On Saturday, the UPS guy showed up with a printed, bound, and jacketed copy of my book The Shallows. It’s exciting and gratifying, of course, to receive a finished copy of a book that’s been in the works for a couple of years, but it’s also scarifying. No more edits, corrections, updates, rethinks: the ink is indelible. The phrase shouldn’t be “hot of the press” – hot things tend to be malleable – but rather “cold off the press.”

Oh, well. It’s now the reader’s book, not the writer’s.

One thing I have no mixed feelings about is the set of endorsements that the publisher has gathered from early readers of the book. They’re all from writers and thinkers I admire, and – shucks – here they are:

“Neither a tub-thumpingly alarmist jeremiad nor a breathlessly Panglossian ode to the digital self, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows is a deeply thoughtful, surprising exploration of our ‘frenzied’ psyches in the age of the Internet. Whether you do it in pixels or pages, read this book.” —Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)

“Nicholas Carr carefully examines the most important topic in contemporary culture — the mental and social transformation created by our new electronic environment. Without ever losing sight of the larger questions at stake, he calmly demolishes the clichés that have dominated discussions about the Internet. Witty, ambitious, and immensely readable, The Shallows actually manages to describe the weird, new, artificial world in which we now live.” —Dana Gioia, poet and former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

“Nicholas Carr has written an important and timely book. See if you can stay off the web long enough to read it!” —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change

“The core of education is this: developing the capacity to concentrate. The fruits of this capacity we call civilization. But all that is finished, perhaps. Welcome to the shallows, where the un-educating of homo sapiens begins. Nicholas Carr does a wonderful job synthesizing the recent cognitive research. In doing so, he gently refutes the ideologists of progress, and shows what is really at stake in the daily habits of our wired lives: the re-constitution of our minds. What emerges for the reader, inexorably, is the suspicion that we have well and truly screwed ourselves.” —Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class As Soulcraft

“Ultimately, The Shallows is a book about the preservation of the human capacity for contemplation and wisdom, in an epoch where both appear increasingly threatened. Nick Carr provides a thought-provoking and intellectually courageous account of how the medium of the Internet is changing the way we think now and how future generations will or will not think. Few works could be more important.” —Maryanne Wolf, director of the Tufts University Center for Reading and Language Research and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

The book comes out June 7.

I’ll be at the LA Times Festival of Books on Saturday, participating on a panel with David Shields and Ander Monson called “Rebooting Culture: Narrative & Information in the New Age.” Shields is playing the nihilist, Monson is playing the anarchist, and I’m taking the role of the vigilante. Moderating is David Ulin, the Times’s book editor. Stop by if you’re in Los Angeles. More details and a bonus link.

Three strangely echoing visions of the future:

2010: “As humans rely on the Internet for all aspects of our lives, our ability to think increasingly depends on fast, reliable applications. The web is our collective consciousness, which means web operators become the brain surgeons of our distributed nervous system. Each technology we embrace makes us more and more reliant on the web … For much of the Western world, technology, culture, and society are indistinguishable … Today’s web tells you what’s interesting. It learns from your behavior. It shares, connects, and suggests. It’s real-time and contextual. These connected systems augment humanity, and we rely on them more and more while realizing that dependency less and less … Take away our peripheral brains, and we’re helpless. We’ll suddenly be unable to do things we took for granted, much as a stroke victim loses the ability to speak … A slow-down will feel like collective Alzheimers.” -Alistair Croll

2005: “What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows – about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won’t feel like themselves – as if they’d had a lobotomy.” -Kevin Kelly

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

Mad rant becomes ecstatic rhapsody becomes offhand remark.

Inspired by Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, Ben Weber has created a chatbot that converses with other players in online games of StarCraft. The bot’s name is EISBot. “Once every thirty seconds,” explains Weber, “EISBot randomly selects a message from a pool of 75 messages and sends it to the console.” As the following transcript reveals, the bot’s randomly chosen messages fit seamlessly into the conversation:

EISBot: What to ally victory?

Player: damn you

Player: im not stupid

EISBot: Wanna join my clan

Player: dunno

Player: im not that great

Player: lol

EISBot: So, this game is pretty much over

Player: yeah

Player: lol

Player: im playing off race

Player: lol

EISBot: Quit wasting time, come kill me

EISBot: What kind of hardware are you using? I’m on a 486 with 16M ram, pure luxory!!!

Player: i dunno

EISBot: PWN PWN PWN!

EISBot: I’m a huge nonyt fanboy

EISBot: Have you played SC 2 yet?

Player: yeah

Player: pretty sick

EISBot: Have you ever played against a C player?

Player: nope

Player: wait

Player: yeah

Player: i lost

Player: badly

Player: haa

EISBot: Did you see the past OSL?

Player: kinda

Note that the bot’s one major flaw is that its command of the English language, particularly the use of punctuation marks, is much too sophisticated in comparison with that of the human. The sure way to distinguish the computer’s messages from the human’s is to recognize that the computer has a rather sentimental attachment to the apostrophe and the comma.

I take this as another indication that I am correct in my suspicion that when computers finally pass the Turing test it won’t be because computers have become smarter; it will be because humans have become dumber.

lol

To close out Luddite Week here at Rough Type, I would like to direct the Internet’s attention (when the Internet pays attention, servers fail and nodes collapse, and a rictal grin spreads across Ned Ludd’s bony face) to an article on the topic of Ludditism by Thomas Pynchon, which ran in the New York Times Book Review in that fabled year, 1984. Written nearly a decade before the World Wide Web would turn the Internet into a popular medium, the article is nevertheless entirely up to date in its description of humankind’s submergence in a superabundance of accessible data:

… we have come to live among flows of data more vast than anything the world has seen. Demystification is the order of our day, all the cats are jumping out of all the bags and even beginning to mingle. We immediately suspect ego insecurity in people who may still try to hide behind the jargon of a specialty or pretend to some data base forever “beyond” the reach of a layman. Anybody with the time, literacy, and access fee can get together with just about any piece of specialized knowledge s/he may need … the problem has really become how to find the time to read anything outside one’s own specialty.

Pynchon recalls C. P. Snow’s assertion, in his famous 1959 lecture about the growing divide between the “two cultures” of the literary intellectual and the scientific intellectual, that “if we forget the scientific culture, then the rest of intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the Industrial Revolution.” Those intellectuals, the literary types, were, said Snow, “natural Luddites.” Things have changed, notes Pynchon, in the years since Snow’s lecture:

… it’s hard to imagine anybody these days wanting to be called a literary intellectual, though it doesn’t sound so bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, “people who read and think.” Being called a Luddite is another matter. It brings up questions such as, Is there something about reading and thinking that would cause or predispose a person to turn Luddite?

Which leads Pynchon to a consideration of the possibly mythical, and definitely mystical, figure of Ned Ludd, who in 1779, as legend has it,

broke into a house and “in a fit of insane rage” destroyed two machines used for knitting hosiery. Word got around. Soon, whenever a stocking-frame was found sabotaged … folks would respond with the catch phrase “Lud must have been here.” By the time his name was taken up by the frame-breakers of 1812, historical Ned Lud was well absorbed into the more or less sarcastic nickname “King (or Captain) Ludd,” and was now all mystery, resonance and dark fun: a more-than-human presence, out in the night, roaming the hosiery districts of England, possessed by a single comic shtick – every time he spots a stocking-frame he goes crazy and proceeds to trash it.

The twist here is that the mechanical knitting-frame had already been around for nearly two centuries, having been invented in 1589 by a gentleman annoyed that the woman he was courting seemed more interested in fiddling with her knitting needles than heeding his romantic overtures. (Which may mean that the Industrial Revolution originated in sex-craziness.) So it’s an oversimplification, Pynchon continues, to assume that Ned was ” a technophobic crazy” lashing out at a new automated device that was endangering a way of work and a way of life:

No doubt what people admired and mythologized him for was the vigor and single-mindedness of his assault … Ned Lud’s anger was not directed at the machines, not exactly. I like to think of it more as the controlled, martial-arts type anger of the dedicated Badass.

Ned Ludd as Bruce Lee! Or as Uma Thurman in Kill Bill! The movie treatment writes itself.

Public feeling about the machines could never have been simple unreasoning horror, but likely something more complex: the love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery – especially when it’s been around for a while – not to mention serious resentment toward at least two multiplications of effect that were seen as unfair and threatening. One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work – to be “worth” that many human souls. What gave King Ludd his special Bad charisma, took him from local hero to nationwide public enemy, was that he went up against these amplified, multiplied, more than human opponents and prevailed.

The Rough Type lawyers tell me that I’ve reached the limits of the fair-use doctrine. Which comes as a relief, since I find that the remainder of Pynchon’s essay, weaving from Frankenstein to Star Wars by way of Hiroshima, defies the blogger’s (never mind the Tweeter’s) urge to tidbitize. You’ll have to read it yourself.

But just remember this one thing if you’re ever tempted to call me a Luddite: I am not a Luddite. I am a Badass.

As I’ve thought some more about my iPad Luddites post, and the many fine comments that have affixed themselves to its hull, I’ve formulated the following observation:

We are all Luddites, but to avoid admitting our Ludditism to ourselves we will define any manifestation of progress that we don’t approve of as “regress” and criticize it as such.

Has it begun?

James Sturm, the cartoonist, can’t take it anymore, “it” being the Internet:

Over the last several years, the Internet has evolved from being a distraction to something that feels more sinister. Even when I am away from the computer I am aware that I AM AWAY FROM MY COMPUTER and am scheming about how to GET BACK ON THE COMPUTER. I’ve tried various strategies to limit my time online: leaving my laptop at my studio when I go home, leaving it at home when I go to my studio, a Saturday moratorium on usage. But nothing has worked for long. More and more hours of my life evaporate in front of YouTube … Essential online communication has given way to hours of compulsive e-mail checking and Web surfing. The Internet has made me a slave to my vanity: I monitor the Amazon ranking of my books on an hourly basis, and I’m constantly searching for comments and discussions about my work.

He’s not quite ready to divorce the web. But he’s decided on a four-month trial separation. Like Edan Lepucki, he’s having someone visit his online accounts and change all his passwords, just to be safe.

I know there’s no going back to the pre-Internet days, but I just want to move forward a little more slowly.

Disconnection is the new counterculture.

UPDATE: There’s an amusing exchange in the comments to Sturm’s article at Slate: