[D66] Radical Technologies

[R.O.]

(Inderdaad, niet radicaal genoeg, in de zin van terug naar de roots. Te 
pro-tech. Geen referenties in de index naar Anders' en Heidegger's 
techniekkritiek.  Weg met al die siliconshit...)


Book Review

Adam Greenfield: Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, 
London/New York, Verso, 2017.
ISBN 9781784780432

Christopher Hartney


In one way, “Radical Technologies” is misfit title for this book. 
Greenfield is dealing with technologies that are with us right now or 
very soon to be – smart phones, augmented reality devices (Pokemon Go, 
Google Glass), desktop factories, algorithms that teach machines how to 
think for themselves (Tesla Autopilot, Alpha Go), policing programs, and 
face-recognition surveillance systems – things that don’t seem so 
radical because we are already acclimatised to their presence if we are 
not eagerly awaiting their availability. Similarly, this book is not 
really about “the design of everyday life” because “design” seems to 
suggest that as a community, or as a cohort of designers we will 
structure our lives with care and amenity and this will continue in the 
days ahead. This is not going to happen. The “radical” of Greenfield’s 
title is best applied to the results of this technology on our idea of 
self and community for the main theme here is how “utopian” technology 
very quickly finds other uses and as a result, serves other political 
agendas than those first imagined during its design and rearranges 
relationships between us for the worse. In the end, Greenfield’s big 
story is how these emergent technologies have the capacity to radically 
alter our lives without any “design” considerations coming to fruition 
in any intended way at all. In reading this book, one feels our future 
will be a victim of these technologies as much as it might be a 
beneficiary. How does this then relate to aesthetics?

I would suggest that there is much meat in this work for the scholar of 
religion, for futurists, sociologists, designers, and a range of policy 
makers, but given my abiding interest in social aesthetics – what 
conditions concepts of appropriate behaviour between us as social actors 
– I will complete this review with my eye on Greenfield’s use of the 
word “everyday” in his title and what this means for how we behave to 
each other. In numerous respects Greenfield has composed a partial 
rewrite of Ervin Goffman’s masterwork Presentation of Self in Everyday 
Life (1956). Radical Technologies does not delve into Goffman’s stage 
metaphors as deeply, but he does provide a view at the level of the 
everyday on how these epoch-marking technologies that will interrupt, 
interfere, rewrite, and reconfigure how human “actors” get on with the 
world and each other in newly framed performances. The author cannot do 
this with every aspect of his analysis – some of the technologies he 
discusses are yet to be part of our everyday world just yet. Other 
technologies he speaks of (particularly those connected with crime 
prevention) maybe in use but their operation is closely guarded by both 
their developers and clients and this also retards a full view of their 
impact on us. But wherever he can, Greenfield analyses what these new 
technologies are doing and what they may very well do to us as social 
actors. This is most clear in the early chapters and to do this 
important book justice, I will briefly go through it chapter by chapter 
to provide the fullest overview I can.

Greenfield starts with a discussion of the smartphone. The author rose 
to prominence as an information architect with Nokia. He then moved to a 
writing and academic career with a speciality on urban design and its 
relation to the digital. With this background he is able to provide 
valuable insight into both the technological and social consequences of 
Apple’s great handheld microprocessor and its copies. He discusses the 
schizoid-like interruptive life that the smartphone has given us, the 
porosity of our selves as we delve into its screen, the little victories 
the convenience of the phone has over our privacy, the impact of the 
little dopamine hits we suffer as we constantly link with and “like” the 
comments of others and get “liked” in return as we walk along. Here too 
he speaks of the increase in pedestrian accidents as, focused on the 
little screen in our hand we increasingly walk out into traffic, and 
putting all this together, he sums up this new level of 
interconnectivity in a brief passage potent and clear:

The individual networked in this way is no longer the autonomous subject 
enshrined in liberal theory, not precisely. Our very selfhood is smeared 
out across a global mesh of nodes and links; all the aspects of our 
personality we think of as constituting who we are – our tastes, 
preferences, capabilities, desires – we owe to the fact of our 
connection with that mesh, and the selves and distant resources to which 
it binds us (p. 27-8).

What maybe noteworthy here is that Greenfield writes of the smartphone 
and later on augmented reality as someone who understands that this 
history of these devices on our mentality is important to chart. But I 
wonder what his words mean to generations who have not seen this history 
evolve, but rather, have always lived in a world of these technologies 
and who take the conditions of their use as so normative as to be 
unworthy of comment.

“The Internet of Things” is Greenfield’s second chapter and in it he 
delves into the relationship between humans and objects beginning with 
those biometric devices we adorn ourselves with and which collect vast 
amounts of data on our health, activities, and movement – all so these 
machines may tell us how to be “fitter, healthier, more productive.” He 
does not mention iOvulate – the app designed to keep track of female 
fertility, but he does remain concerned that wearers of Fitbit and Apple 
watches are eager to let information about the specific functioning of 
their body out into the world and worries about the way this will come 
to change how we deal with health and insurance companies in the near 
future. He then moves onto considerations of the various devices we let 
into our home – the Amazon “Dash” button and other technologies like 
“Alexa” that grant the convenience of ordering items with a simple voice 
command. He speculates that such instruments will make us increasingly 
less critical about the way we satisfy our immediate wants and this will 
be to the advantage of monolithic supply organisations such as Amazon. 
This all builds to another telling conclusion where Greenfield wonders 
why “…the internet of things … so often seems like an attempt to paper 
over the voids between us, or slap a quick technological patch on all 
the places where capital has left us unable to care for one another” 
(p.60).

In Chapter Three the author writes about augmented reality focusing on 
Pokemon Go and Google Glass and he analyses the potential results of 
that divided attention we may give each other and the built environment 
if augmentation is taken up only by some of us including the beautiful 
ballet moves we execute as we flow around each other walking down city 
streets. But, asks Greenfield “…is this achievement being eroded by our 
involvement with technologies that demand to be at the focus of 
attention, to the exclusion of all else?” (p.80). One suspects that the 
recent  failure of Google Glass has meant that the formula for reading 
reality and its augmentation is not yet perfect but soon will be. This 
section could become a book in itself as we begin to consider the full 
ramifications of what interruptive technologies can do to the “actions” 
we commit in social space and how these technologies will subvert the 
agreed behaviours of particular social atmospheres. People might wish to 
go searching for a charmander whilst playing Pokemon Go between the huts 
at Auschwitz, and for a few weeks when the game came out this was 
possible, but such actions remind us of the very human complexities of 
all social spaces and the ways in which technology design fails to 
address these complexities.

Chapter Four considers the realm of desktop factories and the promise of 
unceasing abundance they offer. My concern with Chapter Four was that 
Greenfield seemed too quick to buy the idea that these machines, more 
advanced than 3D printers, but not yet at the stage of building items 
from the atomic-level up (soon though) will end want on the planet. A 
scenario of abundance seems strangely unlikely to me even if the 
technology exists. Greenfield provides a potted history of the 
development of these machines. He explains that the underlying ethos of 
these small factories was that once the first machine was built, it 
would be able to replicate itself and so soon the whole world would be 
filled with such devices. The author is canny enough to point out that 
very few of these machines are presently where they are needed (in the 
developing world), and he is critical of where users source the filament 
that serves as the basic material of the machines (a source that is 
often not green enough). But what Greenfield can’t do here is any deep 
speculation on how these machines will in fact change our everyday life 
beyond the idea that we will have more stuff. The internet of things 
seems at first salvational, but will we, as he suggests, just take the 
easy option and order it from China in a manner that simply makes Amazon 
larger and richer?

Chapters Five and Six are really one section of the book. Greenfield 
starts with a detailed explanation of Bitcoin in Five and this then 
leads to a much fuller explanation of the ramifications of blockchains 
in Six. The discussion of the operations and limitation of Bitcoin is 
exacting, but it is when Greenfield moves onto his discussion of the 
cryptocurrency Ethereum that the full consequences of crypto money 
becomes clear. In Six Greenfield carefully explains how Ethereum can be 
linked to DAOs or “decentralized autonomous organisations.” Such an 
organisation is established in a blockchain to lock-in certain 
contractual obligations for certain actors. Only once these obligations 
are met will an amount of Ethereum be released to those actors by way of 
payment. This has unending consequences for (a) how we might establish 
companies in the future (free of the complex legislations of any state) 
or (b) how paralegal contracts may work well beyond the grip of any 
national jurisdiction, and more disturbingly, (c) how DAOs might impact 
on labour relations and condition the future of work. That is, all the 
formal agreements that can be made between humans but which are tightly 
regulated and enforceable by states, might now bind us but without that 
state care, without considerations of the history of industrial 
relations, or without instruments of policing in the real world to 
ensure compliance. The message behind all this is ambiguous; on one hand 
blockchain agreements promise an effective post-national organisation 
structure that cannot be de-internationalised and which remains beyond 
the meddling of any state, additionally we have a promise of new 
freedoms in how we make arrangements, but on the other hand we end up 
with a technology that seems to also foreshadow the ominous collapse of 
other freedoms long fought for. Again, Greenfield can only touch on the 
full possibilities of the expansion of DAOs, but there is enough here to 
suggest, once more, that a radical re-imagining of the negotiated space 
between us is about to radically change.

Chapters Seven, Eight, and Nine can also be assessed together. Chapter 
Seven analyses automation, and by now the term “the unnecessariat” 
arises in the argument of the book. This is not a term coined by 
Greenfield, but he deploys it to remind us of those vast sections of the 
population whose very existence is being rendered unnecessary by these 
emerging technologies and automation. The author deploys figures on 
employment types across America to show that the economies of certain 
regions will be decimated as automating technology takes over the major 
industries that employ most of the labour in those regions - with the 
transport industry most at risk. It is at this point that a kind of 
“technology fatigue” set in with me. Greenfield reminds us earlier in 
his book of the much quoted proclamations by Maynard Keynes and others 
earlier in the twentieth century that technology would set us free, 
would give us 15 hour working weeks, or four hour days, but in much of 
the discourse on technology in this book we see that the real economic 
focus in on how the great “Stacks” of the international economy – 
Google, Apple, Facebook, the Musk companies, and Amazon, can exact 
maximum profits, and maximum political influence from the peoples of the 
world and their government systems. As they suck dry the communities 
they feed off, states merely become ancillary partners in the Stacks’ 
quests to be larger and more dominant. Moreover, to achieve this end the 
processes of getting to the future involves the ongoing interruption of 
community and the isolation of the individual. Technology helps in this 
as the invasive monitoring of the human workforce increases while 
humans, for the time being, are valued only in the way they can work 
like robots.

Greenfield touches on this drive in Chapter Ten as well (“Radical 
Technologies”) but from Seven onwards he demonstrates how machine 
thinking has been improving over the last few years. He provides a 
fascinating examination of Tesla’s automated driving system Autopilot. 
This relies on significant and ongoing data collection from all its cars 
– each of them slowly adding to a vast database of road experience and 
open-ended algorithms to assess, order, access this vast knowledge 
repository. Greenfield’s one use of the adjective “Orwellian” is saved 
for his discussion of a range of crime-predicting programs that now have 
police in numerous jurisdictions focusing on neighbourhoods and on 
people who are more likely be the site of criminal activity. But these 
programs advise police not on crime – but on the statistics that are 
available regards crime – statistics that have their own biases. 
Greenfield worries about the “black box” nature of these programs – the 
mysterious functioning of the program must remain mysterious if its 
inventors are to retain the economic advantage of its uniqueness, yet 
this mysteriousness also hides the biases embedded in the program. We 
cannot investigate the parameters of the program, the data scope, or why 
it might recommend police be stationed in one neighbourhood rather than 
another or have police following one individual rather than another.

The “intelligence” of machines is best summed up in Greenfield’s 
comparison between Deep Blue’s win at chess over Garry Kapsarov in 1997 
and AlphaGo’s victory over go master Lee Sedol in 2016. Deep Blue was 
simply a chess machine that could go through a pyramid of possible moves 
faster than Kasparov. AlphaGo on the other hand was a vast thinking 
machine that had been adapted to play the game of go. The ability of 
machines to not exactly “think” but to be open to finding patterns in 
new data received is making Tesla Autopilot and Alpha Go able to learn 
from the increasingly large amounts of data on the world that is 
presently being produced and synthesise it. Greenfield includes a quote 
from a go player who was watching the matches. At one point he rose and 
shouted out “that’s not a human move!” And it is here that I began to 
see another, more beautiful possibility for what’s taking place: that as 
we teach machines to think, they in turn teach us how to expand our 
experiences of being human. In one way this does happen, but only, it 
seems as a side effect of more pressing neo-capitalist urges. Greenfield 
does not specifically mention Kurzweil’s singularity, but he does give 
five possible scenarios of what might happen as machine intelligence 
spreads. After reading these I wonder if a better title for the book 
would be “Apocalyptic Technologies.” But these five scenarios are only 
so interesting as they take Greenfield away from the matter of his book 
and into deep speculations on the ecological state of the planet. What 
is clear from all five possibilities is that design fails. Inventors 
with utopian gleams in their eyes put forward an idea that will 
supposedly help us, and the technology gets rerouted easily enough to 
serve prevailing power systems, not new and more liberal ones. The 
problem of Silicon Valley’s solutionism has already been dealt with well 
by Evgeny Morozov, but Greenfield adds his own political twist.

The speculation on how fast machines can learn if they are connected to 
other machines that learn is one of the mind-blowing possibilities that 
Greenfield only touches upon. And the potential of how good it could 
this might be for the world is not a possibility that is completely 
obscured but “good” seems the wrong adjective. There’s something wrong 
he suggests in a program that can synthesise the works of Rembrandt, 
essentialise the strokes he used, and produce new and unseen Rembrandts, 
but wrong or right, it is being done. Like the human at the end of Spike 
Jonze’s Her we really will become the unnecessariat and be left behind. 
So it is at the end of Chapter Nine that Greenfield turns unexpectedly 
elegiac:

We’ll feel pride that these intelligences have our DNA in them, however 
deeply buried in the mix it may be, and sorrow that they’ve so far 
outstripped the reach of our talents. It’s surely banal to discribe the 
coming decades as a time of great beauty and greater sadness, when all 
of human history may be described that way with just as much accuracy. 
And yet that feels like the most honest and useful way I have of 
characterizing the epoch I believe we’ve already entered, once it’s had 
time to emerge in its fullness (p.269).

It is, however, the ability of design to go wrong that leaves Greenfield 
worried about what we shall become as many of the deep implications 
behind how emergent technology come to hatch out. Yet from this book we 
get a solid view of what social aesthetics will look like in the 
immediate future. Greenfield’s research allows us further insight into 
the developing nature of interpersonal interaction including the 
appropriateness and beauty in the senses of politeness that make our 
lives and cities that contain our lives operative. In the final pages 
though, this beauty, politeness, and operability seem on the edge of 
destruction, leaving the author to make a final political plea about how 
we should assess the design that goes into our everyday lives:

The fundamental insight [these examples] offer us is this: people with 
left politics of any stripe absolutely cannot allow their eyes to glaze 
over when the topic of conversation turns to technology, or in any way 
cede this terrain to existing inhabitants, for to do so is to surrender 
the commanding heights of the contemporary situation. It’s absolutely 
vital, now, for all of us who think of ourselves as in any way 
progressive or belonging to the left current to understand just what the 
emerging technologies of everyday life propose, how they work, and what 
they are capable of. A time of radical technologies demands a generation 
of radical technologists, and these networks are the material means by 
way of which we can help each other become that….And perhaps we could do 
a better job of pushing back against the rhetoric of transcendence we’re 
offered. Every time we are presented with the aspiration towards the 
posthuman, we need to perceive the predictable tawdry and all-too-human 
drives underlying it (p.314).

It is a sound point to end on because social aesthetics at its heart is 
about the enunciation not only of the sense of beauty and politeness of 
human interaction, but about the inherent power structures that make 
social interaction smooth, jarring, or sublime in its expectations and 
execution. What becomes evident from Greenfield’s book, barring some 
fringe exceptions, is the absences of so many of the issues here from 
the field of democratic discourse as it is currently carried on. What 
Greenfield and others study, our present batch of politicians do their 
best to ignore. In addition to the breadth ns usefulness of his 
research, it is the absence of discussion of these issues in mainstream 
politics that makes Greenfield’s book a significant place to recalibrate 
who we are as both social actors and political beings.

On 02-08-2020 06:49, R.O. wrote:
> 9781784780456
> Radical Technologies
> The Design of Everyday Life
> by Adam Greenfield <https://www.versobooks.com/authors/2168-adam-greenfield>
> 
>   * Paperback
>   * Ebook
>   * Hardback
> 
> Paperback with free ebook
> £9.99£5.9940% off
> 368 pages / May 2018 / 9781784780456
> 
> A field manual to the technologies that are changing our lives
> 
> 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 re-evaluate the Silicon Valley 
> consensus determining the future.
> 
> We already depend on the smartphone to navigate every aspect of our 
> existence. We’re told that innovations—from augmented-reality interfaces 
> and virtual assistants to autonomous delivery drones and self-driving 
> cars—will make life easier, more convenient and more productive. 3D 
> printing promises unprecedented control over the form and distribution 
> of matter, while the blockchain stands to revolutionize everything from 
> the recording and exchange of value to the way we organize the mundane 
> realities of the day to day. And, all the while, fiendishly complex 
> algorithms are operating quietly in the background, reshaping the 
> economy, transforming the fundamental terms of our politics and even 
> redefining what it means to be human.
> 
> Having successfully colonized everyday life, these radical technologies 
> 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.
> 
> 
>     Reviews
> 
> “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/ 
> <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/13/radical-technologies-adam-greenfield-review?CMP=twt_b-gdnreview>
> 
> “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 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/ 
> <http://www.publicseminar.org/2017/07/we-can-remember-it-for-you-wholesale/#.WXsDpIWKwot>
> 
> “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/ 
> <http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-73c5-Game-changers-could-be-great#.WZqtVYWKwot>
> 
> “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/
> 
> “Provides a grounded guide, a cautionary tale in which each chapter 
> walks readers through another layer of a dazzling and treacherous 
> landscape.”
> 
> – Jennifer Howard, /Times Literary Supplement/
> 
> “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]/ 
> <https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-business-leaders-read-in-2017-1513107964>
> 
> “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/ 
> <https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/informed-dissent>
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> D66 mailing list
> D66 at tuxtown.net
> http://www.tuxtown.net/mailman/listinfo/d66
>