If you're looking at a city through multiple metaphors and then seeing how each of them adds to your knowledge,

I think that's much more productive than the reductive everything is computationally modifiable model.

Hello. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Shannon Madden.

Shannon is a professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research and president of the board of the Metropolitan New York Library Council.

She's the author of the 2017 book Code and Clay, Data and Dirt, and a more recent book that came out this week called A City is Not a Computer, Other Urban Intelligencees.

That new book was published by Princeton University Press, and if you want to get a copy,

you can get 30% off until the end of September by buying it through the publisher's website and using the code

TWSU for Tech Won't Save Us. You can find the information on that in the show notes.

Shannon and I had a great conversation about the book and the things that she has been writing

about and thinking about for a while now. In our conversation, she made the point that her

previous book was about thinking about the history and how that informs our understanding of

technology, the city, and the intersection between the two. And this more recent book was about looking at other sectors and other

knowledges that exist in the present to inform our understanding of technology and the city as well.

I think those broader perspectives that Shannon brings are so important,

especially when, you know, kind of these ideas of technology and

the very particular understanding of technology that comes out of Silicon Valley are so dominant

in our conversations today. And if we want to think more broadly about how we build better

cities and better technologies, then we need to look beyond that narrow lens

and learn from both those historical perspectives, but also those other ways of seeing the world

that Shannon identifies in the newer book that we're talking about primarily in this conversation.

I highly recommend taking advantage of that discount code and buying a copy

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