Publisher's description: A freewheeling, sharp-shooting indictment of our tech-besotted culture by the Pulitzer Prize finalist. Over the past dozen years, Nicholas Carr has made his name as an agenda-setting writer on our complicated relationship with technology. Gathering posts from his blog Rough Type as well as seminal pieces published in The Atlantic, the MIT Technology Review, and the Wall Street Journal, he now provides an alternative history of the digital age, chronicling its roller-coaster crazes and crashes (remember MySpace or Second Life?). Ground-breaking essays such as 'Is Google Making Us Stupid?' and 'Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Privacy' dissect the logic behind Silicon Valley's 'liberation mythology, ' laying bare how technology has both enriched and imprisoned us--sometimes at the same time. A forward-looking new essay rounds out the collection. With searching assessments of topics from the future of work and play to free choice and the fate of reading, Carr once again challenges us to see our world anew.

Silicon Valley days --The amorality of Web 2.0 -- MySpace's vacancy -- The serendipity machine -- California kings -- The Wikipedian crackup -- Excuse me while I blog -- The metabolic thing -- Big trouble in Second Life -- Look at you! -- Digital sharecropping -- Steve's devices -- Twitter dot dash -- Ghosts in the code -- Go Ask Alice's avatar -- Long player -- Should the net forget? -- The means of creativity -- Vampires -- Behind the hedgerow, eating garbage -- The social graft -- Sexbot aces Turing test -- Looking into a see-through world -- Gilligan's web -- Complete control -- Everything that digitizes must converge -- Resurrection -- Rock-by-number -- Raising the virtual child -- The iPad Luddites -- Nowness -- Charlie bit my cognitive surplus -- Making sharing safe for capitalists -- The quality of allusion is not Google -- Situational overload and ambient overload -- Grand Theft attention -- Memory is the gravity of mind -- The medium is McLuhan -- Facebook's business model -- Utopia is creepy -- Spinelessness -- Future gothic -- The hierarchy of innovation -- Rip, mix, burn, read -- Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful hologram -- Online, offline, and the line between -- Google Glass and Claude Glass -- Burning down the schoolhouse -- The ennui of the intelligent machine -- Reflections -- Will Gutenberg laugh last? -- The searchers -- Eternal sunshine of the spotless AI -- Max Levchin has plans for us -- Evgeny's little problem -- The shortest conversation between two points -- Home away from home -- Charcoal, shale, cotton, tangerine, sky -- Slumming with Buddha -- The quantified self at work -- My computer, my doppeltweeter -- Underwearables -- The bus -- The myth of the endless ladder -- The loom of the self -- Technology below and beyond -- Outsourcing Dad -- Taking measurement's measure -- Smartphones are hot -- Desperate scrapbookers -- Out of control -- Our algorithms, ourselves -- Twilight of the idylls -- The illusion of knowledge -- Wind-fucking -- The seconds are just packed -- Music is the universal lubricant -- Toward a unified theory of love -- <3S and minds -- In the kingdom of the bored, the one-armed bandit is king -- Theses in tweetform -- The eunuch's children : essays and reviews -- Flame and filament -- Is Google making us stupid? -- Screaming for quiet -- The dreams of readers -- Life, liberty, and the pursuit of privacy -- Hooked -- Mother Google -- The library of utopia -- The boys of Mountain View -- The eunuch's children -- Past-tense Pop -- The love that lays the swale in rows -- The Snapchat candidate -- Why robots will always need us -- Lost in the cloud -- The Daedalus mission.