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Innovation and Its Enemies
Juma's 2016 comparative study of nine technologies across six centuries — the most comprehensive empirical demonstration that innovation resistance follows structural patterns rather than random cultural accidents.
Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies (Oxford University Press, 2016) traced the dynamics of opposition across coffee, the printing press, margarine, farm mechanization, electricity, mechanical refrigeration, recorded music, transgenic crops, and AquaAdvantage salmon. Its argument is that resistance follows structural patterns rooted in commercial interest, cultural identity, and power preservation rather than ignorance or technophobia. The book proposes that opposition typically contains legitimate concerns about social and economic consequences — concerns institutions should decode as intelligence rather than dismiss as noise. Its final chapters specify the institutional architecture — inclusive deliberation, co-designed governance, targeted support for the displaced — required to convert transitions from concentrated suffering into broadly shared prosperity.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book emerged from Juma's accumulated frustration with two opposing camps in the innovation discourse. The first camp treated all resistance as ignorance to be overcome, typically through education campaigns that assumed the resisters simply lacked the facts. The second