Superbloom

The subtitle of Superbloom, the latest book by American writer Nicholas Carr, might surprise those who have never stopped to question or even observe the media: “How technologies of connection tear us apart.”

Sounds contradictory, doesn’t it? Yes, but it makes sense. With the delicious prose that’s characteristic of him — and which, from time to time, is offered to us in his newsletter —, Carr reviews the history of communication technologies from a new perspective, one in which, because of development focused on eliminating friction and accelerating the speed of information, the social fabric deteriorates.

For the author, although acceleration has intensified with digital and the internet, the advent of these technologies is part of a much older history, begun with writing, the moment when message and sender separated for the first time, making it apt for being transmitted through technological means. From there to hyperreality, or the “metaverse” that worked, was just a hop, skip, and a jump.

When he gets to this part, that is, to the present, Carr places us before a somewhat… hopeless scenario.

For him, for example, the moderation efforts that platforms employ are the result of a reality in denial: that people — we — are attracted to that horrible content as much as to the “good” content that also goes viral. “The algorithms are adept at reading the human id and satisfying its desires, however twisted,” he writes.

The fundamental argument of Superbloom is that fast and uninterrupted communication doesn’t necessarily result in more socialization or healthier relationships. Worse: the appeal of the fractured ecosystem created by communication technologies would derive from our primitive desires and instincts. It’s almost as if we were accomplices, and not just victims, of big tech’s addictive recommendation algorithms, which knew how to “read” this weak point in our makeup. After being hooked by this bait, it’s hard to go back:

And while [Shoshana] Zuboff’s claim that social media is manipulative is hard to dispute—the writers of feed algorithms are nothing if not code-wielding Machiavels—it’s important to be honest about our own complicity. We’re not being manipulated to act in opposition to our desires. We’re not hostages with Stockholm syndrome. We’re being given what we want, in quantities so generous we can’t resist gorging ourselves. The manipulation is secondary to and dependent on the pleasure.

This behavior fostered by the contemporary information ecosystem, which pops up novelties at every moment, would be a perfect match to “cognitively gifted mammals who crave mental stimulation and as socially obsessed mammals who crave connection and status.” Us. It was these instincts that led us to the metaverse — not Zuckerberg’s failed version, but the one in which, for Carr, we’re already immersed, that of Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreality:

The computer is so quick to sense and fulfill our desires that it never allows us the opportunity to examine our desires, to ask ourselves whether what we choose, or what is chosen for us, is worthy of the choosing.

[…]

The real world can’t compete. Compared with the programmed delights of the virtual, it feels dull, slow, and, poignantly enough, lifeless. By filling every moment with novelty and exaggerating every psychic sensation, the hyperreal, as Baudrillard argued, comes to feel more real than the real. “It is the excess of reality that puts an end to reality.”

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The “Superbloom” of the book title is a natural phenomenon that occurs in California where flowers bloom in the middle of the desert. In 2019, it became an Instagram craze and turned into #superbloom, a portrait and metaphor of the perpetual “superbloom” we live in, not of flowers, but of messages:

When superbloom becomes #superbloom, the experience changes. The media representation turns into a gathering spot, a communal if entirely virtual space, and that’s what people see and are drawn to. As more people attach themselves to the representation, its magnetic force strengthens. Still more are pulled in. The real thing, the referent, disappears; the carpet of poppies is experienced as an image even before it’s photographed. To those who arrived in Walker Canyon intent on placing themselves in the frame of #superbloom, virtual reality had already displaced material reality. The canyon didn’t exist except as content — content they wanted to become part of.

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Superbloom is the best articulation of many of the disappointments I carry with the digital world and the anguish of feeling alone in a world that never stops talking. More importantly, it does so in a forceful, well-grounded way and, despite the dark prognoses, free from the alarmism that critiques of this type usually carry. Which is a relief because, I think, we’ve already moved past (or should have moved past) that phase.