Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

"Adam Greenfield is a brilliant guy who has spent most of his time in industry working for companies like Nokia and actually designing systems. But he’s always been a critic and warned about the larger societal implications of the technological decisions we make. There’s now widespread discussion about the downside of everyone being connected in this new world, but he’s focused on this issue for a while. This book discusses the politics embedded in these technologies. He talks about blockchain as a two-sided technology: on the one hand, it’s a decentralizing technology; it’s largely open source systems that have the potential to break down all these points of central control. But it can also be used as a technology of control. He’s not ignoring the potential of blockchain, but rather articulating some of its challenges and downsides, such as the fact that the public blockchains like Bitcoin use fantastic amounts of energy to power these mining pools and so forth. So I think it’s a really helpful book in terms of putting blockchain in the context of this larger debate we’re having about the social value and dangers of network technology. Yes, the environmental issue, but also the consolidation of it. These miners are deliberate, intentionally self-motivated entities. There’s much more consolidation than people realize in terms of who’s in control of the system. It’s a controversial statement. I don’t entirely agree with it; in my opinion, we don’t really know. But it’s not unsupported. As with most of these books, I recommended it not because I agree with it 100 per cent, but because for those of us excited about the potential of blockchain, nothing is more important than engaging very seriously with the criticisms. We’ll go into this more with the next book on the list, but I don’t think we need more trumping up and excitement about what blockchain could change. We need very thoughtful responses to skepticism. It’s not trivial to understand and it behoves people to go a little bit below the surface. You can say: ‘Bitcoin is like money. Do you understand money? Okay. So it’s another kind of money without the government.’ But that doesn’t tell you anything about how it works. If you actually want to understand how it works, it is explainable and the Antony Lewis book goes through these mechanisms of proof of work and so forth. But it’s challenging. What Greenfield points out very well is that the discourse within the cryptocurrency community tends to be really esoteric for the general public. That’s in part because of what we discussed before, that it’s building upon a whole variety of assumptions in several different domains. And if you don’t know the prehistory of those, you can quickly get lost. But there is an extent to which the conversation within the blockchain community gets far removed from something that even most fairly sophisticated people, who understand finance and business and law, can grapple with and that’s really a problem. It’s a problem when people who can contribute to this debate don’t feel like they understand what’s going on. So I think it’s a healthy corrective to point that out. Still, if you ask me, I probably wouldn’t be quite as skeptical as he is, that an ordinary person can get a sufficient level of understanding to appreciate the potential and the dangers. You just need to read things, but it can be helpful: I taught a class on blockchain last semester, and we did give all of our students some money to buy Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency. Then we gave them a set of assignments to do various things with it. We did feel there’s a level of understanding that you only get by experiencing it. It’s valuable but it’s only a piece of the understanding. For example, it doesn’t give you an understanding of how the consensus system of proof of work works on Bitcoin. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s also a useful corrective. You read that this is a global, frictionless, magical currency that eliminates all the problems of traditional currencies, but when you try to actually buy some Bitcoin today and use it, it’s incredibly cumbersome. There are good questions about why that is and whether it’ll change, but it’s important to know that and not just to take the representations of the Bitcoin promoters as what’s actually happening. No. I have some I bought to experiment with, but I don’t buy them as investments. I wouldn’t be surprised if the price of cryptocurrencies went up again. I think there is real value there, but they’re so volatile and there’s so much fraud and manipulation going on that it’s impossible to have any confidence in the price. And today, there are very few things that ordinary people need to do or want to do which require cryptocurrency."