What Our Tools Do to Us
How do technologies shape the people who use them, and what do the people who build them owe those users?
This site begins from a claim attributed to Melvin Kranzberg: technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. The books on this path explore what that means for the people who use technology and the people who build it.
The path starts with media and design: how the form of a technology shapes what people do with it. It then grounds the discussion in how computers work and how they are made, from logic gates to the global chip industry. It turns next to attention and childhood, where the effects of design choices are most contested, and ends with the newest question: what it means to think alongside machines.
The pharmakon idea, that every tool is both remedy and poison, is the thread. The social media and word processors essays are companions, as are the founding papers by Licklider and Engelbart.
Gödel, Escher, Bach sits beside Petzold’s Code: once the machine is built from switches, Hofstadter asks what it means that such a machine can describe itself, and why people so readily see a mind in fluent output.
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The starting point for thinking about how a medium shapes public life. Postman argued that the form of television changed what could be said and thought.
- Read it for
- The idea that every medium carries a bias, and the comparison between Orwell's and Huxley's visions of control.
- Carry forward
- What does the form of our product encourage people to do, regardless of what they intend?
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Moves from culture to the object in the hand. Norman shows how design communicates, or fails to communicate, what an object can do.
- Read it for
- Affordances, signifiers, feedback and conceptual models, and the principle that most "human error" is design error.
- Carry forward
- When users make mistakes with our product, whose error is it?
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Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
Builds a computer from the ground up in plain language, so that the rest of the path rests on understanding rather than metaphor.
- Read it for
- How simple switches and codes compose into machines that compute.
- Carry forward
- Which layers of our technology do I use without understanding?
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A portrait of an engineering team building a computer under pressure, about what motivates people who build technology.
- Read it for
- The culture, sacrifice and meaning of intense engineering work.
- Carry forward
- What are we asking of the people who build our products, and what do they get back?
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Widens the frame to the industry and geopolitics behind every device, the history of semiconductors as a contest of companies and nations.
- Read it for
- How manufacturing concentration, supply chains and state strategy shaped computing.
- Carry forward
- Which dependencies in our supply chain would we only notice when they broke?
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Returns to the individual, with an argument for using technology deliberately rather than by default.
- Read it for
- The attention economy from the user's side, and the practice of choosing tools by values.
- Carry forward
- Would our most engaged users say their time with us was well spent?
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Examines the effects of smartphones and social media on children and adolescents, one of the most consequential questions for product builders today.
- Read it for
- The argument about the shift from play-based to phone-based childhood, and the proposals for norms and design.
- Carry forward
- If our youngest users' parents watched how our product works, would they approve?
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Steps back to a long history of information networks, from stories and bureaucracies to algorithms, and what they mean for truth and power.
- Read it for
- The distinction between information and truth, and the risks of networks that optimise for engagement.
- Carry forward
- Does our system help people find what is true, or only what spreads?
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Ends in the present, with a practical account of working alongside AI systems as collaborators.
- Read it for
- How to use AI as a partner while keeping human judgement, and where it helps and harms.
- Carry forward
- Which parts of my work should I hand over, and which should I keep doing myself?
Follow the thread
Where this path leads on the site
- Everyone You Know, and Everyone You Don’tSocial Media
- Ink That Never DriesWord Processors
- The Universal Machine and the End of the Free LunchCompute
- The Machine That AnswersLarge Language Models
- The Auction Behind the AnswerWeb Search
- What You Might Also LikeRecommendation Feeds
- The Blue DotGPS and Digital Maps
- The Library in the AirMusic and Video Streaming