Adam Greenfield > Quotes

“In our time, even the most seemingly transgressive visions of technology in everyday life invariably fall back to the familiar furniture of capital investment, surplus extraction and exploitation. We don't even speak of progress any longer, but rather of 'innovation.”
― Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

“Just as James Watt refused to license his steam engine, suppressing the development of that technology over the quarter century that elapsed between his first commercial model and the expiry of his patents in 1800, the evolution of digital fabrication has been hobbled by practices aimed at securing a remunerative monopoly.30 During the period that Stratasys enforced its patents, the practice of 3D printing went more or less nowhere. It wasn’t until these patents began to expire, after twenty years of painfully slow progress, that the Cambrian explosion of depositional fabrication devices and things made with them became possible.31”
― Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

“Virtually everywhere, decision algorithms are touted to us on the promise that they will permanently displace human subjectivity and bias. And yet in every instance we find that these ambitions are flouted, as the technologies that were supposed to enact them are captured and recuperated by existing concentrations of power. They will not spontaneously bring scarcity to an end, or capitalism, or oppression. Laminated into standing ways of doing, making and selling, the only thing they seem to be capable of spontaneously reproducing is more of the same.”
― Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

“maintenance budgets are among the very first things to go.”
― Adam Greenfield, Against the smart city

“Its first postulate is that the contemporary urban environment is so complex and so vexatious in its demands that no group of ordinary, unaided human beings can hope to understand it, let alone manage it wisely.”
― Adam Greenfield, Against the smart city

“how often life was about not wanting to be doing what it was you were supposed to be doing.”
― Adam Greenfield, Circa

“It’s not hard to perceive a certain deadening sameness that has begun to blanket the world under the sway of the Stacks, as the planet’s extraordinary diversity of lifeways yield to the unlimited perfect reproduction of the modes of taste, self-expression and subjectivity these new hegemons are tuned to. All of them are headquartered on the west coast of the United States, three of them within a ten-mile radius of Stanford University. They share a set of assumptions about who their user is, how that person lives and what they want; they share a grounding in the Californian Ideology18 and the casual technolibertarianism that has long reigned in the Bay Area; and latterly, they even tend to share a single overarching aesthetic.”
― Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

“And for those of us who are motivated by commitment to a specifically participatory politics of the commons, it’s not at all clear that any blockchain-based infrastructure can support the kind of flexible assemblies we imagine. I myself come from an intellectual tradition that insists that any appearance of the word “potential” needs to be greeted with skepticism. There is no such thing as potential, in this view: there are merely states of a system that have historically been enacted, and those that have not yet been enacted. The only way to assess whether a system is capable of assuming a given state is to do the work of enacting it.”
― Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

“There’s little need to invest in the comprehensive instrumentation of the urban fabric with sensors, device controllers or informational displays when people themselves are already equipped with something that can act in all of these roles.”
― Adam Greenfield, Against the smart city