Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology

by Kentaro Toyama

If the Labors of Hercules had an intellectual equivalent, it would be modern education. By the end of high school, we expect a student to know about 60,000 words; read To Kill a Mockingbird; learn the Pythagorean theorem; absorb a national history; and have peered through a microscope. Advanced students will put on Greek tragedies; rediscover the principles of calculus; memorize the Gettysburg Address; and measure the pull of gravity. In effect, students have twelve years to reconstruct the world’s profoundest thoughts – discoveries that history’s greatest thinkers took centuries to hit upon.

Actually, modern society as a whole lacks a good framework for thinking about technology’s social impact.

As a computer scientist, my education included a lot of math and technology but little of the history or philosophy of my own field. This is a great flaw of most science and engineering curricula. We’re obsessed with what works today, and what might be tomorrow, but we learn little about what came before.

Theorists, despite many fine shades of distinction, fall roughly into four camps: technological utopians, technological skeptics, contextualists, and social determinists.

“explanation does not follow from description.”

“The Internet changes nothing on its own,” he told us, “but it can amplify existing forces.”