WORK
Geek Heresy
Toyama's 2015 book Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology — the work that introduced the Law of Amplification and became the founding text of the critical ICT4D tradition.
Geek Heresy is a work of corrective argument built from evidence rather than ideology. Toyama arrived at Microsoft Research India in 2004 with the standard technology optimism of his field; he left five years later having watched enough failed and successful deployments to understand that the failures were not accidents and the successes were not triumphs of the tool. The book's title is precise: it is a heresy specifically addressed to the geeks, the technology industry's believers, who had adopted the faith that better tools produce better outcomes. The heretical claim — that technology amplifies existing capacity and does not substitute for missing capacity — is now one of the most-cited findings in ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development), and it has become a central reference point in the emerging critical literature on AI.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's argument unfolds through case studies from Toyama's Microsoft Research India fieldwork: educational computing in Karnataka, telemedicine in Uttar Pradesh,