A User's Guide to the Age of Tech

How users experience and influence technological change—when so much of that change feels out of our control
 

Every day, we casually employ one of the most complex tools ever created, using it to read the news, plan our day, and connect with friends. In A User’s Guide to the Age of Tech, Grant Wythoff investigates the process by which now-ubiquitous technologies like our phones become integrated into our lives, showing how the “gadget” stage—before devices are widely adopted—opens the door for users to co-create these technologies and adapt them toward unexpected ends. 

In this elegant, approachable work, Wythoff offers a view of how users make new technology their own, subverting dominant power structures and imagining uses never intended by their creators. Rooted in a detailed look into the history of technique (focusing on how we do things with tools rather than the tools themselves), A User’s Guide to the Age of Tech proceeds to complicate, and influence, discussion of subjects like the digital divide and AI.

Drawing on a range of sources, including novels, patents, and newspapers, Wythoff explores the vernacular philosophies that have emerged from users and their diverse, everyday practices, bringing down to earth the conversation about digital titans, away from the abstracted domains of server farms and algorithms. Lodging a passionate argument that we know ourselves better than the data brokers who appear to wield influence over our psyches, Wythoff invites readers (and tech users) to imagine their own digital technique, acknowledge their vast expertise, and see its immense value.

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Grant Wythoff directs graduate student programs at the Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton University. He is cofounder of the cooperative mesh network and digital equity organization Philly Community Wireless and is editor of The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction (Minnesota, 2016).

Contents

Preface: Technique in the Age of Tech

A primer on tékhnē, technics, technique, and associated portraits of the way we do things.

1. Sleight of Hand

Fashionable urbanites begin carrying wireless telegraphs in their pockets and wonder what to say to each other, 1919. Efforts to remain connected during social distancing measures show the fraying seams of that technoutopian vision, 2020. An introduction to the book’s main themes.

2. The Way We Do Things

In war-torn France, Marcel Mauss struggles to complete a treatise on the philosophy of technique, 1941. Virtuoso smartphone gestures flicker on the subway, 2019. Applied scientists propose a humanist technology criticism, 1850s. A report from the high theory of technique.

3. Technically Speaking

Sailors, mechanics, and other technicians invent new words for tools and techniques, 1840s. Lexicographers hunt for specimens of those words in use, 1888. Linguists describe the meaning of a word as the company it keeps, 1957. An excavation of the low theory of technicians.

4. The Custody of Automatism

Community technologists design intentional, cooperative infrastructures by building local consensus, 2023. Smartphone addicts miss their preinternet brains, 2014. A case for conscientious technique.

Epilogue: Reclaiming Technique

A diagnosis concerning technique as the fossil fuel of AI, and two possible futures for refusal.

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index