Software and Technology Criticism: What is “Is Google Making us Stupid?”? Does it Matter if We Know It or Not?

But software criticism is not the same as technology criticism. What do you mean by a New York Times book review as a critique of Nicholas Carr’s novel “Is Google Making us Stupid?” and a work of software criticism? The latter is a more synoptic assessment of the field while the former—in theory, at least, if it existed—is a focused interrogation of a single work.

Let’s be clear. Technology criticism is nothing new. According to who you ask, modern technology criticism goes back to the beginning with Lewis Mumford, Herbert Marcuse, and Martin Heidegger. More recently, I assume you’ve heard of popular books like The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and The Attention Merchants and may even be familiar with technology critics like Jaron Lanier, Evgeny Morozov, and Ellen Ullman. Or to name a few from the academic flank, Fred Turner, Gabriella Coleman, and Sherry Turkle.

How to Make Sense of the Wine and Software Culture: From Autonomous Reviews to The New Yorker: The Case of the Los Angeles Times Editor Dan Neil

The idea that a rhapsodic exegesis of fermented grape juice could be a legitimate category of criticism hadn’t emerged until the likes of Robert Parker—whose legacy is, for the record, quite messy—made the genre serious. There were wine reviews published in trade magazines but there was no culture of wine criticism. Now, there are more wine columns than (alas) poetry sections in major newspapers in the United States.

Wine is not the same as software, you might think. This is another example of how to deal with car criticism. In 2004, Dan Neil of The Los Angeles Times won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his “one-of-a-kind reviews of automobiles, blending technical expertise with offbeat humor and astute cultural observations.”

And here would be to present the case of architecture criticism, whose bona fides are well established. On this much we should agree at the outset: A piece of architecture can be as complex as a piece of software. The software engineering vocabulary is similar to the architecture vocabulary. (For example, those who make high-level design choices are called software architects.) Many concepts are shared as well. Take the interface-implementation divide in software. Similarly, all elevators share the same interface—the door opens when you press the button, you wait for it to arrive and enter, you press the button of the floor you want to go to, and so on—but their implementations—hydraulic, geared traction, machine-room-less—vary. It is possible that there is a correlation between Mumford and The New Yorker.