Trump Is A ‘Malevolent Coxcomb,’ And Other Deranged Takes From Nicholas Carr

The first red flag with Nicholas Carr’s new book is the subtitle: “How technologies of connection tear us apart.” It’s beyond banal, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. After all, his book The Shallows is still the definitive treatment of how the internet has “rewired” our brains. It’s been 10 years since his last book. I figured he wouldn’t end the hiatus without something to say.

It turns out that he was driven not by a burning insight but by a moderate-to-severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Whereas The Shallows and its successor The Glass Cage felt perceptive and proved prescient, Superbloom feels outdated already. Its microwaved takes on Trump, democracy, and the internet are laughably out-of-touch with reality.

It reads more like promotional material for Bluesky.

Donald Trump, ‘Malevolent Coxcomb‘

Carr’s other books were pre-Great Awokening, and his focus was on how an individual’s memory, concentration, and skills were reshaped by digital tools. It was an apolitical, universal experience, and many found his descriptions and warnings compelling. I certainly did.

Superbloom, however, is concerned with the societal and social repercussions of the internet. It doesn’t take long for Carr’s TDS to make itself known. After 15 pages of “How we got here,” Carr cuts to the heart of the matter:

It all boiled over in 2016. The year began when a heavily armed man, a twenty-nine-year-old father of two, stormed a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C. He was intent on freeing children who, according to rumors circulating online, were imprisoned in the restaurant by a Democratic Party pedophile ring…The year ended with the election to the presidency of the United States of a malevolent coxscomb [sic] with a tweeting habit. The campaign had been marked by the spread, through Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and other platforms, of thousands of fake and often bizarre news stories from made-up publications, all aimed at misleading or confusing voters.

 This one paragraph has it all.

He opens with Pizzagate, one of many instances where he pretends that the Right is marred by conspiracists and misinformation while the Left is the party of Truth and Science. He closes arguing Trump won in 2016 due to that very misinformation. That idea was a comfort to Hillary Clinton fans and Never Trumpers c. 2016, but to continue repeating it now, after Trump got soundly re-elected, capping off the greatest comeback in political history? It comes off as oblivious at best, and contemptuous of the American public at worst.

Right in the middle of the paragraph, there’s my favorite line: “malevolent coxcomb with a tweeting habit.” Now, I wasn’t familiar with that construction, “malevolent coxcomb,” so I went to the Oxford English Dictionary to make sure there wasn’t something I was missing.

Malevolent, as you probably know, means wishing harm to others or having a harmful influence. It’s a common corporate media adjective for Trump. Coxcomb is more of a ten-dollar word. Originally, it referred to a court jester whose hat resembled a “cock’s comb,” and it came to mean a “vain, conceited, or pretentious man; a fop.”

It doesn’t really make sense, but it exemplifies the cognitive dissonance at the root of TDS. On the one hand, he’s a coxcomb: a failed businessman given to incoherent rambling, a six-time bankrupted buffoon. On the other hand, he’s malevolent: a convicted felon and dire threat to our democracy, capable of singlehandedly taking down America.

TDS in the Machine

In Superbloom, Carr elaborates on a 2021 piece for The New Atlantis that argued we need to regulate social media. He sketches out how telegrams, radio, and TV all disrupted American society and to varying degrees government interventions helped protect us as consumers and citizens.

For instance, he contrasts the privacy the government demands of package couriers (the “secrecy-of-correspondence” doctrine) with Google scanning our emails with impunity. Children can’t buy cigarettes, but they can sign up for Instagram. Pretty standard takes, but Carr offers some interesting allusions and asides along the way.

Nevertheless, his credibility in arguing the internet is “broken” is undermined by his repeated TDS flare-ups. To explain how our information can become siloed, he uses Jan. 6. To explain how our information is censored, he cites Elon Musk’s takeover of X. To explain how our information is manipulated, he points to deepfakes (and AI hypotheticals) that Joe Biden suffered on the 2024 campaign trail.

The Twitter Files, the Covid lockdowns, the gaslighting that was “cheapfakes”: these never get mentioned once. He shows no awareness that the Left is not only capable but well-practiced at exerting the exact control that he fears in Republican’s hands. That’s the thing about TDS: most people don’t even know they have it.

While the book is marketed as a “bracing exploration of how social media has warped our sense of self and society,” it is actually best enjoyed as an unintentional work of humor.

That’s Cringe, Mr. Carr

In The Shallows, Carr was able to articulate how the internet was reshaping him personally and then contextualize that in the arc of technological and epistemological history. He understood the moment and its implications. He has lost the former, and it’s hard not to laugh at the earnest efforts that result.

A standard discussion of how “the metaphor of contagion” is used to describe social media — a post goes “viral,” etc. — takes a sudden turn for the cringe: “When a real pathogen is on the loose, we discovered, social media turns into an antiviral. It allows people to socialize without physical proximity, to gather together while remaining apart. If there was anything fortunate about Covid’s arrival, it was the timing. The disease appeared after social media had already trained us in the art of social distancing. Our phones and laptops proved our most valuable pieces of personal protective equipment.”

That’s right, the big silver lining from the lockdowns was that we got to spend all day on Zoom and TikTok.

He goes on to say that Elon Musk is no defender of the First Amendment. In fact, he’s just a “flighty oligarch” who has turned what was our digital town square into his own personal “house party.” Carr closes with a solemn thought experiment:

Whenever history needed an update, the bureaucrats in Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth would stuff outdated documents into chutes called memory holes that led down to enormous furnaces in the building’s basement. Imagine how much more efficiently they would have performed their work had they been supplied the right software.

He seems totally unaware that “memory-hole” is well-established slang online and a well-established practice for Dems in power. Thus, what he meant to sound serious comes off as absurd and what was meant to be damning turns out to be incriminating.

But hey, that’s TDS for you.

Ben Christenson writes from Virginia, where he lives with his family and pets.