Radical Technologies

The Design of Everyday Life

Adam Greenfield

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781784780456
• eBook ISBN: 9781784780463
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Public Policy

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 reevaluate the Silicon Valley consensus determining the future.

Having successfully colonised everyday life, radical technologies - from smartphones, blockchain, augmented-reality interfaces and virtual assistants to 3D printing, autonomous delivery drones and self-driving cars - 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.

1

Smartphone

The networking of the self

The smartphone is the signature artifact of our age. Less than a decade old, this protean object has become the universal, all-but-indispensable mediator of everyday life. Very few manufactured objects have ever been as ubiquitous as these glowing slabs of polycarbonate.¹

For many of us, they are the last thing we look at before sleep each night, and the first thing we reach for upon waking. We use them to meet people, to communicate, to entertain ourselves, and to find our way around. We buy and sell things with them. We rely on them to document the places we go, the things we do and the company we keep; we count on them to fill the dead spaces, the still moments and silences that used to occupy so much of our lives.

They have altered the texture of everyday life just about everywhere, digesting many longstanding spaces and rituals in their entirety, and transforming others beyond recognition. At this juncture in history, it simply isn’t possible to understand the ways in which we know and use the world around us without having some sense for the way the smartphone works, and the various infrastructures it depends on.

For all its ubiquity, though, the smartphone is not a simple thing. We use it so often that we don’t see it clearly; it appeared in our lives so suddenly and totally that the scale and force of the changes it has occasioned have largely receded from conscious awareness. In order to truly take the measure of these changes, we need to take a step or two back, to the very last historical moment in which we negotiated the world without smartphone in hand.

There are few better guides to the pre-smartphone everyday than a well-documented body of ethnographic research carried out circa 2005, by researchers working for Keio University and Intel Corporation’s People and Practices group.² Undertaken in London, Tokyo and Los Angeles, the study aimed to identify broad patterns in the things people carried in their wallets, pockets and purses on a daily basis. It found a striking degree of consistency in what Londoners, Angelenos and Tokyoites thought of as being necessary to the successful negotiation of the day’s challenges:

Pictures, firstly, and similar mementoes of family, friends and loved ones. Icons, charms and other totems of religious or spiritual significance. Snacks. Personal hygiene items, breath mints, chewing gum—things, in other words, that we might use to manage the bodily dimensions of the presentation of self. Things we used to gain access of one sort or another: keys, identity cards, farecards and transit passes. Generally, a mobile phone, which at the time the research was conducted was just that, something used for voice communication and perhaps text messaging. And invariably, money in one or more of its various forms.

If the Intel/Keio study found in the stuff of wallets and handbags nothing less than circa-2005 in microcosm, its detailed accounting provides us with a useful and even a poignant way of assessing just how much has changed in the intervening years. We find that a great many of the things city dwellers once relied upon to manage everyday life as recently as ten years ago have by now been subsumed by a single object, the mobile phone. This single platform swallowed most all the other things people once had floating around in their pockets and purses, and in so doing it became something else entirely.

Once each of the unremarkable acts we undertake in the course of the day—opening the front door, buying the groceries, hopping onto the bus—has been reconceived as a digital transaction, it tends to dematerialize. The separate, dedicated chunks of matter we needed to use in order to accomplish these ends, the house keys and banknotes and bus tokens, are replaced by an invisible modulation of radio waves. And as the infrastructure that receives those waves and translates them into action is built into the ordinary objects and surfaces all around us, the entire interaction tends to disappear from sight, and consequently from thought.

Intangible though this infrastructure may be, we still need some way of communicating with it. The 2005-era mobile phone was perfect in this role: a powered platform the right shape and size to accommodate the various antennae necessary to wireless communication, it was quite literally ready-to-hand, and best of all, by this time most people living in the major cities of the world already happened to be carrying one. And so this one device began to stand in for a very large number of the material objects we previously used to mediate everyday urban life.

Most obviously, the smartphone replaced conventional telephones, leading to the widespread disappearance from streetscapes everywhere of that icon of midcentury urbanity, the telephone booth, and all the etiquettes of negotiated waiting and deconfliction that attended it. Where phone booths remain, they now act mostly as a platform for other kinds of services—WiFi connectivity, or ads for sex workers.

In short order, the smartphone supplanted the boombox, the Walkman and the transistor radio: all the portable means we used to access news and entertainment, and maybe claim a little bubble of space for ourselves in doing so. Except as ornamentation and status display, the conventional watch, too, is well on its way to extinction, as are clocks, calendars and datebooks. Tickets, farecards, boarding passes, and all the other tokens of access are similarly on the way out, as are the keys, badges and other physical means we use to gain entry to restricted spaces.

The things we used to fix cherished memory—the dogeared, well-worried-over Kodachromes of lovers, children, schoolmates and pets that once populated the world’s plastic wallet inserts—were for the most part digitized at some point along the way, and long ago migrated to the lockscreens of our phones.

Most of the artifacts we once used to convey identity are not long for this world, including among other things name cards, calling cards and business cards. Though more formal identity-authentication documents, notably driver’s licenses and passports, are among the few personal effects to have successfully resisted assimilation to the smartphone, it remains to be seen how much longer this is the case.

What else disappears from the world? Address books, Rolodexes and “little black books.” The directories, maps and guidebooks of all sorts that we used to navigate the city. Loyalty and other stored-value cards. And finally money, and everything it affords its bearer in freedom of behavior and of movement. All of these have already been transfigured into a dance of ones and zeroes, or are well on their way to such a fate. Of all the discrete artifacts identified by the Intel/Keio studies, after a single decade little more remains in our pockets and purses than the snacks, the breath mints and the lip-balm.

Time flows through the world at different rates, of course, and there are many places where the old ways yet reign. We ourselves are no different: some of us prefer the certainty of transacting with the world via discrete, dedicated objects, just as some still prefer to deal with a human teller at the bank. But as the smartphone has come to stand between us and an ever-greater swath of the things we do in everyday life, the global trend toward dematerialization is unmistakable. As a result, it’s already difficult to contemplate objects like a phone booth, a Filofax or a Palm Pilot without experiencing a shock of either reminiscence or perplexity, depending on the degree of our past acquaintance with them.

However clumsy they may seem to us now, what’s important about such mediating artifacts is that each one implied an entire way of life—a densely interconnected ecosystem of commerce, practice and experience. And as we’ve overwritten those ecosystems with new and far less tangible webs of connection based on the smartphone, the texture of daily experience has been transformed. The absorption of so many of the technics of everyday life into this single device deprives us of a wide variety of recognizably, even distinctively urban sites, gestures and practices. Stepping into the street to raise a hand for a cab, or gathering in front of an appliance-shop window to watch election results or a championship game tumble across the clustered screens. Stopping at a newsstand for the afternoon edition, or ducking into a florist shop or a police booth to ask directions. Meeting people at the clock at Grand Central, or the Ginza branch of the Wako department store, or in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel. What need is there for any of these metropolitan rituals now?

It isn’t particularly helpful to ask whether this new everyday life is “better” or “worse”; I very much doubt we’d have permitted the smartphone to supplant so many other objects and rituals in our lives if we didn’t, on balance, perceive some concrete advantage in doing so. But there are a few circumstances that arise as a result of this choice that we might want to take careful note of.

Firstly, the most basic tasks we undertake in life now involve the participation of a fundamentally different set of actors than they did even ten years ago. Beyond the gargantuan enterprises that manufacture our devices, and the startups that develop most of the apps we use, we’ve invited technical standards bodies, national- and supranational-level regulators, and shadowy hackers into the innermost precincts of our lives. As a result, our ability to perform the everyday competently is now contingent on the widest range of obscure factors—things we’d simply never needed to worry about before, from the properties of the electromagnetic spectrum and our moment-to-moment ability to connect to the network to the stability of the software we’re using and the current state of corporate alignments.

Secondly, all of the conventions and arrangements that constitute our sense of the everyday now no longer evolve at any speed we’d generally associate with social mores, but at the far faster rate of digital innovation. We’re forced to accommodate some degree of change in the way we do things every time the newest version of a device, operating system or application is released.

And thirdly, and perhaps most curiously of all, when pursuits as varied as taking a photograph, listening to music and seeking a romantic partner all start with launching an app on the same device, and all of them draw on the same, relatively limited repertoire of habits and mindsets, a certain similarity inevitably comes to color each of them. We twitch through the available options, never fully settling on or for any one of them.

This is our life now: strongly shaped by the detailed design of the smartphone handset; by its precise manifest of sensors, actuators, processors and antennae; by the protocols that govern its connection to the various networks around us; by the user interface conventions that guide our interaction with its applications and services; and by the strategies and business models adopted by the enterprises that produce them.

These decisions can never determine our actions outright, of course, but they do significantly condition our approach to the world, in all sorts of subtle but pervasive ways. (Try to imagine modern dating without the swipe left, or the presentation of self without the selfie.) Fleshing out our understanding of the contemporary human condition therefore requires that we undertake a forensic analysis of the smartphone and its origins, and a detailed consideration of its parts.

Though its precise dimensions may vary with fashion, a smartphone is fundamentally a sandwich of aluminosilicate glass, polycarbonate and aluminum sized to sit comfortably in the adult hand, and to be operated, if need be, with the thumb only. This requirement constrains the device to a fairly narrow range of shapes and sizes; almost every smartphone on the market at present is a blunt slab, a chamfered or rounded rectangle between eleven and fourteen centimeters tall, and some six to seven wide. These compact dimensions permit the device to live comfortably on or close to the body, which means it will only rarely be misplaced or forgotten, and this in turn is key to its ability to function as a proxy for personal identity, presence and location.

The contemporary smartphone bears very few, if any, dedicated (“hard”) controls: generally a power button, controls for audio volume, perhaps a switch with which to silence the device entirely, and a “home” button that closes running applications and returns the user to the top level of the navigational hierarchy. On many models, a fingerprint sensor integrated into the home button secures the device against unauthorized access.

Almost all other interaction is accomplished via the device’s defining and most prominent feature: a shatter-resistant glass touchscreen of increasingly high resolution, covering the near entirety of its surface. It is this screen, more than any other component, that is responsible for the smartphone’s universal appeal. Using a contemporary touchscreen device is almost absurdly easy. All it asks of us is that we learn and perform a few basic gestures: the familiar tap, swipe, drag, pinch and spread³. This interaction vocabulary requires so little effort to master that despite some tweaks, refinements and manufacturer-specific quirks, virtually every element of the contemporary smartphone interface paradigm derives from the first model that featured it, the original Apple iPhone of summer 2007.

Beneath the screen, nestled within a snug enclosure, are the components that permit the smartphone to receive, transmit, process and store information. Chief among these are a multi-core central processing unit; a few gigabits of nonvolatile storage (and how soon that “giga-” will sound quaint); and one or more ancillary chips dedicated to specialized functions. Among the latter are the baseband processor, which manages communication via the phone’s multiple antennae; light and proximity sensors; perhaps a graphics processing unit; and, of increasing importance, a dedicated machine-learning coprocessor, to aid in tasks like speech recognition. The choice of a given chipset will determine what operating system the handset can run; how fast it can process input and render output; how many pictures, songs and videos it can store on board; and, in proportion to these capabilities, how much it will cost at retail.

Thanks to its Assisted GPS chip—and, of course, the quarter-trillion-dollar constellation of GPS satellites in their orbits twenty million meters above the Earth—the smartphone knows where it is at all times. This machinic sense of place is further refined by the operation of a magnetometer and a three-axis microelectromechanical accelerometer: a compass and gyroscope that together allow the device to register the bearer’s location, orientation and inclination to a very high degree of precision. These sensors register whether the phone is being held vertically or oriented along some other plane, and almost incidentally allow it to accept more coarsely grained gestural input than that mediated by the touchscreen, i.e. gestures made with the whole device, such as turning it upside down to silence it, or shaking it to close applications and return the user to the home screen.

A microphone affords voice communication, audio recording and the ability to receive spoken commands, while one or more speakers furnish audible output. A small motor allows the phone to produce vibrating alerts when set in silent mode; it may, as well, be able to provide so-called “haptics,” or brief and delicately calibrated buzzes that simulate the sensation of pressing a physical button.

Even cheap phones now come with both front and rear cameras. The one facing outward is equipped with an LED flash, and is generally capable of capturing both still and full-motion imagery in high resolution; though the size of the aperture limits the optical resolution achievable, current-generation cameras can nonetheless produce images more than sufficient for any purpose short of fine art, scientific inquiry or rigorous archival practice. The user-facing camera generally isn’t as capable, but it’s good enough for video calls, and above all selfies.

Wound around these modules, or molded into the chassis itself, are the radio antennae critical to the smartphone’s basic functionality: separate ones for transmission and reception via cellular and WiFi networks, an additional Bluetooth antenna to accommodate short-range communication and coupling to accessories, and perhaps a near-field communication (NFC) antenna for payments and other ultra-short-range interactions. This last item is what accounts for the smartphone’s increasing ability to mediate everyday urban interactions; it’s what lets you tap your way onto a bus or use the phone to pay for a cup of coffee.

Finally, all of these components are arrayed on a high-density interconnect circuit board, and powered by a rechargeable lithium-ion or lithium-polymer battery capable of sustaining roughly 1,500 charging cycles. This will yield just about four years of use, given the need to charge the phone daily, though experience suggests that few of us will retain a given handset that long.

There is one final quality of the smartphone that is highly significant to its ability to mediate everyday experience: it is incomplete at time of purchase. For all its technical capability, the smartphone as we currently conceive of it remains useless unless activated by a commercial service provider. In the business of mobile telephony, the process by which this otherwise-inactive slab of polycarbonate and circuitry is endowed with functionality is called “provisioning.” A user account is established, generally with some means of payment authenticated, and only once this credential has been accepted do you find that the object in your hands has come alive and is able to transact with the things around it.

Even once provisioned, the smartphone is not particularly useful. It can be used to make voice calls, certainly; it generally comes loaded with a clock, a calendar, weather and map applications, a web browser, and—rather tellingly—a stock ticker. But the overwhelming balance of its functionality must be downloaded from the network in the form of “apps,” designed and developed by third parties with wildly differing levels of craft, coding ability and aesthetic sensibility.

This immediately confronts the would-be user with a choice to make about which corporate ecosystem they wish to participate in. The overwhelming majority of smartphones in the world run either on Apple’s iOS or on some flavor of the open-source Android operating system, and these are incompatible with one another. Apps designed to work on one kind of device and operating system must be acquired from the corresponding marketplace—Apple’s App Store, Goog...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Paris year zero
• 1. Smartphone: The networking of the self
• 2. The internet of things: A planetary mesh of perception and response
• 3. Augmented reality: An interactive overlay on the world
• 4. Digital fabrication: Towards a new political economy of matter
• 5. Cryptocurrency: The computational guarantee of value
• 6. Blockchain beyond Bitcoin: A trellis for posthuman institutions
• 7. Automation: The annihilation of work
• 8. Machine learning: The algorithmic production of knowledge
• 9. Artificial intelligence: The eclipse of human discretion
• 10. Radical technologies: The design of everyday life
• Conclusion: Of tetrapods and tactics—radical technologies and everyday life
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index