Human After Update

What technology changed about being a person

A book about the part of us that did not get patched. Attention, friendship, anger, patience and identity, looked at through what technology has quietly done to each — and what can be done back.

Published 2017
On attention, identity and the cost of being online

Attention as the thing actually being sold
Friendship at scale, and why it does not work
Anger that travels faster than thought
Staying a person in a system built for users

Every few years the devices get better and the people using them get more tired. This book takes that seriously: not as a complaint about phones, but as a question about what a mind needs and what the last twenty years have taken from it. Part psychology, part cartoonist's eye for the absurd.