Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology

After a decade designing technologies meant to address education, health, and global poverty, awardwinning computer scientist Kentaro Toyama came to a difficult conclusion: Even in an age of amazing technology, social progress depends on human changes that gadgets cant deliver.Computers in Bangalore are locked away in dusty cabinets because teachers dont know what to do with them. Mobile phone apps meant to spread hygiene practices in Africa fail to improve health. Executives in Silicon Valley evangelize novel technologies at work even as they send their children to Waldorf schools that ban electronics. And four decades of incredible innovation in America have done nothing to turn the tide of rising poverty and inequality. Why then do we keep hoping that technology will solve our greatest social ills?In this incisive book, Toyama cures us of the manic rhetoric of digital utopians and reinvigorates us with a deeply peoplecentric view of social change. Contrasting the outlandish claims of tech zealots with stories of people like Patrick Awuah, a Microsoft millionaire who left his engineering job to open Ghanas first liberal arts university, and Tara Sreenivasa, a graduate of a remarkable South Indian school that takes impoverished children into the hightech offices of Goldman Sachs and MercedesBenz, Geek Heresy is a heartwarming reminder that its human wisdom, not machines, that move our world forward.