Birth, School, Work, Death

An adventurous deconstruction of the relentless user optimization in tech that commodifies and flattens our livesWhether it's AI doing our homework assignments or the latest "smart" appliance, optimization is the tech world's solution for everything—but is a frictionless life really what we need? Tony D. Sampson exposes the relentless pursuit of ostensibly neutral strategies to optimize user experience (UX) as a cradle-to-grave venture to extract, expropriate, and commodify lifecycle experiences—a dire manifestation of a broader colonizing agenda.Sampson introduces the term "essentralization" to describe how the reign of UX, dispersed throughout our lives, reduces human experiences to a core set of marketable essentials and renders users homogenized, transactional personas. With Mikey Georgeson's artwork, Sampson boldly maps the UX journey across the entire human lifecycle, deploying a vast constellation of radical thinkers, artists, and activists—foremost William Blake and W. E. B. Du Bois—to examine how UX imposes on major life moments: in maternity services, universities, the workplace, and funerals. By silencing lived realities, cultivating synthetic happiness, and marketing frictionless satisfaction, UX systematically undermines democratic public goods and compassionate support systems.A crucial intervention in political and social theory, Birth, School, Work, Death transcends the individual to deconstruct how tech's relentless pursuit of radical optimization erodes public services, brings greater precarity into labor, and even prevents the necessary experience of collective grief. A major new work from a thinker who has been at the forefront of digital culture and contemporary capitalism, Birth, School, Work, Death is a vital call to struggle against the extraction of our experiences and to reclaim the unoptimizable potential of our lives.Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.