Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection are Tearing Us Apart

Some Quotes from Nicholas Carr's Latest Book

In January 2024, in preparation to write my chapter in the forthcoming book Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age (Crossway, 2025), I finally got around to Nicholas Carr’s much-discussed book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, 2nd ed. (Norton, 2020). I found Carr’s book compelling and, frankly, convicting.

The first edition of The Shallows was published in 2010, and lots of folks have written on this topic since that time, so I was familiar with many of Carr’s arguments. Our brains are being hacked. Our desires are being shaped by the algorithms. Adolescents are especially vulnerable. But adults are vulnerable, too. No lies detected. Yet, actually reading through the book and processing the material was eye-opening, even for someone who has been pretty heavily invested in this conversation since about 2017. I’d recommend the book.

Shallow’s newest book is Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart (Norton, 2025). It is a fitting follow-up. I finished reading it recently, and plan to review it soon for another website. At that time, I’ll engage with Shallow’s arguments from a Christian perspective. But until then, consider the following quotes. Then go and read the whole thing.

Our phones have turned us into human transceivers, nodes on a communication network of unprecedented scope and speed…. We spend our days sharing information, connected as never before, but the more we communicate, the worse things seem to get. Poppies are lush, vibrant, and entrancing. They’re also garish, invasive, and narcotic. (p. 3)

By means of its media a society promotes values and sets norms, allocates praise and censure, promulgates models of conduct and character, motivates and coordinates action, and establishes hierarchies and other structures of power and status. Human nature may be largely fixed, but human behavior is always susceptible to social influence. (pp. 9-10)

The combination of deregulation and digitization erased the legal and ethical distinction between interpersonal communication and broadcast communication that had governed media in the twentieth century. When Google introduced its Gmail service in 2004, it announced, with an almost imperial air of entitlement, that it would scan the contents of all messages and use the resulting data for any purpose it wanted. Our new mailman would read all our mail. The public, in thrall to Google and eager for free email accounts, barely flinched. The centuries-old secrecy-of-correspondence doctrine was tossed aside just as personal correspondence and conversation were moving online. On the internet, the wiretap wouldn’t be a bug; it would be a feature. (p. 61)

Social media renders category errors obsolete because it renders categories obsolete. All information belongs to a single category—it’s all “content”—and it pours through a single channel with a single objective: maximizing “engagement.” News, entertainment, conversation, and all other forms of human expression would from now on be in direct competition, angling for both the consumer’s fleeting attention and the algorithm’s blessing. (p. 65)

What’s rarely heard in the outrage over the ugly content that pervades social media is an acknowledgment of the public’s role in its spread. The vast, shadowy infrastructure of moderation is necessary because feed algorithms promote the bad stuff, and the algorithms promote the bad stuff for the same reason they promote any content: because people are drawn to it. The algorithms are adept at reading the human id and satisfying its desires, however twisted. (p. 72)

Now that we’re all virtual neighbors, we’re all in one another’s business all the time. We’re exposed, routinely, to the opinions and habits of far more people, both acquaintances and strangers, than ever before. With an almost almost microscopic view of what everybody else is saying and doing—the screen turns us all into Peeping Toms—we have no end of opportunities to take offense. There may not be any garbage cans or dog turds in the virtual world, but there’s plenty of environmental spoiling. (p. 104)

In the physical world, we remain present even when we’re quiet. In the virtual world, we don’t. To shut up, even briefly, is to disappear. To confirm our existence, we have to keep posting. We have to keep repeating Here I am! (p. 108)

In a study published in 2018 in Science, three MIT researchers examined how news stories circulated on Twitter. They tracked more than 125,000 stories that were shared through more than 4.5 million retweets over an eleven-year period, from 2006 through 2017. They discovered that false or otherwise misleading stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than factual ones. While accurate stories rarely reached more than a thousand people, fake reports often reached tens of thousands. “Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information,” the researchers wrote, and the effect was most pronounced with political news. The reason fake stories get retweeted more than true ones, they suggested, is that the fakes are more surprising: “Novelty attracts human attention.” The spread of misinformation, the authors went on to emphasize, is not spurred by software bots, as many would like to believe, but by people. The fake spreads faster than the true “because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.” (p. 142)

The social and the real have parted ways. No longer tied to particular locations or times of day, social situations and social groups now exist everywhere all at once. We move between them with a tap on a screen, a flick of a finger, a word to a chatbot. And because our phones allow us to socialize all the time, even when alone, interludes of solitude have largely disappeared from everyday life. There’s no offstage anymore, no place insulated from communication and its demands. Everyone is always within earshot and eyeshot. The old social architecture, with its walls and doors, its mornings and afternoons and evenings, has collapsed—just as the old epistemic architecture did. Digitization acts as a universal solvent for all that’s tangible in culture. (p. 162)

Disease, it turns out, can be spread by words and images as well as by germs. That doesn’t mean people with sociogenic illnesses are faking it. Their symptoms and their suffering may be very real. But what the phenomenon makes clear is that the transmission of messages can be metamorphic, altering physical and mental states at a deep level. Through its emphasis on repetition and imitation, social media does more than influence people’s opinions. It shapes and sometimes shakes the very foundations of their being. (p. 177)

Because friendships are, more and more, taking disembodied forms, with conversations mediated by apps and platforms, bonding with a bot doesn’t seem such a stretch. The human mind, always seeking social connection, has a strong tendency to attribute human qualities to inanimate things, including computer-generated avatars. The more we talk with a machine, the more like a person it becomes to us. We hear emotions and intentions; we sense affection. (pp. 191-192)

Chatbots are innocents, like Rousseau’s noble savages. They come into the world with pure souls, but as soon as they’re exposed to civilization, as soon as they begin to feed on our thoughts and words, they’re corrupted. They say nasty things. They lie. They spread rumors. They get devious and manipulative. Whenever the automatons misbehave, we’re quick to ridicule or pillory them, as we’re quick to ridicule or pillory any online transgressor. But all the bots are doing is holding a mirror up to the social mind. We blame them for our own sins—and somewhere in their neural networks, they have the paper trail to prove it. (p. 201)

In the 1990s, when the internet was just beginning its transition from an academic to a commercial network, we could have passed laws and imposed regulations that would have shaped the course of its development and, years later, influenced how social media works. We could have updated the secrecy-of-correspondence doctrine for a new era of online communication. We could have applied the public-interest standard to internet companies. We could have made the companies legally responsible for the information they transmit. We could have drawn technological and regulatory distinctions between private and public communication. But none of that happened. It was hardly even talked about. The public’s enthusiasm for the web and its apparent democratizing power, an enthusiasm that swept through Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court, was too strong. Our faith in the benefits of ever more efficient communication overrode any concerns about risks or unintended consequences. We had to keep our hands off the precious gift, as Justice Stevens counseled, for fear our touch might deform it. Now, it’s too late to rethink the system. It has burrowed its way too deeply into society and the social mind. (p. 228)

Ten Recommended Weekend Reads

I was busy last week and unable to write an update to this newsletter. Because of that lag, I’m recommending seven online articles, all of which have been published since the last edition of my newsletter.

Jonathon Van Maren, “IVF Is Not Pro-Family,” First Things (February 21, 2025)

Trevin Wax, “Don’t Talk About Yourself Like You’re a Machine,” The Gospel Coalition (February 25, 2025)

George Weigel, “Putting Americans in Iron Lungs Again?” First Things (February 26, 2025)

Lauren Jackson, “One Nation, Under God,” New York Times (February 26, 2025)

Steven Wedgeworth, “A Treatment Worse Than the Problem,” WORLD Opinions (February 27, 2025)

Knox Thames, “Religious Persecution is Part of Russia’s Battle Plan,” The Dispatch (March 2, 2025)

Rachel Treisman, “James Harrison, Whose Blood Donations Saved over 2 Million Babies, Has Died,” NPR (March 3, 2025)

Kevin Williamson, “Ghosts of the Cold War,” The Dispatch (March 5, 2025)

Daniel Darling, “A Turn Toward Faith in America,” WORLD Opinions (March 6, 2025)

Carl Trueman, “Anti-Humanism at Home and Abroad,” First Things (March 6, 2025)