On the Consequences of Technology on Shared Urban Life

As an urbanist, Greenfield has particular concern for our shared experience of the city. At multiple points in the book, he discusses the consequences of technology on public urban life and the dynamics of our co-existence with each other.

For example, the dematerialization of daily interactions and activities into our smartphones offers a convenience, but also wipes away a myriad of small physical artifacts and rituals that give tangibility to our way of life.

What’s important about such mediating artifacts is that each one implied an entire way of life—a densely interconnected ecosystem of commerce, practice and experience. And as we’ve overwritten those ecosystems with new and far less tangible webs of connection based on the smartphone, the texture of daily experience has been transformed. The absorption of so many of the technics of everyday life into this single device deprives us of a wide variety of recognizably, even distinctively urban sites, gestures and practices. (pp.12-13)

When discussing augmented reality, the idea of splitting our attention into individual, isolated presentations of the physical world causes him concern for our ability to be present and available to others.

If nothing else, reality is the one platform we all share, a ground we can start from in undertaking the arduous and never-comfortable process of determining what else you might agree upon. To replace this shared space with the million splintered and mutually inconsistent realities of individual augmentation is to give up on the whole pretense that we in any way occupy the same world, and therefore strikes me as being deeply inimical to the broader urban project. A city where the physical environment has ceased to function as a common reference frame is, at the very least, terribly inhospitable soil for democracy, solidarity or simple fellow-feeling. (p.83)

Similarly, when describing the possibility for blockchain technologies to organize and empower collective action, he raises doubts whether smart contracts and distributed autonomous organizations, in their requisite exactness, will adequately be able to represent the messiness of mediating any commons.

The virtue of the commons as a mode of thought and action isn't simply that it provides for the scale management of pooled resources, but that it stirs us to envision away of life founded in interdependence, mutuality and shared responsibility for the outcomes experienced by others. Any situation organized in this way offers us away to get outside of ourselves, a scaffolding for the development of intersubjectivity. I'm not at all sure that, whatever their other benefits, distributed organizations based on the blockchain will ever be able to work in quite the same way. (pp.174-175)

Greenfield reveals a pattern across the progress of these technologies. We get excited for the potential new capabilities that each might offer, but often create a blind spot for the ripple effects that transform our public life in ways we won’t be happy with.