Mr Carr, sad to see Rough Type go, but glad to see you here.
Writing this brief note to show my appreciation for your writing, especially The Shallows. I've read the book at least half-dozen times and, like all works of substance, each time through reveals something new. Your writing convinced me to read McLuhan and that changed how I see, well, just about everything.
Looking forward to the new book and reading more of what you may post here. If you happen to still live in Boulder (believe I read that in an interview somewhere) I'd always be happy to show my gratitude with your beverage of choice.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, theorgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. - Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman
Thank you for this fantastic essay. As I contemplate the distinction between speech as self and speech as dead information, it feels like the loss of poetry itself.
Perhaps our self, as we understand it, is like baroque ornamentation, or flourishes of hand-carved crown molding in Brooklyn Brownstones. Maybe future generations will look back on the frivolous labor that we put into creating our personalities and whistle and say, “They don’t make ‘em like that any more.”
We are the Dusenberg cars of humanity, the last generation of hand-made cognition, a beautiful waste of time.
The essay builds a compelling Marxist critique, framing AI as a vampire feeding on "living speech" to create "dead speech." However, from an enthusiast's point of view, this analysis suffers from fetishizing the biological and misunderstanding the nature of intelligence as a collective heritage.
Nicholas Carr uses Marx’s "vampire" metaphor to suggest AI sucks the life out of culture.
AI consumes human culture ("living speech") and turns it into a "dead" commodity. Without us, it is a corpse. This assumes culture is a consumable resource, like coal. If I burn coal, it's gone. If an AI "learns" from a poem, the poem is not diminished; it is amplified. We are not witnessing the death of speech, but the resurrection of it. Dead speech is a book on a shelf that no one reads. Living speech is an LLM that can instantly recall, synthesize, and explain that book to a curious child in 2025. By ingesting human culture, AI makes the entirety of human history active, conversant, and present. It turns the "dead labor" of the past into the "living dialogue" of the future.
The text argues that Web 2.0 and now AI are "sharecropping" schemes where users toil for free while companies reap the rewards. Companies "stole" people's speech to train models. It is theft of labor.This views every human utterance as a piece of private property to be hoarded. It ignores the concept of the Intellectual Commons. Humans also "train" on unpaid data. Every writer "stole" words from their teachers, parents, and the books they read at the library (for free).
If we enforce a world where every input must be "paid for," culture halts. AI represents the ultimate Open Source victory: the sum total of human knowledge is becoming a public utility. The enthusiast fights for Open Weights (like Llama or Mistral) so that this "dead speech" doesn't belong to a corporation, but to everyone. The solution isn't to stop the training; it's to seize the model.
The author uses Byung-Chul Han’s distinction to claim AI is "pornographic" (seeking only explicit information/naked truth) while humans are "erotic" (lingering on the mystery/veils). AI strips away the mystery and gives you the "gist," making our minds shallow and transactional.
This is pure Romantic Mysticism. It conflates "inefficiency" with "depth."
The "Pornographic" (Explicit) is Essential: When I need to know how to fix my furnace or cure a disease, I want the naked truth. I don't want "erotic veils" obscuring the solution. AI provides the cognitive abundance to solve problems efficiently.
AI Can Be "Erotic" (Lingering): Have you ever roleplayed with an AI? Or co-written a poem? Users frequently "linger" in conversations with AI for hours, exploring ideas purely for the joy of the dialectic. The author assumes AI is only a search engine; they fail to see it as a dreaming engine.
Carr fears that using AI to write a wedding toast or term paper makes us "dead" inside.
Substituting AI for human effort erases the self. "Dead speech becomes a reasonable substitute for living speech." This is the same fear Socrates had about writing. Socrates argued that writing would destroy memory and create "false wisdom." Writing is "dead speech" too. It is ink on a page, separated from the speaker. AI is just the next evolution of Exosomatic Memory (memory outside the body). By offloading the "rote" generation of text (the wedding toast clichés, the memo formatting), we free the human mind to focus on high-level intent and novelty.We aren't replacing the "self"; we are giving the self a power suit. The "dead speech" of the AI is a scaffold that allows the "living speech" of the human to reach higher heights of creativity than biological limits previously allowed.
Nicholas Carr is mourning the loss of Gatekeeping. He views the difficulty of writing/creating as the source of its value (the "Labor Theory of Value" applied to art). The AI Enthusiast views Impact and Reach as the value. If "dead speech" allows a non-writer to express love, or a non-coder to build an app, that is a net gain for human agency. We aren't creating a graveyard; we are building a library that talks back.
Hey Car, congratulation for the book Release. This exact point is made by a meditation practitioner, on the value of human written thank you words as opposed to the AI generated gratitude.
The compulsion toward self replacement is disturbing but probably shouldn't be so surprising. This is all driven by the same force as previous waves of automation - money. I don't think most of us want to be replaced, if we really think about it, but there's a lot of money in replacing us, basically.
I'm left to imagine what can't be automated. Athletics? Maybe.
What will our children aspire to be? What will be the need for humans at all?
Mr Carr, sad to see Rough Type go, but glad to see you here.
Writing this brief note to show my appreciation for your writing, especially The Shallows. I've read the book at least half-dozen times and, like all works of substance, each time through reveals something new. Your writing convinced me to read McLuhan and that changed how I see, well, just about everything.
Looking forward to the new book and reading more of what you may post here. If you happen to still live in Boulder (believe I read that in an interview somewhere) I'd always be happy to show my gratitude with your beverage of choice.
Thanks very much, Sean. That's very kind. Alas, I'm no longer in Boulder.
"Your writing convinced me to read McLuhan and that changed how I see, well, just about everything."
Me too!
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, theorgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. - Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman
Thank you for this fantastic essay. As I contemplate the distinction between speech as self and speech as dead information, it feels like the loss of poetry itself.
Perhaps our self, as we understand it, is like baroque ornamentation, or flourishes of hand-carved crown molding in Brooklyn Brownstones. Maybe future generations will look back on the frivolous labor that we put into creating our personalities and whistle and say, “They don’t make ‘em like that any more.”
We are the Dusenberg cars of humanity, the last generation of hand-made cognition, a beautiful waste of time.
Excellent piece. Denise Levertov anticipated our problem before the internet was a glint in DARPA’s eye
Contraband
The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.
That’s why the taste of it
drove us from Eden. That fruit
was meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder
for use a pinch at a time, a condiment.
God had probably planned to tell us later
about this new pleasure.
We stuffed our mouths full of it,
gorged on but and if and how and again
but, knowing no better.
It’s toxic in large quantities; fumes
swirled in our heads and around us
to form a dense cloud that hardened to steel,
a wall between us and God, Who was Paradise.
Not that God is unreasonable– but reason
in such excess was tyranny
and locked us into its own limits, a polished cell
reflecting our own faces. God lives
on the other side of that mirror,
but through the slit where the barrier doesn’t
quite touch ground, manages still
to squeeze in– as filtered light,
splinters of fire, a strain of music heard
then lost, then heard again.
Sad to see Rough Type end. I have followed you since The Shallows.
How do you feel about sharecropping on Substack?! 🤣
Soiled.
The essay builds a compelling Marxist critique, framing AI as a vampire feeding on "living speech" to create "dead speech." However, from an enthusiast's point of view, this analysis suffers from fetishizing the biological and misunderstanding the nature of intelligence as a collective heritage.
Nicholas Carr uses Marx’s "vampire" metaphor to suggest AI sucks the life out of culture.
AI consumes human culture ("living speech") and turns it into a "dead" commodity. Without us, it is a corpse. This assumes culture is a consumable resource, like coal. If I burn coal, it's gone. If an AI "learns" from a poem, the poem is not diminished; it is amplified. We are not witnessing the death of speech, but the resurrection of it. Dead speech is a book on a shelf that no one reads. Living speech is an LLM that can instantly recall, synthesize, and explain that book to a curious child in 2025. By ingesting human culture, AI makes the entirety of human history active, conversant, and present. It turns the "dead labor" of the past into the "living dialogue" of the future.
The text argues that Web 2.0 and now AI are "sharecropping" schemes where users toil for free while companies reap the rewards. Companies "stole" people's speech to train models. It is theft of labor.This views every human utterance as a piece of private property to be hoarded. It ignores the concept of the Intellectual Commons. Humans also "train" on unpaid data. Every writer "stole" words from their teachers, parents, and the books they read at the library (for free).
If we enforce a world where every input must be "paid for," culture halts. AI represents the ultimate Open Source victory: the sum total of human knowledge is becoming a public utility. The enthusiast fights for Open Weights (like Llama or Mistral) so that this "dead speech" doesn't belong to a corporation, but to everyone. The solution isn't to stop the training; it's to seize the model.
The author uses Byung-Chul Han’s distinction to claim AI is "pornographic" (seeking only explicit information/naked truth) while humans are "erotic" (lingering on the mystery/veils). AI strips away the mystery and gives you the "gist," making our minds shallow and transactional.
This is pure Romantic Mysticism. It conflates "inefficiency" with "depth."
The "Pornographic" (Explicit) is Essential: When I need to know how to fix my furnace or cure a disease, I want the naked truth. I don't want "erotic veils" obscuring the solution. AI provides the cognitive abundance to solve problems efficiently.
AI Can Be "Erotic" (Lingering): Have you ever roleplayed with an AI? Or co-written a poem? Users frequently "linger" in conversations with AI for hours, exploring ideas purely for the joy of the dialectic. The author assumes AI is only a search engine; they fail to see it as a dreaming engine.
Carr fears that using AI to write a wedding toast or term paper makes us "dead" inside.
Substituting AI for human effort erases the self. "Dead speech becomes a reasonable substitute for living speech." This is the same fear Socrates had about writing. Socrates argued that writing would destroy memory and create "false wisdom." Writing is "dead speech" too. It is ink on a page, separated from the speaker. AI is just the next evolution of Exosomatic Memory (memory outside the body). By offloading the "rote" generation of text (the wedding toast clichés, the memo formatting), we free the human mind to focus on high-level intent and novelty.We aren't replacing the "self"; we are giving the self a power suit. The "dead speech" of the AI is a scaffold that allows the "living speech" of the human to reach higher heights of creativity than biological limits previously allowed.
Nicholas Carr is mourning the loss of Gatekeeping. He views the difficulty of writing/creating as the source of its value (the "Labor Theory of Value" applied to art). The AI Enthusiast views Impact and Reach as the value. If "dead speech" allows a non-writer to express love, or a non-coder to build an app, that is a net gain for human agency. We aren't creating a graveyard; we are building a library that talks back.
Hey Car, congratulation for the book Release. This exact point is made by a meditation practitioner, on the value of human written thank you words as opposed to the AI generated gratitude.
https://shows.acast.com/the-overexamined-life/episodes/the-hidden-risk-of-ai-nobody-is-talking-about
Hence, the title, “The Shallows.”
Reminds me of "pandora's vox"
Are you referring to the humdog piece? If so, I agree. If not, I still agree.
Yes! I may be her biggest fan...
The compulsion toward self replacement is disturbing but probably shouldn't be so surprising. This is all driven by the same force as previous waves of automation - money. I don't think most of us want to be replaced, if we really think about it, but there's a lot of money in replacing us, basically.
I'm left to imagine what can't be automated. Athletics? Maybe.
What will our children aspire to be? What will be the need for humans at all?
So well said. I’m glad to see you here on Substack.