Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin · 17 Apr 2017 · 222pp · 70,132 words
our profound responsibility and a new opportunity’—just stop.” That is exactly what I propose: let’s stop and consider a strategy of resistance to techno-determinism. Any historian will tell you that revolutions often overshoot their marks, a statement the citizens of Paris in 1789 or Moscow in 1925 would have
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just the way things are? Don’t we have to resign ourselves to working with Google, Facebook, and Amazon?” The audiences seem to parrot the techno-determinism that is, after all, just one way of understanding the problem. I think big changes could happen if we approach the problem of the monopolization
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lose their authority, and humanist practices such as democratic elections will become as obsolete as rain dances and flint knives. We need to confront this techno-determinism now—with real solutions—before it is too late. I undertake the pursuit of these solutions with both optimism and humility. Optimism because I believe
The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman · 4 Sep 2023 · 444pp · 117,770 words
of technology people still get stuck on what it is, forgetting why it was created in the first place. This is not about some innate techno-determinism. This is about what it means to be human. Earlier we saw that no wave of technology has, so far, been contained. In this chapter
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tied together. This has important ramifications for what’s coming. While technology doesn’t simplistically push people in a predetermined direction, it’s not naive techno-determinism to recognize its tendency to afford certain capabilities or see how it prompts some outcomes over others. In this, technology is one of the key
Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities
by Vaclav Smil · 23 Sep 2019
, and a clock” and that it is capable of reabsorbing all perturbations “elastically without influencing the trend” (Marchetti and Nakicenovic 1979, 15). Marchetti’s extreme techno-determinism had an unerring “system” in charge—except it was not. Even in the late 1970s, the proposed pattern did not appear as smooth as claimed
The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire
by Tim Schwab · 13 Nov 2023 · 618pp · 179,407 words
Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age
by Steven Johnson · 14 Jul 2012 · 184pp · 53,625 words
organizing information: all three came from the edges of the network, not the center. The temptation, of course, is to draw a straight line of techno-determinism between the Seattle protests and the global wave of pro-democratic and egalitarian protest that swept across the planet in 2010 and 2011: from the
How to Do Nothing
by Jenny Odell · 8 Apr 2019 · 243pp · 76,686 words
is to start to piece a community back together, though it may not (ever) look the same again. Against the odds and the crush of techno-determinism, things keep growing that “small crack in the continuum of catastrophe.” Nature and culture still abound with forms that, like Zhuang Zhou’s useless tree
The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us
by Tim Sullivan · 6 Jun 2016 · 252pp · 73,131 words
—internet marketplaces replacing Main Street and the mall, Uber and Airbnb disrupting the taxi and hotel industries. But there’s more to this story than techno-determinism. As important as technology is, it’s only one of the driving forces behind the changes we’ve witnessed. We’re here to tell you
The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition
by David Levinson and Kevin Krizek · 17 Aug 2015 · 257pp · 64,285 words
. However that auto or light truck will be automated, and will eventually be electric as well. ———————— "There is an urgent need to move beyond the techno-determinism that surrounds discussions about innovation in transportation, that have become bogged down in a Silicon Valley versus City Hall narrative, the innovate upstart versus the
Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence
by James Bridle · 6 Apr 2022 · 502pp · 132,062 words
lump together the myriad different expressions of the world. The power of these tools to make the world legible to humans in turn contribute to techno-determinism and network power: the belief that the tools produced in the most dominant societies by the most dominant groups are not only the best for
Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World
by Joshua B. Freeman · 27 Feb 2018 · 538pp · 145,243 words
malaise and shriveled imagination. The Industrial Revolution and the giant factory have left in their wake a continuing belief in a teleology of progress and techno-determinism. But for many, the future has already come and gone, perhaps leaving them with sneakers and a smartphone, but with little hope or belief in
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson · 28 Sep 2014 · 243pp · 65,374 words