Review
ONE OF THEGUARDIAN'S BEST BOOKS OF 2018
"The various ways in which the new capitalism is exploiting and manipulating the world's human resources are brilliantly outlined by Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger in Re-engineering Humanity"
John Naughton, The Guardian Best Books of 2018
"A magnificent achievement. Writing in the tradition of Neil Postman, Jacque Ellul and Marshall McLuhan, this book is the decade's deepest and most powerful portrayal of the challenges to freedom created by our full embrace of comprehensive techno-social engineering. A rewarding and stimulating book that merits repeated readings and may also cause you to reconsider how you live life."
Tim Wu, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Columbia Law School, and author of The Attention Merchants
"Everybody is suddenly worried about technology. Will social media be the end of democracy? Is automation going to eliminate jobs?Will artificial intelligence make people obsolete? Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger boldly propose that the problem isn't the rise of 'smart' machines but the dumbing down of humanity."
Astra Taylor, author of The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Control in the Digital Age
"Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger cogently argue that our Fitbit, Echo, Android, and game console, our Facebook pages, Google searches, Amazon and Netflix profiles, give far less than they take.... All of us should read it and decide, deliberately, if this is a future we want for ourselves and our children."
Helen Nissenbaum, Cornell Tech, and author of Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life
"Frischmann and Selinger deftly and convincingly show why we should be less scared of robots than of becoming more robotic, ourselves.This book will convince you why it's so important we embed technologies with human values before they embed us with their own."
Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock, Program or Be Programmed, and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus
"Re-Engineering Humanity brings a pragmatic if somewhat dystopic perspective to the technological phenomena of our age. Humans are learning machines and we learn from our experiences. This book made me ask myself whether the experiences we are providing to our societies are in fact beneficial in the long run."
Vint Cerf, Co-Inventor of the Internet
"Frischmann and Selinger provide a thoroughgoing and balanced examination of the tradeoffs inherent in offloading tasks and decisions to computers. By illuminating these often intricate and hidden tradeoffs, and providing a practical framework for assessing and negotiating them, the authors give us the power to make wiser choices."
Nicolas Carr, author of The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us, from the Foreword
"Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger have written Re-Engineering Humanity as a sustained and multifaceted critique of how contemporary trends in internet technology are slowly but surely shrinking the territory of human autonomy. Their work is a warning, as well as a description, of how internet technologies that ostensibly make our lives easier do so by taking control of our lives away from our self-conscious decision-making."
- Adam Riggio, Royal Crown College, Social Epistemology Reviewand Reply Collective (social-epistemology.com)
"In our own time, as Frischmann and Selinger observe, the 'smart' device and 'internet of things' developers who offer us efficiency then pull a bait-and-switch: instead of sending us on our way to use our newly-free time on art, beauty, and education, they channel us into putting our time into mumblety-Facebook and its ilk, or what the authors aptly call 'cheap bliss'."Lara Freidenfelds, Nursing Clio (nursingclio.org)
"In Re-engineering Humanity, Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger have dug deeply into what's going on behind the 'cheap bliss' in our fully connected world.' Doc Searls, Linux Journal
'... a recent startling and thoughtful book ...[Re-Engineering Humanity] is an exploration of how everyday practices - such as clicking to accept an app's legal terms - are made so simple that we are effectively 'trained' to not read the contents. Unless things change, the dominance of digital technology means that, over time, humans will lose their capacity for judgment, discrimination and self-sufficiency.' John Naughton, The Guardian"This is an incredible work that should be studied by every thinking human. It captures details on threats, documenting the many warnings we are already seeing." Bob Gourley, CTO Vision (ctovision.com)
"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our toolsshape us." This truism--by the media-scholar John Culkin about the workof Marshall McLuhan--is more potent than ever in the age of data andalgorithms. The technology is having a profound effect on how peoplelive and think. Some of those changes are documented in"Re-Engineering Humanity" by two technology thinkers from differentacademic backgrounds: Brett Frischmann is a law professor ... and Evan Selinger teaches philosophy .... Together, they explore how ordinary activities like clicking on anapp's legal terms are made so simple that it "trains" us to not read the contents. Over time, the authors fear that humans will lose theircapacity for judgment, discrimination and self-sufficiency. ... The Economist's Open Future initiative asked Mr Frischmann five questions about thesedyspeptic themes. A lightly-condensed excerpt from the book, onTaylorism and its relevance to the algorithmic economy today, appearsafter his answers.
-- The Economist, economist.com/open-future/2018/10/24/is-technology-re-engineering-humanity
"The various ways in which the new capitalism is exploiting and manipulating the world's human resources are brilliantly outlined by Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger in Re-engineering Humanity (Cambridge University Press)." -- John Naughton, The Guardian, The Observer Best Books of 2018
Book Description
Innovation has a dark side. The price of progress is that humans are becoming increasingly predictable, programmable, and machine-like.
About the Author
Brett Frischmann is The Charles Widger Endowed University Professor in Law, Business and Economics, at Villanova University. He is also an affiliated scholar of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, and a trustee for the Nexa Center for Internet & Society, Politecnico di Torino. He has published foundational books on the relationships between infrastructural resources, governance, commons, and spillovers, including Governing Medical Knowledge Commons, with Michael Madison and Katherine Strandburg (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Governing Knowledge Commons, with Michael Madison and Katherine Strandburg (2014); and Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources (2012). Evan Selinger is Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he is also the Head of Research Communications, Community, and Ethics at the Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction, and Creativity. A Senior Fellow at the Future of Privacy Forum, his primary research is on the ethical and privacy dimensions of emerging technology. Selinger has co-edited The Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Privacy, with Jules Polontesky and Omer Tene (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2018). A strong advocate of public philosophy, he regularly writes for magazines, newspapers, and blogs, including The Guardian, The Atlantic, Slate, and Wired.
