Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Weak Technologies

Weak Technologies

Lee, Alex Taek-Gwang

Paperback

Series: Theory Redux

General Sociology

PREORDER - Expected ship date February 2, 2027

ISBN10: 1509572880
ISBN13: 9781509572885
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: Feb 2 2027
Pages: 156
Language: English

Weak Technologies challenges one of the great myths of our time: that technology is powerful. We are constantly told that tools, technologies, and especially artificial intelligence expand our reach, overcome our limits, and make us stronger. But this book proposes the opposite. Technologies are valuable not because they succeed but because they fail - because they glitch, deviate, surprise, and refuse to obey or represent faithfully the intentions of their designers and users.

The fascination with powerful technology rests on a fantasy of mastery: that human weaknesses can be overcome by machines. Yet every technology, from a screwdriver to a neural network, reveals itself to be interesting only when it does something unexpected: weakness - in the form of inconsistency, malfunction, and improvisation - is where invention emerges. Technologies are not solutions to problems: they are problems that call for new acts of imagination.

This book invites us to abandon the dream of seamless efficiency and embrace instead experimentation and play. It proposes nothing less than an artistic education in technological life, a way of creating with machines, not commanding them. It is a manifesto for an experimental, curious, and genuinely inventive technological culture.

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