Three books about the past, present and future of technology
I’m always on the lookout for patterns in the books that appeal to me. Here are three recent technology books that jumped out and made me read them.
Throwing Rocks
Douglas Rushkoff was one of the first writers to try to understand digital culture, starting with Cyberia in 1994 and followed up by Media Virus in 1995. He is credited with originating ideas that are part of our vocabulary now, like viral media, digital native and social currency.
Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus takes its title from an incident in which protesters shattered windows on one of the buses ferrying employees from downtown San Francisco to Google’s suburban campus. According to Rushkoff, the conflict that really matters—the one that drives so many other problems—is not between residents and the employees whose presence was inflating housing costs, or the 99 percent vs. the 1 percent or the unemployed against Wall Street.
The core problem, he writes, is that “Growth is the single, uncontested, core command of the digital economy.”
He details how the tech tools and innovative business practices of the new economy support that single command, centralizing economic power in new corporate giants like Google, Apple and Amazon, then outlines an idealistic vision of how the same tools could be redeployed to create a distributive economy, serving human, not corporate needs.
Disrupt This!
A Chattanooga start-up founder turned me on to Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, the hysterically-but-painfully funny chronicle of an out-of-work print journalist who went from covering Silicon Valley to trying to reinvent himself as a marketer at a trendy startup.
After losing his job at age 50 as Newsweek’s technology editor, Dan Lyons spent a year and a half at Hubspot, surrounded by vast amounts of self-aggrandizing hype and 20-somethings who thought he was really old.
“The happy!! awesome!! rhetoric masks the fact that beneath the covers, there is chaos,” he writes.
Turns out that a journalist’s analytic skills and finely tuned B.S. detector didn’t mesh well with all the Kool-Aid being handed out about how building online marketing tools was a great way to change the world.
No matter how awkward the culture clashes got, though, it was after he left and announced he was writing a funny book about his experiences at Hubspot that things took a really dark turn and the FBI got involved.
Technology or Art?
Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art, by Virginia Heffernan, is a kaleidoscopic figure-ground exercise, like those pictures that are either a chalice or two faces looking at each other, or a young girl or an old woman, but never both.
When we talk about technology, are we looking at culture or tech? Of course it’s both, but even when you know that, it’s hard to see both at once.
Heffernan is a digital native. Growing up in a college town, she hacked into Dartmouth University’s connection to ARPANET, which predated the Internet. “By the time I turned thirteen, I was confident I knew every single person online,” she deadpans.
In chapters on the building blocks of the Internet—design, text, images, video, music—she alternatively riffs and goes deep, playing over the entire history of the Internet, from its precursor networks and early games to apps and social media. She “reads” the Internet as an aesthetic experience, as a single game that is also one artwork.
She attacks technology head on and cuts right through it to the culture at its heart. But since it’s a magical sword, both tech and art somehow remain intact.
Maybe this is a three-book Rorschach test and everyone sees their own meaning, but here’s what I see: there was a palpable sense that anything was possible with the early Internet.
Then came the centralized, commercialized web serving the old, unchallenged goal of endless growth and accompanied not just by hype, which was there from the beginning, but also stunning amounts of self-deception.
The transformative possibilities of technology still exist, waiting to be realized.
Rich Bailey is a writer, editor, and PR consultant. He led a project to create Chattanooga’s first civic website in 1995 before even owning a modem. Now he covers Chattanooga technology for The Pulse and blogs about it at CircleChattanooga.com