Geek Heresy

Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology

By: Kentaro Toyama

Narrated by: Sean Pratt

In 2004 Kentaro Toyama, an award-winning computer scientist, moved to India to start a new research group for Microsoft. Its mission: to explore novel technological solutions to the world's persistent social problems. But after a decade of designing technologies for humanitarian causes, Toyama concluded that no technology, however dazzling, could cause social change on its own.

Technologists and policy makers love to boast about modern innovation, and in their excitement they exuberantly tout technology's boon to society. But what have our gadgets actually accomplished? Over the last four decades, America saw an explosion of new technologies, but in that same period the rate of poverty stagnated at a stubborn 13 percent, only to rise in the recent recession. So a golden age of innovation in the world's most advanced country did nothing for our most prominent social ill.

Toyama's warning resounds: Don't believe the hype! Technology is never the main driver of social progress. Geek Heresy inoculates us against the glib rhetoric of tech utopians by revealing that technology is only an amplifier of human conditions. By telling the moving stories of extraordinary people, Toyama shows that even in a world steeped in technology, social challenges are best met with deeply social solutions.

©2015 Kentaro Toyama (P)2015 Tantor

Critic reviews

"A white paper largely of interest to education theorists and aid specialists, with occasional asides for the Jaron Lanier/Nicholas Carr crowd." ( Kirkus)

meaningful reading

powerful insight into how real change happens in our modern technological world. well worth reading.

Not bad for a few chapters

A book with one good idea but it tries to spin it out over many many chapters. Lots of example stories that get redundant. The tone is really self-congratulatory and that gets tired after a few chapters.