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An Excerpt from Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

by Nicholas Carr

An excerpt from Superbloom by Nicholas Carr, published by W. W. Norton & Company and longlisted for the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards in the Current Events & Public Affairs category.

From the telegraph and telephone in the 1800s to the internet and social media in our own day, the public has welcomed new communication systems. Whenever people gain more power to share information, the assumption goes, society prospers. Superbloom tells a startlingly different story. As communication becomes more mechanized and efficient, it breeds confusion more than understanding, strife more than harmony. Media technologies all too often bring out the worst in us.

A celebrated commentator on the human consequences of technology, Nicholas Carr reorients the conversation around modern communication, challenging some of our most cherished beliefs about self-expression, free speech, and media democratization. He reveals how messaging apps strip nuance from conversation, how “digital crowding” erodes empathy and triggers aggression, how online political debates narrow our minds and distort our perceptions, and how advances in AI are further blurring the already hazy line between fantasy and reality. Even as Carr shows how tech companies and their tools of connection have failed us, he forces us to confront inconvenient truths about our own nature. The human psyche, it turns out, is profoundly ill-suited to the “superbloom” of information that technology has unleashed.

With rich psychological insights and vivid examples drawn from history and science, Superbloom provides both a panoramic view of how media shapes society and an intimate examination of the fate of the self in a time of radical dislocation. It may be too late to change the system, Carr counsels, but it’s not too late to change ourselves.

Superbloom has been longlisted in the Current Events & Public Affairs category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below is the book's Prologue, "Poppies."

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The poppies come out every March in Walker Canyon, an environmentally sensitive spot in the Temescal Mountains seventy miles southeast of Los Angeles, but the show they put on in early 2019 was something special. Thanks to a wet winter in the normally arid region, seeds that had long lain dormant germinated, and the poppies appeared in numbers not seen in years. The flowers covered the canyon’s slopes in carpets of vivid, almost fluorescent orange—the shade you get on hunters’ vests and caps. On social media, word of the so-called superbloom spread quickly. 

First on the scene were the influencers. On March 1, Jaci Marie Smith, a photogenic twenty-four-year-old Arizonan with four hundred thousand Instagram followers and a popular YouTube lifestyle vlog, posted a picture of herself sitting among the blossoms. She wore orange overalls, an orange pullover, and a creamy wool fedora, a flower in her mouth. “You’ll never influence the world by trying to be like it,” ran the photo’s caption. The post earned tens of thousands of likes, as did a subsequent one featuring a photo of her clutching a bouquet of freshly plucked poppies with a caption promoting the brand of press-on nails she was wearing—“Neon pink nails for a fun change!”—and a link to buy them. 

As the hashtag #superbloom proliferated—it would appear on Instagram a hundred thousand times over the next two weeks—hordes of other, less distinguished selfie-seekers followed the influencers into Walker Canyon. Cars clogged roads and highways. Police struggled to maintain order. The nearby town of Lake Elsinore declared a public-safety emergency. Many of the visitors, angling for the perfect shot, went off the canyon’s marked trails and trampled the delicate flowers. Others, following Jaci Marie’s lead, pulled the blossoms up by the fistful. After a traffic officer was hit by a car, the Lake Elsinore town council closed the main trailhead in an attempt to tame the crowd. The order was rescinded the next day when people started parking haphazardly along access roads and bushwhacking up the hillsides, phones in hand. “Flowergeddon,” the press called it. 

The backlash was swift and brutal. The early comments on the #superbloom posts had been uniformly sunny—“OMG so cute!” “Adorable!” “I love this!!!!”—punctuated with every imaginable variation of the heart emoji. But as news of the Instagrammers’ plundering spread, the comments darkened. “Stop ruining the flowers for your selfish selfies,” read a typical one. “Fuck you, you selfish asshole,” went another. Scolding hashtags like #horribleperson, #publiclandshateyou, and #flowerdestroyer were affixed to the poppy posts as badges of shame. The influencers, sensing a threat to their meticulously cultivated auras of bubbly geniality, rushed to update their posts with excuses or apologies. Some deleted their messages altogether. In an internet minute, a semblance of joy had turned to a semblance of remorse. 

As it played out in the poppy field and through millions of social media feeds, the affair in Walker Canyon offered a portrait in miniature of our frenzied, farcical, information-saturated time. There was the excitement of communal discovery and the noxiousness of mob action. There was the democratization of media production, with everyone churning out content and competing for the symbolic applause of the like button. There was the hurried, hieroglyphic language of hashtag, emoji, and exclamation mark. There were the influencers, with their cavalier blurring of commerce and conversation, and the followers, reveling in a pageant of mass mimicry. There were the trolls and their cruel, often misogynistic barbs. There were the virtue vigilantes, eager to pillory anyone straying outside prescribed lines of speech and behavior. And, everywhere, there were the phoneheads, so obsessed with their busy little screens that they could neither see their surroundings nor hear the voice of common sense. 

As well as a portrait, it offered a metaphor. We live today in a perpetual superbloom—not of flowers but of messages. Our phones have turned us into human transceivers, nodes on a communication network of unprecedented scope and speed. Whatever else we may be doing, we are always receiving and emitting signals, many of which we’re conscious of (words, images, sounds) and others of which we’re not (data on our location, behavior, mood). When we first hooked ourselves up to the network, we did so with excitement and optimism. Being connected to so much information and so many people was thrilling, and it seemed obvious that all those connections would broaden our minds, enlarge our sympathies, and make the world a nicer place. More communication would mean more understanding. 

It hasn’t turned out that way. The excitement may still be there—if Instagram doesn’t get you going, TikTok will; if TikTok seems stale, there’s Discord or BeReal or whatever’s next—but the optimism has turned to foreboding. We find ourselves facing a raft of unintended and unforeseen consequences—all the social pathologies on display in Walker Canyon as well as other, darker ones—and like the Lake Elsinore town council we’re frustrated by our inability to address them. We spend our days sharing information, connected as never before, but the more we communicate, the worse things seem to get.  Poppies are lush, vibrant, and entrancing. They’re also garish, invasive, and narcotic.  

 

Excerpted from Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart by Nicholas Carr, published by W. W. Norton & Company. Copyright © 2025 by Nicholas Carr. All rights reserved.

 

About the Author

Nicholas Carr is the author of The Shallows, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and five other acclaimed books. A former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, he writes for the Atlantic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Oregon.

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From the telegraph and telephone in the 1800s to the internet and social media in our own day, the public has welcomed new communication systems. W...
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