emmadilemma reviewed What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub
Techsplaining
2 stars
I picked up What Tech Calls Thinking to have a short book to take on an airplane. It ended up taking me weeks to finish.
Daub's core thesis is that tech is really good at finding not-quite-problems and selling us on tech solutions. And at not-quite-failing, and being proud of it (proud of the ones who eventually succeed, anyway). And at taking generally true things, or generally false things, and laundering them through the words of people who have said similar things. And at using the names of those people in interviews, or on motivational posters, or in venture-capital pitches.
The dilemma is that Thinking itself engages in this same conceit. At the end of the book, I knew and believed exactly what I had before I opened it. But I had a few new names to drop, if I chose to remember them.
Occasionally Daub allows that the internet …
I picked up What Tech Calls Thinking to have a short book to take on an airplane. It ended up taking me weeks to finish.
Daub's core thesis is that tech is really good at finding not-quite-problems and selling us on tech solutions. And at not-quite-failing, and being proud of it (proud of the ones who eventually succeed, anyway). And at taking generally true things, or generally false things, and laundering them through the words of people who have said similar things. And at using the names of those people in interviews, or on motivational posters, or in venture-capital pitches.
The dilemma is that Thinking itself engages in this same conceit. At the end of the book, I knew and believed exactly what I had before I opened it. But I had a few new names to drop, if I chose to remember them.
Occasionally Daub allows that the internet did change some things for the better, like clearing the shelf space where you kept the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In that example, he even missed a chance to critique whether the tech replacement is actually as good as the original - a fat pitch down the middle that a book like this shouldn't take.
I wasn't expecting a cover-to-cover hymn book for those of the Big Tech Sucks cloth. I might have thought I wanted that when I bought it, but upon finishing the book, I realized that I hadn't.
Like the archetypal internet troll to whom much of a chapter is devoted, Thinking neither adds to nor improves the discourse. One variant of the troll in Daub's telling is the guy who drops a comment to explain to you what you just said. I definitely had a feeling of having just been explained to.