Missive #707

A field manual to the technologies that are transforming 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.

Fortunately, I have signed on to almost none of these great technologies. It is more difficult to live in the United States by doing that but I don’t see any advantages and see a lot of disadvantages. You may disagree but the book is interesting. 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. — Book promo @ goodreads.com

The very first lesson of mapping on the smartphone,  then, is that the handset is primarily a tangible way of engaging  something much subtler and harder to discern, on which we  have suddenly become reliant and over which we have virtually  no meaningful control.  We ordinarily don’t experience that absence of control as a  loss. Simultaneously intangible and too vast to really wrap our heads around, the infrastructure on which both device and navigation depend remains safely on the other side of the emotional  horizon. But the same cannot be said for what it feels like to use  the map, where our inability to make sense of what’s beneath  our fingertips all too frequently registers as frustration, even  humiliation. Here we’re forced to reckon with the fact that the  conventions of interaction with the device are obscure or even  inexplicable to many. Spend even a few minutes trying to explain  basic use of the device to someone picking it up for the first time,  and you’ll realize with a start that what manufacturers are generally pleased to describe as “intuitive” is in fact anything but.  When we do fail in our attempts to master the device, we are  more likely to blame ourselves than the parties who are actually responsible. And while there will no doubt come a point  at which everyone alive will have been intimately acquainted  with such artifacts and their interface conventions since earliest  childhood, that point remains many years in the future. Until  that time, many users will continue to experience the technics of  everyday life as bewildering, overwhelming, even hostile.

I went to the RV shop yesterday morning and got the first half of the roof coating done, power washed the roof. Today I’ll be getting the coating applied but first they will service the A/C. With any luck at all I’ll then be ready to leave here at the end of this month and go to my summer camp. This is assuming that the weather cooperates and there is sun today versus the clouds that we have had for the past few days.