*Adam can be a hard guy to please, but this glowing review oughta make him happy.
Social critic in the smart city, exiled on Main Street
(...)
It is a story, as Greenfield shows, repeated in many different contexts: our visionary tech masters suppose that things can be “disrupted” by a single new device or service, only to learn belatedly that unexpected things happen when technical novelty rubs up against established social mores, embedded structures of power and money, and sometimes even the laws of physics. There is an excellent discussion here, for example, of how the verification of bitcoin transactions works through the enormous expenditure of energy on computing deliberately useless problems: it is probably doomed as a currency, Greenfield suggests, by simple thermodynamics. Meanwhile, the emancipatory dream of 3D printers enabling everyone to make anything they want is currently economically unlikely, and besides the one thing that is very popular in 3D printing is untraceable parts for assault rifles.
Greenfield calls all these things “radical” technologies because they could usher in vast changes that lead to very different potential futures: either what is known sexily as “fully automated luxury communism”, or a dystopia of total surveillance and submission to the networks of autonomous computerised agents that might replace human governments altogether....
