On the Posthuman Everyday

What I wish to argue is that whether they are brought together consciously or otherwise, large-scale data analysis, algorithmic management, machine-learning techniques, automation and robotics constitute a coherent set of techniques for the production of an experience I call the posthuman everyday. This is a milieu in which the rhythms we contend with, the ordinary spaces we occupy, and the material and energetic flows we support are all shaped not so much by our own needs but those of the systems that nominally serve us, and in which human perception, scale and desire are no longer the primary yardsticks of value. (p.185)

Greenfield sees a convergence of current technological developments that is driving towards a world where human intention, judgement, and discretion are designed out of the equation. Each chapter in the book focuses on a particular technology, but overall, he outlines the arc of this transformation.

Technologies like the smartphone and the internet of things multiply the reach and influence of digital networks, and crucially, offer up massive amounts of data, both personal and environmental, to companies, institutions, and any other interested parties.

Our very selfhood is smeared out across a global mesh of nodes and links; all aspects of our personality we think of constituting who we are—our tastes, preferences, capabilities, desires—we owe to the fact of our connection with that mesh and the selves and distant resources to which it binds us. (pp.27-28)

Technologies like augmented reality and digital fabrication are vectors by which digital services are further enmeshed with the physical realm.

Here is one of the core premises of AR: that everything the network knows might be brought to bear on someone or -thing standing in front of us, directly there, directly accessible, available to anyone with the wherewithal to sign a two-year smartphone contract and download an app. (p.67)

Machine learning and artificial intelligence efforts are fed by data made available in the network, which enables the algorithms that govern automation efforts in our everyday life. Emerging technologies like blockchain set the stage for automated transactions and organizations designed to operate without human intervention.

This is the context in which we need to interpret the rhetoric about autonomous agents and organizations. They are conscious steps towards a trans- or even entirely posthuman ordering of the world, not because their designers imagine autonomous technologies working alongside human beings in fruitful, comradely relation, but because they conceive of humanity as something to be transcended. (p.181)

I find this argument compelling because I can recognize how foundational technology principles like abstraction, categorization, quantitative exactness, modularity, and optimization are generally an ill fit for human issues and situations. And yet, the general narrative of interactive technology is the application of these principles as a means of progress.

Broadly, the book is a warning against the consequences of a posthuman everyday. However, Greenfield believes this reality is closer than most of us think and, to some degree, is already present. He voices an amount of uncertainty about what this kind of existence will really look like, but one of his more prominent calls to action is a closer critique of this transformation.

Every time we are presented with the aspiration towards the posthuman, we need to perceive the predictably tawdry and all-too-human drives underlying it, including the desire to profit from the exploitation of others and the sheer will to power and control. (p.314)