Radical Technologies. The Design of Everyday Life

Everywhere we turn, our everyday experience is being overlaid and interrupted by startling new technologies. Today, we depend on the smartphone as an interface to an urban environment we share with autonomous drones and self-driving cars, even as we use augmented-reality applications to interact with things that aren't quite there. Now 3D printing offers us unprecedented fine-grained control over the form and distribution of matter, while the blockchain promises to remake the way we record and exchange value. And all the while, fiendishly complex algorithmic systems are operating quietly, reshaping the economy, transforming the fundamental terms of our politics, and even beginning to etch away at what it means to be human. Just how did these things come to be? How do they work? What (and whose) values do they reproduce? And what kind of choices do they present us with? Radical Technologies raises all of these questions to the surface and provokes us to ask what we might want to do with them now, when we might still be able to shape their impact on our shared 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”
−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
Praise for Against the Smart City:
“Greenfield does for ‘urban renewal’ in the twenty-first century what Jane Jacobs did for it in the twentieth.”
−Ian Bogost, author of Alien Phenomenology
“A cogent debunking of the smart city. An insightful, timely and refreshing read that will make you rethink the city of tomorrow.”
−J. Meejin Yoon, Head of Architecture School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology