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Radical Technologies:The Design of Everyday Life
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A field manual to the technologies that are changing our lives
Everywhere we turn, a startling new device promises to transfigure our lives. But at what cost? In this urgent and revelatory excavation of our Information Age, leading technology thinker Adam Greenfield forces us to reconsider our relationship with the networked objects, services and spaces that define us. It is time to reevaluate the Silicon Valley consensus determining the future.
Having successfully colonised everyday life, radical technologies – from smartphones, blockchain, augmented-reality interfaces and virtual assistants to 3D printing, autonomous delivery drones and self-driving cars – are now conditioning the choices available to us in the years to come. How do they work? What challenges do they present to us, as individuals and societies? Who benefits from their adoption? In answering these questions, Greenfield’s timely guide clarifies the scale and nature of the crisis we now confront – and offers ways to reclaim our stake in the future.
Reviews
Adam Greenfield goes digging into the layers that constitute what we experience as smooth tech surface. He unsettles and repositions much of that smoothness. Radical Technologies is brilliant and scary.
We exist within an ever-thickening web of technologies whose workings are increasingly opaque to us. In this illuminating and sometimes deeply disturbing book Adam Greenfield explores how these systems work, how they synergise with each other, and the resultant effects on our societies, our politics, and our psyches. This is an essential book.
A tremendously intelligent and stylish book on the ‘colonization of everyday life by information processing’ calls for resistance to rule by the tech elite... a landmark primer and spur to more informed and effective opposition
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Fascinating and scary…[Adam Greenfield] is very well informed about a whole host of technologies that we hear a lot about but (if you’re like me) have a hard time grasping. He's a graceful writer, so even when he’s angry he’s eloquent without relying on emotional cues or nostalgia. More importantly, he thinks new technologies have a lot of potential – but if we fail to pay attention, all of its benefits will reinforce current power structures. What they call 'innovation' now that 'progress' has gone out of style is the entrenchment of power and wealth.
, Inside Higher Ed