Looking back on Nicholas Carr

January 25, 2025

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

As I was daydreaming at work, an article from 16 years ago published in The Atlantic surfaced again in my mind. Much has been written about how the internet affects us, but I think while the concerns Carr raises are valid (just as now with how Google makes money, advertising).

His article is no longer as accessible as it was back then but after a few taps I could pull it up from the Internet Archive or use my local library account.

Being unable to absorb long chunks of text or focus your attention is not the fault of technology, but rather a change in something deeper. Your focus sucks, because you have a time and attention problem. It’s your ability to plan and set aside the time to do what you promise yourself you will do.

What I find ironic is Google has not in fact become better at organizing the worlds information. Google’s quality varies depending on who you ask, but the rise of AI slop, login walls for social media and pay walls for legacy journalism means the worlds information is less freely accessible now than before. Twice now with Google Books and the Internet Archive have seen the efforts to make books available wither.

There is no easy solution because everything on the internet is ephemeral. Yet it’s easy to maintain a naive view everything will last forever. The only way against this is to stop relying on tech companies to organize the information that matters to you. More and more I want to adopt this attitude where unless you saved your own copy yourself, you didn’t really archive it. So says Gwern. For me I have a complicated manual process but in the end it involves saving webpages with SingleFile.

Our greatest power, which is something no AI or tech company will be able to replicate is this idea of context. By writing about what we read or consume, we make it relevant to ourselves now and in the future. There are a number of different ways to go about creating this context whether it be notes, a wiki, or a blog, but if you didn’t write about that article and save a copy of it, it will easily become lost in the endless stream of content available on the internet and it will feel like are losing your brain.