>> we are out of time. it is a very good place and i thank you. >> thank you for coming. >> thank you for starting the conversation. thanks to the madison festival and the public library foundation. >> thank you so much. history o silicon valley.

[inaudible conversations] >> i'm 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 c-span 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 don't 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. long-standing 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 america's homegrown religions, greater then jehovah's witnesses, greater then the church of jesus christ of latter-day 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. it's unearthly vastness, america's spiritual yearnings. what better way, wrote michael time in 1991 to emulate god's 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 god's 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 self-defeating. it would serve only to the they

the inevitable. the web's 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 half-truth 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 special-interest. 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 didn't 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, it's 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 turn-of-the-century silicon valley was selling more than gadgets. it was selling an ideology. the creed is set in the tradition of american

techno-utopianism but with a digital twist. fierce materialists, what couldn't 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 world's 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 didn't 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

isn't 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 people's 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, don't encourage us to explore, don't 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 frost's 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 nature's 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 boy's 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 poet's scrutiny of the world can be more subtle and discerning than a scientist's. 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 here's not romanticizing a distant pre-technological 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, it's 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 can't 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 they're lofty but because our perception of their form in tight is shaped by our own stature. because of the particular construction of our hand and arm enables us to pick it up and throw it. perception is embodied. it follows that whenever we gain any talent we not only change our bodily capacities we change the world the ocean extends an invitation to the swimmer that it withholds from the person who has never learned to swim. with every skill we master the world reshapes itself. it becomes more interesting by enabling us to act and go beyond the bodily limits also offers a different perspective of the world. technology is transformative.

it is most apparent in tools of discovery from the microscope and the particle accelerator of the scientist to the canoe and the spaceship. but the power is there and all tools including the ones we use in our everyday lives whenever an instrument allows us to cultivate a new talent the world becomes a different and more intriguing place. a setting of even greater opportunity. the value of a will made and well used tool in other words lies not only in what it produces for us but what it produces in us. and it's best technology opens fresh ground. i gives us a world that is at once more understandable to our senses and better suited to our intentions. a world in which we are more at home. used thoughtfully and with skill us tool becomes a much more.

not all tools are so congenial. some deter us from skilled actions the technologies of computerization in automation that's hold such sway over us today rarely invite us into the world or encourage us to develop new talents that enlarge our perceptions and expand our possibilities they are designed to be dissed in fighting. they pull us away from the world. as a consequence not only of prevailing design practices which place ease inefficiency above all other concerns but also of the fact the computer has become a media device. it grabs and scatters our attention. as most people by now i know

from experience the computer screen is intensely compelling. not only for the convenience and offers a but also for the many diversions it provides. there is always something going on we can join in at any moment with the slightest of effort. yet the screen for all its enticements is an environment of sparseness fast-moving efficient clean revealing only a shadow of the world. that is true even of the most meticulously crafted positions of space such as gains, architectural models and the tools used by surgeons and others to control robots. the renderings of space may provide stimulation to her eyes and to our lesser degree our ears but they tend to start our other senses. and greatly restrict the

movements of our bodies. when we enter the virtual world we are required to shed much of our body. the real world in turn is made less meaningful. as we adapt to our streamlined environment they are perceiving what the world offers. like drivers following gps command we traveled blindfolded. as nature and culture withdraw their invitations to act into proceed it can only thrive and grow. continuing that quote an environment that was always everywhere congenial to the

straightaway execution of our impulses the kind that they like to be with us. it is boosted on the forward way it would run its course thoughtless and dead to emotion. it is also a test that we set for ourselves challenges as to think about what is important in our lives to ask ourselves what human beings mean. computerization as it extends its reach into the deepest spheres of our existence raises the stakes. we can allow ourselves to be carried along by the technological current wherever it may be taking us or we can

push back against it. to resist and mention mentioned is not to reject invention. it is to humble invention. to bring progress down to earth. resistance is futile that is the opposite of the truth. resistance is never futile. if the source of our vitality is the act of the soul the highest obligation is to resist any force whether institutional or commercial or technological that would innovate that soul. one of the most remarkable things about it is one of the easiest to overlook. and each time we collide we deepen our understanding of the world and become more fully a part of it. while we are wrestling with the challenge we may be motivated by in anticipation of the ends of our labor but as robert frost saw it's the

work, and the means that makes us who we are. computerization and automation sever ends for means. they make getting what we want easier but they distance us from the work of knowing as we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen we face a question does it still lie in what we know does it still lie in what we know we had time for questions and comments because this is being broadcast if you have a question please come up to the microphone. so, i think what the story that they tell as i was

writing about this phenomena is a story about an somewhat tragic shift of the nature of what the personal computer is. the computer was a tool it was a set of tools and in many ways it represented the best kind of tools that are available to us. it opened up new areas of reading and pre- much everyone they could sit down and do new things with the computer. but as a model it was

delivered to us and changed not only in the way we use it but the way were constantly looking to the screen for diversion. in the ways that the companies they made money. it was no longer about selling a decent piece of software or program to you that you could evaluate and use the way you wanted it was all about selling advertisements. that changed the way the computer industry thought about us their customers. to us being the attention they

want to capture and resell. in the way the smartphone and the apps and social media and snapped chat or facebook or whatever how they are designed they are very much designed to keep us going back over and over again. what they understand we want to know everything that's going on around us. you can see why that is so. it's very important to brain function. we want to know everything that's going on. that helped keep us alive.

you wanted to see the berry bush that would provide the meal for the evening. we developed this new environment in this new digital environment that surrounds us more and more all the time and it's an environment that has been designed to have new things happening all the time. given that we walk around with it in our pocket these days we are constantly tempted to pull out our phone and look at it. simply because we know there's gonna be something new there. i'm not disparaging in them but they make useful goods and services and their doing what companies do. but these companies are very much now in the business of keeping us distracted and more and more dependent on the software and the services that they provide.

in order to resist that to become aware. to resist that it's not about throwing await your smart phone. it's really about trying to take back the technology as a tool. a not assume it's an all purse this medium. >> thank you so much for coming.

what i know from the experience in the world. there has to be a lot more accountability on our part. i also believe that with the accountability i must say from the millennial there is a certain level of consciousness that comes with understanding how the technology works and if you use it you can create an opportunity to keep people together. or a segue to get those together. i think it's kind of generational. i really do think that they embrace the technology a lot more and apply to avenues in

terms of growing as opposed to just say at the distraction. i do spend a lot of time on facebook but i spend a lot of time connecting getting information but at the same time i can use that to be more productive in the society. we are the ones who are sitting there looking at it. as long as we use it to our benefit. >> i had been focusing on being critical and the technology. ionic were critical enough. but it doesn't discount the fact that our smart phones into google and the internet give us access used to be very hard it's not impossible. it allows you to communicate in ways that used to be impossible or at least very

difficult. my problem though is i'm sure there are many people who use the technology thoughtfully and wisely and i am sure you are one of them. but if you look at the studies that have been done the broad studies that have been done about how people behave around their smartphones and how they are around facebook. they don't see a lot of thoughtful consideration. it's kind of this some people have i've compared to what we get when we play slot machines. essentially a smart phone becomes this kind of ward a device device that we know whenever we look at it we may have liked something we like something we put up on facebook.

it is to give them the sense that anytime they pick up the screen they may get a award. it's important because we've never have a technology that is so intrusive into our lives it's very important that we stand back and look skeptically at what it's doing to us. as well as what it's doing for us. >> i would like to put your futurist hat on a little bit. i had been noticing in my life how it went from a medium toad now i'm paying to use as a tool. i don't watch any advertisements. i wondered if that was where we were hopefully headed with the tech that you are taking issue with.

>> this is something i also write about in the book. the whole momentum with digital technology television to take the opposite. and rather than getting over the air wait for free. it's very interesting to contrast the two. as soon as they started paying for it. there is still a lot of garbage of course. i think it's very much connected to the fact that when we started paying for it relieved a lot of studios and

channels from the need to just grab our attention in the simplest way possible so that we would stick around and not had off to the kitchen or the bathroom. it often a lot of these companies if you ask google or facebook how they conceded themselves i think they are very much in the business of doing whatever it takes to get us to go back to the screen. because that's how they get information about us and how they have information and show us ads. >> i think there are some small indications that people might be getting tired of this model of constant distraction and dependency and so i think

there's at least a group of the population that is probably and it may continue it will begin to back away from the stuff that we pay such a high price for online and begin to pay for more thoughtful things. we can kind of see that in the limited success that some newspapers and magazines are having my futurist hat is pretty ill fitting. i had trouble seeing it's a big enough challenge to see what's going on at the moment. i can't say optimistic but i have seen have to use every

social medium possible among more more people a sense that this is in my best interest if i actually had to pay something in my pocket i could make wiser decisions about how i use this very powerful technology. whether that view expands, broadly in the population i don't know. my hope is that we will see a countercultural movement rise up in question and is always true most by definition that will mean young people. but whether that is enough to balance the momentum that the things like facebook and other social media had i don't know. it's very hard to tell. let me end if there are any other questions with a brief i wrote.

>> i'm in my 50s and obviously not a member of the digital generation. i find that i used to have great focus and now especially when i'm online i don't. are there any plans for companies to change the way they present their webpages. it's just the article for that few minutes you can focus on that one thing and then move on to the next ad they want to show you. >> the answer is no.

it was really but for smart phones even smartphones even took over. the more time i spent online the less able i've seem to be to muster strong consultation -- concentration. would find myself getting nervous because i wasn't getting enough stimulation. i found myself i think that does show our technology and the ones we used to think with due train us to think in particular ways. and we adapt to them. if you look at bringing

science brain science and discoveries that have been made about neuro- plasticity. the way they do adapt to our environment. as a result it becomes harder and harder to turn off that stream of information and quiet down your mind to read something or to have a conversation with somebody without both of you glancing in your phone or think about glancing at your phone or listening to a piece of music or walking in nature or the city even just following your own train of thought. to me i don't think barring some change i don't think we will see companies like google and facebook and apple moving towards a quieter display of information where you are not constantly encouraged to shift

your focus that would defeat their business. they make their money by keeping you clicking and shifting your focus all the time. i think it comes down to a couple of things changes in our personal behavior making sure that we spend time and her kids spend time not looking at the screen. it means exercising your mind in different ways and doing it kind of on a daily basis where you keep training yourself how to pay attention. it turns out were not good at paying attention. you really do have to train yourself. i do get means at a societal and cultural level challenging the huge importance we had placed on the technology today if you want to do something involving the government you have to go online. if you want to hold your job

you have to monitor other messages. everybody should be online as much as possible. beyond personal discipline as a society we really need to start thinking about is this really the way we want to live. >> i posted an article recently on the blog. he was given a link at that was really interesting because he said to me the article was so funny and it was because he was that this alternate content and it just really

struck me that these people are actually changing the meaning of publications and i just wondered if you have any comments on that or if you've witnessed it yourself i have certainly witnessed it as a writer and there's good things and bad things. i've written a blog for a long time i had written in many other publications and on the one hand you get and can get a much broader audience. on the other hand i remember it becomes harder to make living as a creative person because we begin to accept that we should have to pay for this. plenty of people are competing

against that. it does change the economics not only of writing but i think of any kind of creative pursuit in a very fundamental way. >> one more question. >> having this discussion the exciting part of about technology. if you are interested in questioning technology and influence on our lives it's really like twilight zone all focused on technology and it's a short jump into possible futures it's really a great way the art is helping us one of the reasons i called this creepy is there's a blog post

in there that's in here. i began to realize that in art and literature and tv it was always either really boring or really quick creepy. it's intrinsic in being human. she realized that the utopia that is often presented to us and the technology industry wants is really something geared towards robots and not human beings. i will end it there. thank you. thanks very much. [applause].

we will be back at 3:00. >> good afternoon. soak up deeply humbled. i am deeply honored and deeply humbled to have the altar of introducing jeff chang this morning. i know many of you who are here know his work also of "can't stop won't stop, who w