A freewheeling, sharp-shooting indictment of a tech-besotted culture.

With a razor wit, Nicholas Carr cuts through Silicon Valley’s unsettlingly cheery vision of the technological future to ask a hard question: Have we been seduced by a lie? Gathering a decade’s worth of posts from his blog, Rough Type, as well as his seminal essays, Utopia Is Creepy offers an alternative history of the digital age, chronicling its roller-coaster crazes and crashes, its blind triumphs, and its unintended consequences.

Carr’s favorite targets are those zealots who believe so fervently in computers and data that they abandon common sense. Cheap digital tools do not make us all the next Fellini or Dylan. Social networks, diverting as they may be, are not vehicles for self-enlightenment. And “likes” and retweets are not going to elevate political discourse. When we expect technologies―designed for profit―to deliver a paradise of prosperity and convenience, we have forgotten ourselves. In response, Carr offers searching assessments of the future of work, the fate of reading, and the rise of artificial intelligence, challenging us to see our world anew.

In famous essays including “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Privacy,” Carr dissects the logic behind Silicon Valley’s “liberation mythology,” showing how technology has both enriched and imprisoned us―often at the same time. Drawing on artists ranging from Walt Whitman to the Clash, while weaving in the latest findings from science and sociology, Utopia Is Creepy compels us to question the technological momentum that has trapped us in its flow. “Resistance is never futile,” argues Carr, and this book delivers the proof.

Nicholas Carr is an acclaimed writer on technology and culture whose books have been translated into more than 25 languages. His new collection, "Utopia Is Creepy . . . and Other Provocations," offers an alternative history of our tech-besotted times. It's a "bright, fun, telling book," says Kirkus Reviews.

Carr's previous book, "The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us," examines the personal, social, and economic consequences of our growing dependence on computers and robots to do our jobs and live our lives. The New York Times called the book "essential," and the Wall Street Journal termed it "elegant."

"The Glass Cage" expands the arguments in Carr's groundbreaking book "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," which was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. A New York Times bestseller, "The Shallows" spotlights the cognitive consequences of Internet and computer use and, more broadly, examines the role that media and other technologies have played in shaping the way people think.

Carr is also the author of the 2008 Wall Street Journal bestseller "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google," which the Financial Times calls "the best read so far about the significance of the shift to cloud computing." In addition to his books, Carr has contributed articles and essays to many newspapers and magazines. He wrote the celebrated and much-anthologized essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," which appeared in The Atlantic, and he has also contributed to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, Wired, and Nature. He was formerly the executive editor of the Harvard Business Review. Carr blogs at www.roughtype.com. More information about his work can be found at his website, www.nicholascarr.com. [Author photo by Scott Keneally.]