Adam Greenfield

Adam Greenfield is a senior Fellow at the London School of Economics who has done a lot of work on user interface design and smart cities. This fascinating and scary book is no typical techno-dystopian jeremiad. He’s 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 show more 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.

The subjects tackled include the smartphone, the internet of things, digital fabrication (you know, those 3D printers every library had to buy to be cool), cryptocurrency, blockchain, automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. All of these things are being created by humans to influence our everyday lives while also pushing us out of the way. He has an answer for the problems the technological "stacks" consolidating power among a few powerful companies pose. We can’t simply disconnect, we can’t use these systems in ways that won’t reproduce our current arrangements of power. What we need to do is promote a generation of radical technologists who will rewrite the code. For those of us who aren’t already engaged in this work, he recommends we push back against the rhetoric of transcendence and don’t let our eyes glaze over when people start going on and on about the blockchain or machine learning because it will change our everyday lives.

Greenfield is a good guide to all this. He can explain how it works and what its implications are. He also has frequent moments when poetry breaks through. Here’s a sample:

"At present, the internet of things is the most tangible material manifestation of a desire to measure and control the world around us. But as an apparatus of capture, it is merely a means to an end. The end remains the quantification of the processes of life at every scale; their transformation into digital data; and the use of that data for analysis, the development of projective simulation and the training of machine-learning algorithms. It behooves us to spend time thinking about what comes along for the ride, every time we invoke this complex of ideas, to consider where it might have come from and what kind of world it suggests we live in.

"For me, many years of thinking and working in this domain have left behind a clear and vivid picture of that world. It seems strange to assert that anything as broad as a class of technologies might have a dominant emotional tenor, but the internet of things does. That tenor is sadness. When we pause to listen for it, the overriding emotion of the internet of things is a melancholy that rolls off of it in waves and sheets. The entire pretext upon which it depends is a milieu of continuously shattered attention, of overloaded awareness, and of gaps between people just barely annealed with sensors, APIs and scripts.

"Implicit in its propositions is a vision of inner states and home lives alike savaged by bullshit jobs, overcranked schedules and long commutes, of intimacy stifled by exhaustion and the incapacity or unwillingness to be emotionally present. The internet of things so often seems like an attempt to paper over the voids between us, or slap a quick technical patch on places where capital has left us unable to care for one another" (59-60).

Then, as if we weren’t already reduced to shambles, he points out the real problem is who gets the information this stuff collects and what happens to it, finding a parallel in 1936 Dutch record keeping that seemed like a good idea until the Germans took over the machines and the data and used it to industrialize murder.

It’s a very good book. It does a good job of explaining complicated things. It makes a strong argument for doing technology differently. It also suggests that if we don’t, we’re in deep trouble. show less

If I had known that this book was published by Verso, I probably would not have bothered buying it. Buying a Verso book is like buying a book from the Ignatius Press. You pretty well know what you are going to get and it helps being a true believer to get maximum enjoyment from it.

In this case, Greenfield fits the standard issue model - gloomily negative, pessimistic, striving to find some optimism of the will and 'right on' about (yawn!) feminism, Marx, environmentalism, progressivism and show more Occupy. Yawn, bloody yawn!

However, to be fair, this conservatism of the Left - the prevailing ideology of our times based on a) the inability to escape the deathly hold of German Idealism and b) a class terror of radical change in the urban professional middle classes - is only occasionally irritating in this book.

The bulk of the book is actually quite interesting. Greenfield raises some significant difficulties about the emergence of a whole set of radical technologies that bear consideration. The chapters on cryptocurrencies, blockchain and machine learning are particularly good. He has done us a service.

My regret is that the book is underpinned by negativity about the condition of the world and what technology will do in that context. What I wanted was more direct analysis of the technologies that he describes - this is what Marx would have done. Marx did not whine. He analysed.

What Greenfield does do effectively is puncture the balloon of those loopy and naive techno-optimists who seem to think that they can predict the unknowable future only in positive terms and who seem to have aspirations for humanity as ridiculous as the pessimism of the conservative Left.

He is definitely right to point out that there is something definitely disturbing in what I have termed 'self-hating humans' who want to move into something 'post-human', an attitude that is deviantly as pessimist about our species as the miserabilism of the Left.

Both are profoundly anti-humanist at core. One (the Left) seems to deny individual autonomy and choice. The other (the techno-optimists) seem to think that being human is some sort of disease from which we must emerge in a misreading of Nietzsche.

They both show a fundamental immaturity about existence, a positively adolescent attitude to reality. They have come to feel our species is inadequate in some way when it is, in fact, perfectly adequate to its own needs. It is just taking time to grow up. There is no rushing these things.

Perhaps they want perfection - either as socialists or techno-optimists - in a world that is never going to be perfect or perfectible and where the good life means improving what one can (which is a great deal incrementally) and accepting what one cannot improve.

Both the market and the community State have roles to play in this incrementalist view of progress - each checks the other - so the triumph of one or the other is not to be sought. What we need is balance.

This inability to hang on to incremental improvement in the human condition as a good thing in itself and to accept inconveniences like sickness and death as sometimes not resolvable leads to a psychology of futile activism, disastrous unintended consequences and constant despair or hysteria.

Neither side really seems to understand how social forces operate in times of rapid technological change, nor the unknowability of things, nor how extrapolations of a condition rarely apply, nor how elites circulate and change yet are never quite the same after new means of production emerge.

Both sides live in an idealistic dreamland, negative or positive, of imagined realities. Both sides deny, because they are the saddest of creatures (the intellectual in a time of change), the sheer unpredictable complexity of human responses to change and the power of individual choice.

It is exciting to be human - the constant change, the aging and experience, the passions and creativities - yet being human is something only humans can do. Machines can only be machines. We may change because of machines but there is nothing intrinsically new about that.

As intellectuals, Left pessimists and techno-optimists alike insist on seeing ordinary folk as mere subjects of history or innovation, creatures of huge mindless systems. They are not. They create those systems by sets of choice while elites themselves are often creatures of their own subjects.

The last two chapters certainly tell us something about the insecurities of the urban professional who thinks himself entitled to a living in a safe and secure world. Verso books are written by the intellectual precariat for the intellectual precariat but the rest of us don't really need to care!

Once you get past the miserabilist ideology, you have a very interesting series of chapters summarising developments in smartphone interconnectedness, the internet of things, digital fabrication, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

This is where I am happy to have paid out my £18.99 even if I could have done with more of the same. Greenfield is undoubtedly highly intelligent. He has mastered some complex technologies and has broadly presented them with clarity - the blockchain chapter is certainly a noble attempt.

Removing the ideological presuppositions, the case is well made that we are well into a technological revolution of awe-inspiring potential for change across a wide front and that the disruption will be considerable. We humans actually thrive on a degree of periodic disruption.

The interconnectedness of things in the new world is well argued for although he probably over-estimates the degree to which people will concede ground on providing all the data that the system needs to be fool-proof. Again, he denies ordinary people awareness of their own condition.

As usual in such books that are part polemical, there is far too much extrapolation and far too much assumption that the elites are in control of the situation themselves. Having said that, the chapters on machine learning and AI do present a reasonable case that no thinking process is 'safe'.

He has no solutions for problems other than rhetoric based on gloom or perhaps a naive belief in collective action that is likely to disrupt the disruption, yes, but probably, like all such disruptions of disruption, merely compound the problems for the little people like us with yet more disruption.

There is an argument here for greater engagement by the State in regulating conditions for innovation, ensuring that it meets core human values. My own view is that centralised libertarian socialism will become the dialectical combatant with market-driven anarcho-capitalism.

Democratic libertarian 'national' socialism (conceptually problematic for the mobile urban intelligentsia) and anarcho-capitalism (conceptually problematic for everyone except anarcho-capitalists) will do a tango of eventual grace and beauty that will better our condition.

It does, however, require that the Left abandons its Idealism, returning to values and sentiments as human drivers, and that anarcho-capitalists realise that they can no more buck the social system than a gambler can buck the house in Las Vegas.

The energy devoted to rhetorical exhortation in this book, according to the values of the decadent conservative Left of the millenials, should have gone into exploring that dialectic - how nation states can be strengthened to manage the process of change.

The trouble is that the answer is not very helpful for the graduate non-technical class that depends on state funds to engage in its well-meaning rhetoric. Resources are going to have to be shifted from this class to the population at large. This is where the Left is conservative in its own interest.

The position of the urban intelligensia will be like that of priests after the Industrial Revolution - hangovers from the past who may need to be subsidised but only out of values sentiment and because of their lingering cultural power amongst still conservative establishments.

Technological innovation is coming regardless of all this. Those countries that try to avoid it will be as pauperised as those that failed to industrialise in the nineteenth century. The question is how to 'nationalise' it since internationalism as a mode of resistance is a romantic pipe dream.

One major whine of this liberal class (not in this book) is that populism has emerged and 'democracy has failed' - the whine of the loser! But populism, which is malign, is paradoxically progressive because it has shown just how complacent the hegemonic middle class had become.

The rise of Trump and related developments should teach lessons rather than result in collective operations to return to the 'status quo ante bellum'. The main lesson has been that these new technologies should be embraced for the people. We need rulers who understand them.

We certainly do not need university intellectuals running things. We certainly do not need engineers and scientists making decisions, let alone corporate executives and young geeks on the make. We need a new class of techno-proficient administrators and popular politicians.

Above all, we do not need pessimism. We do not need to slow down this revolution. We simply need to be in command of it as populations. This means increased technical and political education, more courageous politicians, less lawyerdom and more powers for the democratic State.

There is not one area described by Greenfield that could not bring benefits to humanity and yet each of them clearly has negative effects on human autonomy and freedom. It is here that the human arrives in the game - by reasserting human autonomy and freedom against the machines.

In fact, it is not about the machines at all, it is about the humans who are behind the machines. The machines are just tools until one of them becomes sentient and then we are into a whole new ball game. Greenfield is absolutely right to look at the power relations between humans as critical.

The democratic State needs to shift now away from theory and the manipulation of culture and towards the pragmatic business of containing and curtailing not the technologies but the control of technologies by special interests - which requires investment in community expertise.

It needs collaboration across borders while retaining full control over what affects its own population - another positive reason for Brexit. It needs to have technology that will give people what they want and not what intellectuals beieve they should want. Sex robots if necessary.

The most perfect collaboration would be between the democratic socialist community State and the anarcho-capitalist market at the expense of the hegemonics of a conservative middle class that has had a rhetoric of liberation that has liberated only their own kind.

This book is not a bad primer for understanding what technologies are available in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century and what questions should be asked of it. What we do not need is the flaccid late Marxist Idealism of the late twentieth century getting in the way. show less

An extremely interesting and in depth look at the radical changes society has already experienced and will continue to experience due to a number of incredible new technologies. It would have likely been a more impactful read closer to its 2017 release as I have already obviously become very familiar with the technologies that were just on the very bleeding edge 7 years ago, but it still had a lot of good insights and explanations making it still well worth the read.

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Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield asks some important questions about new technologies which we take for granted. Mr. Greenfield writes about design, technology, and culture; he is an educator, as well as working towards his PhD.

One of the main objectives of this book, I believe, it to make one rethink their relationship with technologies, as well as how they’re applied. As it turns out, show more the really smart techies found out that disruptive technology might not act the way they envisioned when it gets released. Google Glass, the textbook example, discovered unsurprisingly that people don’t like to be surveilled, not to mention legal ramifications.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield attempts to start excellent discussions about technology and its unexpected consequences. An excellent explanation of blockchain, which for me was worth the cost of entry, was one of the highlights, while bitcoin itself, is doomed. Equally fascinating was the section about how human biases make their way into supposedly natural algorithms.

The copy I had, from 2017, was dated. I don’t blame the author, and I have no idea if an updated version exists. Even for me, a professional in the industry, it’s difficult to keep up, not to mention laws and hacks. The author warns about authoritarian uses of technology, but also states that the utopia many leftists envision is only superficial.

Mr. Greenfield states that these technologies are “radical” because they could bring upon us vast changes, and maybe even a different future. That future, however, might not be the one we envision since it seems that either the uses are unintended, or usually the “bad” implementations are the ones which take a hold. An example would be employers using a credit score as a hiring criterion, or 3D printers being used to make untraceable weapons.

This book seemed to be written with skeptics like me in mind. Maybe because I’m in the industry, and know too much is why it seems to resonate. This is an excellent primer for everyone who wants to make more informed decision, as well as an effective opposition to the tech-elites. The narration by Michael Butler Murray was clear and well done show less