These days, we all have too much to do and too little time. This book is about how technology has changed our lives and what we can do about it.

What happened to the promise that technology would give us more leisure time? Instead, we are working harder and for longer hours than we did fifteen years ago, squeezed and scattered and stressed to the point of burnout. We are trying to cope with a constantly accelerating pace brought about by cutbacks and restructuring, but also by computers and cell phones that, in their super-efficient dispatch of data, text and voice messages and the like, let us do more things faster than ever before.

Yet somewhere between the multi-tasking pace and the sea of data divorced from real life, we're losing touch with ourselves and with each other. We're even losing a sense of how to tell when things go wrong and how to take action when they do. We need to take back our lives, and renew the humanity of our social institutions.