Book review: Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
This post was written as an assignment for the course History of Technology Revolution at Sciences Po Paris. The course is part of the policy stream Digital & New Technology of the Master in Public Policy and is instructed by Laurène Tran, Besiana Balla and Nicolas Colin.
In Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, Adam Greenfield — Writer and Urbanist — describes the contours of an increasingly digitalized human habitat, where technologies such as machine learning, Internet of Thigs and automation increasingly play a role in shaping social change. During his service in the US Army, Greenfield was a psychological operations specialist, engaging first hand with the capabilities developed by the most technologically advanced state on Earth. Later in life, he focused on the design and development of networked digital technologies, with a critical outlook guiding his writings and analyses.
The book begins with a description of Paris, not the Paris that we see in postcards nor the map represented at the various metro stops across the city, but the trail left by an American tourist’s smartphone describing his path across the city, the transponders and sets of sensors inscribed in the various infrastructures of the city. All of them leaving a digital trace, all of them capturing information on human life in the networked city, tracing the rhythms of the city in its incessant flow, all at once. And while these technological means become more and more integrated in everyday reality, Greenfield poses the basic claims that unite the various discussions in his book: despite the power they appear to offer us, they leave existing modes of domination almost intact; despite the hype that surround them, there is the need to critically address their functions and effects, if we are to retain our agency and control for the years to come.
He firstly addresses the technologies that are closer to our daily experience, the smartphone and Internet of Things devices. With their large capacity to collect vast amounts of data about our ordinary activities, they represent the first interface between us and the technologies that now loom over the social sphere, as if they were an attached ‘network organ’. The vast diffusion of these devices is the first element that raises questions of privacy and control, but also of individuality and communion. Indeed, they represent a porous juncture between us as individuals and the networked everything, where the private blends with the public, work blends with leisure.
From the networked ‘personal assistants’ in our homes, to the information gathering network of the ‘smart city’, their deployment conceals a veil of logical positivism, where technical systems are employed to increase awareness and generate knowledge on activities and circumstances in a particular context through a statistic driven approach. This approach captures only a part of it, only a glimpse of the social and the personal, what is easy and cheap to detect, but it is used to generate predictions, courses of action which shape our public and personal spaces through the agency of the actors that we engage with, willingly or not, the architects and owners of the information systems we are integrated in.
As the book progresses, Greenfield deals with the technological solutions that recently appeared on the scene of the tech community (or at least the hype around them): blockchain & cryptocurrencies as computational depositaries of value and trust, artificial intelligence & machine learning as the potential triggers of an eclipse in human discretion and production of knowledge. He brilliantly describes their fundamentals, in a language that is both accessible to all and millimetrically precise in its depiction of these complex computational assemblages.
From the development of Bitcoin, to the more recent emergence of Ethereum and its blockchain infrastructure, the author critically addresses their merits and unconcretized promises, their potential and their current weakness. He does so in a way which is different from the majority of critical assessments of these technologies, by taking into account the fundamental feature for their success, their interfacing with human collectivities and agents. Their philosophical and political underpinnings, which span over the radical decentralization advocated by both right-wing techno-libertarians and anarcho-socialist fully-automated-luxury-communism supporters, sharing the view of a transformed human organization of a form resembling Deleuzian rhizomes.
Within those two extremes, nonetheless natural declinations of the desire for radical decentralization expressed in the hype surrounding these technologies, Greenfield argues that despite the promise of blockchain to enable horizontal and democratic organization at scale outside the state, their propensity to generate this sort of change is much more limited than simply enabling a new domain of financial speculation such as cryptofinance. However, while not hiding a certain pessimism on such potential, it must be stressed that these technologies are still in their infancy, and much of their practical effect will depend on the agency of those who shape them.
For what regards artificial intelligence and machine learning, on the other side, it can be argued that their deployment has opened a frontier of possibility which can hardly be captured in a pragmatic fashion. However, Greenfield masters this effort of interpretation with a wide variety of practical examples, from the determination of creditworthiness to smart policing, from the problem of algorithmic accountability, to the concerns raised on autonomous vehicles and pattern recognition algorithms.
In conclusion, what Greenfield ultimately proposes is an holistic and precise account of the technologies we encounter in our daily lives, be they observable or not. As a complement to this punctual analysis, he also provides a critically useful lesson: we need to avoiding concentrating on vague speculations on what the role of these technologies will be in the future, we need to address what they do in the present, how else they might be working and most importantly who ultimately benefits from their deployment. In this sense, the pessimism of the author on the role of monopolistic IT giants in the shaping of their implementation should be taken as a wake up call and a compelling task for those who want to retain their agency and freedom in the future, by opening new frontiers for these radical technologies beyond the dominant paradigm.
By Francesco Lanzone
Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield is published by Verso Books. To order a copy: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2742-radical-technologies