Previously a rock critic, bike messenger and psychological operations specialist in the US Army, Adam Greenfield spent over a decade working in the design and development of networked digital information technologies, as lead information architect for the Tokyo office of internet services consultancy Razorfish, Independent User-Experience Designer and Head of Design Direction for Service and User-Interface Design at Nokia headquarters in Helsinki. Selected in 2013 as Senior Urban Fellow at the LSE Cities centre of the London School of Economics, he has taught in the Urban Design program of the Bartlett, University College London, and in New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. His books include Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Urban Computing and Its Discontents, and the bestselling Against the Smart City.
His book, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, argues that the new technologies transfiguring our lives comes at a great cost. From smartphones, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality to cryptocurrency, 3D-printing and the “smart city,” Adam forces us to reconsider our relationship with the networked objects, services and spaces that define us. It is time to re-evaluate the Silicon Valley consensus determining the future. In case you missed it, he recently had an excerpt from the book run in Longreads about The Sociology of the Smartphone, in the Guardian regarding the “Internet of Things,” and an interview on The Atlantic regarding cryptocurrency.
Aimee Meredith Cox is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham University, and the author of Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship.