In March 2019, heavy rains in California led to a brilliant carpet of orange poppies in Walker Canyon, part of a 500,000-acre habitat reserve in the Temescal Mountains southeast of Los Angeles. Run by a state conservation agency, the reserve was mainly a local attraction until a twenty-four-year-old Instagram and YouTube influencer with tens of thousands of followers posted two selfies of herself amid the poppies. The result, as technology critic Nicholas Carr explains in his book Superbloom (named after the viral hashtag #superbloom), brought a Woodstock-size influx of selfie-seekers who “clogged roads and highways,” “trampled the delicate flowers,” and in general “offered a portrait in miniature of our frenzied, farcical, information-saturated time.”
Today, Walker Canyon is closed until further notice. But the frenzied farce continues, as Donald Trump’s electoral victory sets the Big Tech companies against one another in a new, more politically visible way. If you’re wondering how we arrived at this pass, Carr is your man. An eloquent, levelheaded writer, he has been sticking pins into the hot-air optimism of Big Tech since 2001, when, as editor of the Harvard Business Review, he published several politely skeptical articles on the uses of what was then the new “information technology.” Less politely, and with sharper pins, Superbloom appraises the past and present of that technology and issues a warning about its future.