Carr’s Superbloom (2025): A tale of naivete and technological optimism
What I learned and how to build on his ideas
Autocorrect often does a butcher job on my texts.
Stop putting words in my mouth, Autocorrect.
Do I carefully ruminate over my messages before letting them fly? Not usually (though perhaps I should).
Do I correct errors after I’ve already texted? Yes.
For example, if I send “I need to talk to you ahout Rumblestiltskin,” then I will immediately follow up with “*about Rumplestiltskin.” It’s textspeak. I’m allowed to correct myself after the fact.
Almost certainly, when people were writing love letters during the Civil War, they paid more attention to grammar, punctuation, and spelling. They had to. They had no autocorrect.
And autocorrect didn’t have them, at least not yet.
Superbloom (2025)
Reflecting on conventions like “textspeak” is one of the many things that Nicholas Carr does in his latest book Superbloom (2025). It is his first work in nine years, his last being Utopia is Creepy (2016).
As with The Shallows (2010), Carr’s Superbloom is eminently readable and filled with memorable anecdotes:
The opening title Superbloom comes from an Instagram-influencer-induced stampede to a poppy field.
W. B. Yeats’ wife was an occultist who practiced automatic writing.
Frank Walsh, the guy who shot his TV, got famous and won a TV set on the television game show Strike It Rich.
I take these examples at random. But there’s more to this book than attention-grabbing anecdotes.
Above all, the story that Carr tells is one of naivete and technological optimism over the last two centuries, of dreamers and technologists who thought media could save the world. From the messianic pronouncements of Tesla and Marconi to the confident utterances of Zuckerberg himself, it is rich with historical detail.
In this post, I’ll walk you through what I found worthwhile in Superbloom. I’ll give you its most important themes and ideas. My hope is you’ll pick up the book and read it. And if you don’t, in the very least you’ll have some nuggets of insight that’ll help you make sense of the media mess we’re in.