Hostility by Design: How Technology Loses its Innocence

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Technologies are not created hostile, but they can become so. Through neglect, austerity or repurposing, the systems that shape our lives can cause profound harm to people, animals, and physical and social environments in ways their creators neither anticipated nor acknowledged.

Drawing on examples spanning border control, welfare systems, urban design and AI, this provocative collection introduces the concept of technological innocence: the obliviousness that allows bias and hostility to flourish unchallenged.

Moving beyond naïve design ethics, it offers scholars, designers and policy makers a powerful new vocabulary for confronting the darker consequences of technological choice.