Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life - Hardcover

"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 "A work of remarkable breadth and legibility that acts as both a technical design guide and a sharp political critique of the networked products that are reshaping society." The Monthly [Australia] "Provides a grounded guide, a cautionary tale in which each chapter walks readers through another layer of a dazzling and treacherous landscape." TLS "Of all the books I've read this year, one that really stood out was Radical Technologies by Adam Greenfield, which describes some of the ways innovation is transforming our daily lives ... Change is inevitable. The big question is, How do we retool ourselves? How do we function in this new, utterly transparent world? What are the social consequences of what we are experiencing?" - Indra Nooyi, Wall Street Journal [Books of the Year, 2017] "A work of remarkable breadth and legibility that acts as both a technical design guide and a sharp political critique of the networked products that are reshaping society." - Scot Ludlam, The Monthly "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." - Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Ed

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.