Nicholas Carr: The 'Rational Consumer of Ideas' Is a Myth, So Is the Informed Citizen
round · x · 2026-09-27
Tech writer Nicholas Carr's new Substack essay "The Myth of the Informed Citizen" argues that the assumption of an efficient marketplace of ideas rests on the fiction of a rational consumer of ideas — a "homo philosophicus" as fictional as homo economicus. Having entered strange new information territories, he contends, we need new cartographies to make sense of them. A substantive big-picture reflection on information ecology in the AI era.
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