Again, thanks for reading. It’s always a pleasure when celebrities stop by.

As a pessimist, he’d like to simply contradict what the optimists are saying, which would mean minimizing or denying the enormity of the current changes. However, he’s a smart and knowledgeable pessimist, so he can’t simply gainsay the optimists and call it a day, because he knows that the current changes are a big deal (even if they are not a big deal in the ways or to the degree we optimists claim they are.)

This means he *also* can’t side with most of the minimizers or hand-wringers. There’s nothing in Carr’s work that I read as “Oh, this will all return to the old normal” — his point about Google News opening up access to 11,000 competing accounts of a news story means that the correcting of supply-side imbalance, per Carr, leave a handful of suppliers who can charge after that change, but the path to that re-balanced supply will be nothing less than the Gotterdammerung of newspapers, and Carr knows it.

He also can’t side with ‘third-way’ models — he was as skeptical of Sanger’s Citizendium project as I was — because he things the internet’s effect on culture is 99% bad.

This leaves him writing from a lonely spot — he believes the media world we’ve know is being blown to bits; he can’t bring himself to hold out false hope that this change will stop or reverse; and he also believes that many of the cherished hopes of the optimists tied to increased participation or free culture are claptrap.

This puts him in the position of “a pox on both your houses” writing, and it’s easy to mis-read, because what Luddites see in Carr are predictions that newspapers will be crushed by transparency, while all we optimists see is his conviction that our imagined future will fail, because it’s built on nothing more than fantasies about psychology and economics.

As a historical analogy, one of the optimists’ models for the current change is the Protestant Reformation, where new communications practices upended traditional society, but also ushered in science and democracy. Carr’s model is the sack of Rome, where the people doing the upending are destroying a culture too tired to carry on, but replacing it with nothing of comparable value.

Disagree with him all you like on that latter point, but don’t underestimate the force, clarity or sophistication of his work.

Again, thanks for reading. It’s always a pleasure when celebrities stop by.

As a pessimist, he’d like to simply contradict what the optimists are saying, which would mean minimizing or denying the enormity of the current changes. However, he’s a smart and knowledgeable pessimist, so he can’t simply gainsay the optimists and call it a day, because he knows that the current changes are a big deal (even if they are not a big deal in the ways or to the degree we optimists claim they are.)

This means he *also* can’t side with most of the minimizers or hand-wringers. There’s nothing in Carr’s work that I read as “Oh, this will all return to the old normal” — his point about Google News opening up access to 11,000 competing accounts of a news story means that the correcting of supply-side imbalance, per Carr, leave a handful of suppliers who can charge after that change, but the path to that re-balanced supply will be nothing less than the Gotterdammerung of newspapers, and Carr knows it.

He also can’t side with ‘third-way’ models — he was as skeptical of Sanger’s Citizendium project as I was — because he things the internet’s effect on culture is 99% bad.

This leaves him writing from a lonely spot — he believes the media world we’ve know is being blown to bits; he can’t bring himself to hold out false hope that this change will stop or reverse; and he also believes that many of the cherished hopes of the optimists tied to increased participation or free culture are claptrap.

This puts him in the position of “a pox on both your houses” writing, and it’s easy to mis-read, because what Luddites see in Carr are predictions that newspapers will be crushed by transparency, while all we optimists see is his conviction that our imagined future will fail, because it’s built on nothing more than fantasies about psychology and economics.

As a historical analogy, one of the optimists’ models for the current change is the Protestant Reformation, where new communications practices upended traditional society, but also ushered in science and democracy. Carr’s model is the sack of Rome, where the people doing the upending are destroying a culture too tired to carry on, but replacing it with nothing of comparable value.

Disagree with him all you like on that latter point, but don’t underestimate the force, clarity or sophistication of his work.