the future that was at once seductive and repellent. Noting the ability of digital computers to analyze data and communicate messages, he predicted that the machines eventually would be deployed to fine-tune society’s workings. ‘The computer can be used to direct a network of global thermostats to pattern life in ways that will optimize human awareness,’ he said. ‘Already, it’s technologically feasible to employ the computer to program societies in beneficial ways.’ He acknowledged that such centralized control raised the specter of ‘brainwashing, or far worse,’ but he stressed that ‘the programming of societies could actually be conducted quite constructively and humanistically.’

The interview appeared when computers were used mainly for arcane scientific and industrial number-crunching. To most readers at the time, McLuhan’s words must have sounded far-fetched, if not nutty. Now they seem prophetic. With smartphones ubiquitous, Facebook inescapable, and wearable computers like Google Glass emerging, society is gaining a digital sensing system. People’s location and behavior are being tracked as they go through their days, and the resulting information is being transmitted instantaneously to vast server farms. Once we write the algorithms needed to parse all that ‘big data,’ many sociologists and statisticians believe, we’ll be rewarded with a much deeper understanding of what makes society tick.

One of big data’s keenest advocates is Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, a data scientist who, as the director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, has long used computers to study the behavior of businesses and other organizations. In his brief but ambitious new book, Social Physics, Pentland argues that our greatly expanded ability to gather behavioral data will allow scientists to develop ‘a causal theory of social structure’ and ultimately establish ‘a mathematical explanation for why society reacts as it does’ in all manner of circumstances. As the book’s title makes clear, Pentland thinks that the social world, no less than the material world, operates according to rules. There are ‘statistical regularities within human movement and communication,’ he writes, and once we fully understand those regularities, we’ll discover ‘the basic mechanisms of social interactions.'”

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“Paper May Be The Single Most Versatile Invention In History”

September 1, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In “Paper Versus Pixel,” Nicholas Carr’s excellent new Nautilus essay, he argues that print won’t be disappeared by 0s and 1s. The opening:

“Gutenberg we know. But what of the eunuch Cai Lun?

A well-educated, studious young man, a close aide to the Emperor Hedi in the Chinese imperial court of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Cai invented paper one fateful day in the year 105 A.D. At the time, writing and drawing were done primarily on silk, which was elegant but expensive, or on bamboo, which was sturdy but cumbersome. Seeking a more practical alternative, Cai came up with the idea of mashing bits of tree bark and hemp fiber together in a little water, pounding the resulting paste flat with a stone mortar, and then letting it dry into sheets in the sun. The experiment was a success. Allowing for a few industrial tweaks, Cai’s method is still pretty much the way paper gets made today.

Cai killed himself some years later, having become entangled in a palace scandal from which he saw no exit. But his invention took on a life of its own. The craft of papermaking spread quickly throughout China and then, following the Silk Road westward, made its way into Persia, Arabia, and Europe. Within a few centuries, paper had replaced animal skins, papyrus mats, and wooden tablets as the world’s preferred medium for writing and reading. The goldsmith Gutenberg would, with his creation of the printing press around 1450, mechanize the work of the scribe, replacing inky fingers with inky machines, but it was Cai Lun who gave us our reading material and, some would say, our world.

Paper may be the single most versatile invention in history, its uses extending from the artistic to the bureaucratic to the hygienic. Rarely, though, do we give it its due. The ubiquity and disposability of the stuff—the average American goes through a quarter ton of it every year—lead us to take it for granted, or even to resent it. It’s hard to respect something that you’re forever throwing in the trash or flushing down the john or blowing your nose into. But modern life is inconceivable without paper. If paper were to disappear, writes Ian Sansom in his recent book Paper: An Elegy, ‘Everything would be lost.’

But wait. ‘An elegy’? Sansom’s subtitle is half joking, but it’s also half serious. For while paper will be around as long as we’re around, with the digital computer we have at last come up with an invention to rival Cai Lun’s.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“E-Books Are Well Suited To Some Types Of Books (Like Genre Fiction) But Not Well Suited To Other Types”

August 8, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The sales of e-books have flattened this year in the U.S., and even declined worldwide, surprisingly. An excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s list of six reasons why this might be so:

“1. We may be discovering that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction)  but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction) and are well suited to certain reading situations (plane trips) but less well suited to others (lying on the couch at home). The e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audiobooks have long been, rather than an outright substitute.

2. The early adopters, who tend also to be the enthusiastic adopters, have already made their move to e-books. Further converts will be harder to come by, particularly given the fact that 59 percent of American book readers say they have ‘no interest’ in e-books, according to the Bowker report.

3. The advantages of printed books have been underrated, while the advantages of e-books have been overrated.”

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“There Are Social Pressures And Brain Chemicals That Encourage Us To Stay Connected”

February 1, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I disagree with many of Nick Carr’s concerns about the Internet, though I always find him a really smart and lively thinker. I don’t believe new media will necessarily make us a lot smarter–at least not in the short term–but I don’t think it’s turned us from a contemplative nation of readers of thick Russian novels into pinheads. I mean, when did that earlier nation even exist? When was it ever going to exist? An excerpt from “We Turn Ourselves Into Media Creations,” a new inteview by Lars Mensel in The European in which Carr makes some points about social networking:

“Carr: There are social pressures and brain chemicals that encourage us to stay connected: It becomes very difficult to cut ourselves off from the flow of information. As technology becomes ever more deeply woven into our social processes and expectations, it becomes something more than just a matter of personal discipline. In their jobs, many people face the expectation to always monitor messages and emails coming from colleagues or clients. That pressure goes on even when they leave work and go home; they are still constantly checking information. Thanks to Facebook, social networking and other communication tools, there is now a situation where similar pressures are arising in our social lives: People you know are using online tools to plot their social lives and exchange information – it makes you feel compelled to also always be monitoring information. Obviously that doesn’t mean we don’t have free will or the choice to disconnect, we shouldn’t miss the fact that it is – like earlier technology such as the automobile – being woven so deeply into society that it is not just a matter of personal discipline to decide how to use it.

The European: A study has shown that using Facebook causes people to romanticize other peoples’ lives whilst seeing their own in a negative light: It is because people share predominately good news of flattering photos…

Carr: I saw a study that examined how people regard their Facebook friends and when somebody admired the exciting life of a friend, this friend often said exactly the same about them. It shows you how we turn ourselves and each other into media creations through social networks. As with celebrities and other media personalities, the reality can be very different from how we present ourselves online.” (Thanks Browser.)

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Science/Tech: Lee De Forest Was A Miserable Bastard Who Helped Invent The Electronic Age

June 12, 2010 in Books, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Inventor Lee de Forest: I was a tremendous prick, but terribly important.

Lee de Forest was one of the most important inventors in modern times, but don’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of him. The man is as forgotten as his invention, the Audion, is ubiquitous. The vexing inventor’s 1906 discovery made audio amplification possible, giving new life to the flagging radio industry and making possible any number of media. Gizmodo has posted an excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows, which provides insight into de Forest.  An excerpt:

“Even when judged by the high standards set by America’s mad-genius inventors, de Forest was an oddball. Nasty, ill-favored, and generally despised–in high school he was voted ‘homeliest boy’ in his class–he was propelled by an enormous ego and an equally outsized inferiority complex. When he wasn’t marrying or divorcing a wife, alienating a colleague, or leading a business to ruin, he was usually in court defending himself against charges of fraud or patent infringement–or pressing his own suit against one of his many enemies.

De Forest grew up in Alabama, the son of a schoolmaster. After earning a doctorate in engineering from Yale in 1896, he spent a decade fiddling with the latest radio and telegraph technology, desperately seeking the breakthrough that would make his name and fortune. In 1906, his moment arrived. Without quite knowing what he was doing, he took a standard two-pole vacuum tube, which sent an electric current from one wire (the filament) to a second (the plate), and he added a third wire to it, turning the diode into a triode. He found that when he sent a small electric charge into the third wire–the grid–it boosted the strength of the current running between the filament and the plate. The device, he explained in a patent application, could be adapted ‘for amplifying feeble electric currents.’

De Forest’s seemingly modest invention turned out to be a world changer. Because it could be used to amplify an electrical signal, it could also be used to amplify audio transmissions sent and received as radio waves. Up to then, radios had been of limited use because their signals faded so quickly. With the Audion to boost the signals, long-distance wireless transmissions became possible, setting the stage for radio broadcasting. The Audion became, as well, a critical component of the new telephone system, enabling people on opposite sides of the country, or the world, to hear each other talk.

De Forest couldn’t have known it at the time, but he had inaugurated the age of electronics.”

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Science/Technology: The Unabomber Goes Mainstream?

April 28, 2010 in Science/Tech | Permalink

Kaczynski lived in a remote Montana cabin while carrying out his mail-bomb terrorism.

Chillingly telling or heavy-handed and selective fearmongering? You’ll have to decide for yourself over at Nick Carr’s always provocative Rough Type site.

Carr has posted three cautionary quotes that have a lot in common; the difference is two of them are from respected AI thinkers and one was written by the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski. Check out Kaczynski’s quote below and click through to Carr’s post to see how others have echoed him (unintentionally) in years since.

1995: “[As] machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.”–Theodore Kaczynski

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Science/Tech: Information Does Not Want To Free

January 25, 2010 in Misc., Science/Tech | Permalink

Okay, some information wants to be free.

Over at the Rough Type blog, the always probing and questioning Nick Carr has a brief and bitter retort to those who say that in the Internet Age, information wants to be free. In his post titled “Information wants to be free my ass,” he points out that we’re paying plenty of money for delivery systems, so why quibble over tossing in a few pennies for content. An excerpt:

“Never before in history have people paid as much for information as they do today.

Do the math. Sit down right now, and add up what you pay every month for: Internet service, Cable TV service, Cellular telephone service (voice, data, messaging), Landline telephone service, Satellite radio, Netflix, Wi-Fi hotspots, TiVO and other information services

So what’s the total? $100? $200? $300? $400? Gizmodo reports that monthly information subscriptions and fees can easily run to $500 or more nowadays. A lot of people today probably spend more on information than they spend on food.”

There’s a lot of truth to what Carr is saying, but he loses me somewhat with his follow-up argument:

“It’s a strange world we live in. We begrudge the folks who actually create the stuff we enjoy reading, listening to, and watching a few pennies for their labor, and yet at the very same time we casually throw hundreds of hard-earned bucks at the saps who run the stupid networks through which the stuff is delivered. We screw the struggling artist, and pay the suit.”

No one is paying for cable TV for the wires but for the programs. We don’t begrudge the makers of the programs–their work is the attraction. And they receive part of the proceeds from the cable bill. If Carr is saying that the systems are getting too big a slice of the pie, that’s another argument. But content is what we love. Making that content available and navigable are also positives, but they are secondary ones to almost all of us. Perhaps cable TV is a bad point of debate for either Carr or I since its structure was in place before the Internet became the dominant medium, but Carr’s bone of contention may have more to do with self-appointed gurus pushing books than the rest of us. As the paradigm shift sorts itself out, we’ll pay for the content we want and need.

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