Birth, School, Work, Death

<P><B>An adventurous deconstruction of the relentless user optimization in tech that commodifies and flattens our lives</B></P><P>Whether 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.</P><P>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.</P><P>A crucial intervention in political and social theory, <I>Birth, School, Work, Death </I>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, <I>Birth, School, Work, Death</I> is a vital call to struggle against the extraction of our experiences and to reclaim the unoptimizable potential of our lives.</P><P><B>Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.</B></P>