Name: Geek heresy
ISBN: 9781610395281

Geek heresy

"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. Together with his team, he invented electronic devices for under-resourced urban schools and developed digital platforms for remote agrarian communities. 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 - from the Internet to the iPhone, from Google to Facebook - but in that same period, the rate of poverty stagnated at a stubborn 13%, 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.

What Hacker News says

malsheOct 2021

I bought into the hype and used to think about social media the same way as you. Then I came across a comment on HN mentioning Geek Heresy (https://geekheresy.org) and got that book from our public library. It has strong arguments against everything you have written above.

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disqardJun 2020

For those who fervently believe that "Video Games Are The Future of Education", I would like to recommend two books: "Geek Heresy" by Kentaro Toyama, and "The Flickering Mind" by Todd Oppenheimer.

The former offers a voice of caution, and is written by the former head of MSR Asia.

The latter is filled with historical examples of "x is the Future of Education" (for x ∈ {"radio", "television", "computers", ...}) each of which has failed to replace human instruction, showing that there's something about human interaction that appears to be crucial for education.

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disqardApr 2020

Regarding Ed Tech, for a merciless look at this recurring insanity, see Todd Oppenheimer's "The Flickering Mind", and in general, Kentaro Toyama's "Geek Heresy".

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disqardJul 2019

Thank you for articulating these points so well. Possibly preaching to the choir here, but you should check out "Geek Heresy" by Kentaro Toyama.

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jseligerMay 2017

I haven't seen good evidence for most computers and related devices improving learning and that's part of the reason I ban them: https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distract... .

I have seen good evidence that computers do the opposite, in the form of Toyama's book Geek Heresy: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/11/17/geek-heresy-rescuing-soci... .

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GuiAFeb 2017

I thoroughly enjoyed Geek Heresy by Kentaro Toyama, which is precisely about taking that trope apart. The book goes over a number of case studies about technocrats thinking their purely technological solutions would "make the world a better place", and how they failed. It also goes over examples where no/low tech approaches succeeded. It's a quick, recommended read.

https://www.amazon.com/Geek-Heresy-Rescuing-Social-Technolog...

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