Well... How did we get here?: Technology, humanity, and who made who.
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Well... How did we get here?: Technology, humanity, and who made who.
Sale price
$20.99
Regular price $25.99
Well… How Did We Get Here? is the question David Byrne asked in 1981. It is the question this book asks about the digital world that has assembled itself around us since.
We did not vote for the attention economy. Nobody decided, through any democratic process, that the most powerful communications infrastructure in human history should be funded by selling human attention to advertisers. Nobody planned that a Finnish student's hobby project would become the operating system of the Internet. Nobody intended that the World Wide Web — given freely to humanity by one man who believed information should flow without permission — would become the architecture of surveillance capitalism.
And yet here we are.
Technology, humanity, and who made who is the question at the heart of this book. It is one of the most important questions of our time — and one that most of us have been living inside without fully noticing.
Technological determinism is the idea that technology drives history — that it reshapes society, behaviour, and even the brain itself, in ways that exceed human intention and resist human control. The counter-argument says that human beings make choices, that those choices shape what technology becomes, and that the outcomes are never inevitable. Both positions are right. Neither is complete. The conversation between them is where this book lives.
What you will find inside:•
The military architecture that became the free and open Internet — and how a nuclear survivability network became the foundation of democratic communication • The hacker ethic that built Linux, gave away the Web, and briefly changed what was possible — and the commercial forces that built toll booths on the roads the idealists laid • The neuroscience of what the smartphone is doing to the brain — not metaphorically, but structurally, measurably, written in neurons • The attention economy, from Benjamin Day's 1833 penny press to Zuboff's surveillance capitalism — and how human attention became the raw material of a trillion-dollar industry • The platform power that has concentrated control of the information environment in the hands of a handful of private companies — and what that means for democracy • The speed problem — whether technology is now advancing faster than human wisdom can follow — and why artificial intelligence makes that question more urgent than it has ever been
Guided by thinkers including Marshall McLuhan, Tim Berners-Lee, Lawrence Lessig, Shoshana Zuboff, Nicholas Carr, and Jonathan Haidt, and drawing on the author's decades-long engagement with the subject that began with a university essay on technological determinism, Well… How Did We Get Here? is a book for everyone who has ever looked up from their screen and wondered how the world came to be this way.
Rigorous but accessible. Personal but evidenced. And honest, in its final pages, about the technology that made it possible.Well. How did we get here? Let's find out.
We did not vote for the attention economy. Nobody decided, through any democratic process, that the most powerful communications infrastructure in human history should be funded by selling human attention to advertisers. Nobody planned that a Finnish student's hobby project would become the operating system of the Internet. Nobody intended that the World Wide Web — given freely to humanity by one man who believed information should flow without permission — would become the architecture of surveillance capitalism.
And yet here we are.
Technology, humanity, and who made who is the question at the heart of this book. It is one of the most important questions of our time — and one that most of us have been living inside without fully noticing.
Technological determinism is the idea that technology drives history — that it reshapes society, behaviour, and even the brain itself, in ways that exceed human intention and resist human control. The counter-argument says that human beings make choices, that those choices shape what technology becomes, and that the outcomes are never inevitable. Both positions are right. Neither is complete. The conversation between them is where this book lives.
What you will find inside:•
The military architecture that became the free and open Internet — and how a nuclear survivability network became the foundation of democratic communication • The hacker ethic that built Linux, gave away the Web, and briefly changed what was possible — and the commercial forces that built toll booths on the roads the idealists laid • The neuroscience of what the smartphone is doing to the brain — not metaphorically, but structurally, measurably, written in neurons • The attention economy, from Benjamin Day's 1833 penny press to Zuboff's surveillance capitalism — and how human attention became the raw material of a trillion-dollar industry • The platform power that has concentrated control of the information environment in the hands of a handful of private companies — and what that means for democracy • The speed problem — whether technology is now advancing faster than human wisdom can follow — and why artificial intelligence makes that question more urgent than it has ever been
Guided by thinkers including Marshall McLuhan, Tim Berners-Lee, Lawrence Lessig, Shoshana Zuboff, Nicholas Carr, and Jonathan Haidt, and drawing on the author's decades-long engagement with the subject that began with a university essay on technological determinism, Well… How Did We Get Here? is a book for everyone who has ever looked up from their screen and wondered how the world came to be this way.
Rigorous but accessible. Personal but evidenced. And honest, in its final pages, about the technology that made it possible.Well. How did we get here? Let's find out.