Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

Description

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.

Adam Greenfield has worked as a lead information architect for the Tokyo office of internet services consultancy Razorfish, head of design direction for service and user-interface design at Nokia headquarters in Helsinki, and Senior Urban Fellow at the LSE Cities Centre of the London School of Economics. He has been an instructor in Urban Design at the Bartlett, University College London. His books include Everyware, Urban Computing and its Discontents, and the 2013 pamphlet Against the Smart City.

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 -- Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, author of Expulsions 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 synergize with each other, and the resultant effects on our societies, our politics, and our psyches. This is an essential book. -- Brian Eno 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. * Guardian * A systematic analysis of the hazards posed by the most revolutionary of new technologies... his analyses are extremely proficient at uncovering the risks and contradictions that our enthusiasm for new technology has occluded... a vital counter-statement to such pervasive utopianism * Public Seminar * Does an excellent job of introducing non - specialist readers to some of the game-changing technologies that are transforming our lives and that are set to affect the social, economic, political and cultural evolution of humanity... a very valuable contribution to the discussion about what that future should look like. * Morning Star *