Not So Fast

Reviews / Votes

Lively, fast moving, always entertaining, Not So Fast offers a grand overview of the extravagant hopes and dire warnings that accompany the arrival of powerful new technologies. Blending the key ideas of classic and contemporary thinkers, Doug Hill explores the aspirations of those who strive for the heavens of artifice and those who find the whole enterprise a fool's errand. This is the most engaging, readable work on the great debates in technology criticism now available and a solid contribution to that crucial yet unsettling tradition. -- Langdon Winner * author of Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought and The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology * This is the technology criticism I've been waiting for-aware of the history of technology criticism and the history of changing attitudes toward technology, and at the same time attuned to contemporary developments. Not So Fast is readable, meticulously sourced, and, above all-nuanced. I recommend it for technology critics and enthusiasts alike. -- Howard Rheingold * author of Tools for Thought, The Virtual Community, Smart Mobs and Net Smart * Doug Hill's Not So Fast has to be one of the five best books on technology I've read over the past decade. Hill has a remarkable command of the technology creators, analysts, and critics, such as Ellul, Heidegger, Kurzweil, Gates, Jobs, Mumford, Borgmann, and McLuhan. He approaches technology from several helpful angles. His prose is clear, convincing, and often droll! Not So Fast must be part of any reflection on our culture and future. -- David W. Gill, Professor of Workplace Theology & Business Ethics, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, President, International Jacques Ellul Society Not So Fast addresses the primary questions of the day: how can we construct a coherent story about what is happening to us? And what can we do about it? Anyone interested in the future of the human project will benefit hugely from Doug Hill's lucid performance. -- James Howard Kunstler * author of Too Much Magic, The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere * Not So Fast reflects, in addition to Doug Hill's consummate skill as a writer, his deep knowledge of the history and the philosophy of technology. His reflections are grounded in that knowledge and at the same time are original and profound. I've worked and traveled in the highest reaches of the tech world for more than twenty years and I still learned much from this book. -- Allen Noren, Vice President, Online, O'Reilly Media Never have I experienced such a probing, in-depth analysis of the push-and-pull oftechnology as a driver, determining force, savior or disease of our species. -- Roger Cubicciotti, former chair, Center of Innovation for Nanobiotechnology, North Carolina Biotechnology Center; Visiting Scholar, Department of Physics, Wake Forest University It's crucial-even as we sink ever deeper into our mediated world-that we pay attention to the technology engulfing us. This book helps draw the baseline that we're leaving behind, and perhaps will slow down the flight from reality. -- Bill McKibben * activist and author, Enough, The Age of Missing Information and The End of Nature * This book is the most comprehensive, provocative, and entertaining review of technological thought, expression, impact and controversy that I have yet seen. Written in a remarkably straightforward and open style, and seemingly without personal axes to grind, Doug Hill provides details and insight into the evolution of technology over the last millennium, while focusing on the debates, pro and con, that shaped many stages of recent development. The book is more than just a discourse; it's an informal encyclopedia of perspectives, predictions, debates and consequences of our society's technologic evolution; the upsides, and perhaps more-so, the downsides; and is more comprehensive and efficient in these explorations than anything that has preceded it. And yet it is easy reading, personable, and charming. An extraordinary achievement. -- Jerry Mander, Founder and Chair of the International Forum on Globalization * and author of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television; In the Absence of the Sacred; and The Capitalism Papers - Fatal Flaws in an Obsolete System * Anyone who might want to reflect on the implications of more than three generations of scholarly criticisms of technology should read this book. The same goes for any scholars who have been thinking about technology and desire to see how their work may have been more publicly appropriated -- or, indeed, may wish to deepen their own understanding of what they have been doing. -- Carl Mitcham * Colorado School of Mines and author of Thinking through Technology: The Path Between Engineering and Philosophy *