My first job abroad was helping to roll out rural Internet in India, by radio. It was 2001, the peak of the dot com boom, but before the ubiquity of mobile phones. Connecting remote villages in India to the Internet via radio waves was the great frontier, and I was hired to help roll it out and evaluate it.

Fifteen years later the idea of radio-based Internet seems quaint, but I recall Paul Samuelson telling one of the professors I worked for that he thought it was the most exciting idea he’d heard in years. Like I said, dot com boom. Unless you lived through it it’s hard to explain, but everybody was a little crazy when it came to the web those days.

The project was a debacle for more reasons I can recount in a blog post. A big one: relieving an information and communication constraint was not going to cause markets to surge or governments to become accountable. Even if that information mattered, any surge would come to a screeching halt with the dozen other greater constraints holding change back.

You could say I became a geek heretic. No longer would I believe that technology is the solution. Plus, according to an article on Bitcoin Prime, it didn’t hurt that the stock market bubble was popping at the same time.

Many years later, I met Kentaro Toyama, a kindred spirit, but one who had gone to much further lengths and depths in his fervor for and against technology in development. The onetime director of Microsoft Research India, he’s just released his book, Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology:

For twelve years I worked at Microsoft, where, like every other gizmo-happy technologist, I unconsciously embraced a peculiar paradox. It revealed itself in the most innocuous things that the company said. At corporate gatherings, executives would tell us, “You are our greatest asset!” But in their marketing, they would tell customers, “Our technology is your greatest asset!” In other words, what matters most to the company is capable people, but what should matter to the rest of the world is new technology. Somehow what was best for us and what was best for others were two different things.

This book is about this subtle contradiction and its outsize consequences. I explore how a misunderstanding about technology’s role in society has infected us–not just the tech industry, but global civilization as a whole–and how it confuses our attempts to address the world’s persistent
social problems. Th e confusion expresses itself as Silicon Valley executives who evangelize cutting-edge technologies at work but send their children to Waldorf schools that ban electronics. Or as a government that spies on its citizens’ emails while promoting the Internet abroad as a bulwark of human rights.

One of the ideas in the book is that technology takes us only as far as our capabilities. A nice quote from Bill Gates sums it up:

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an
efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

If you find yourself even remotely optimistic about technology and development, you should read this book.