The Short Version
- Performance: Robertson Dean reads Marc Goodman's sprawling tech-thriller nonfiction with controlled urgency, keeping the parade of alarming scenarios from collapsing into breathless catastrophism.
- What it covers: Digital vulnerability and surveillance capitalism, emerging technology as criminal infrastructure, the human cost of connectivity
- Feel: Alarming and propulsive, sustained over twenty hours with enough variety to prevent fatigue
- Our call: Marc Goodman's forensic account of how technology is weaponized against individuals and nations is comprehensive, well-researched, and genuinely sobering.
Marc Goodman spent a career in law enforcement and counterterrorism before writing Future Crimes, and that background shows in how the book is structured. This is not speculative anxiety about what might happen. It is a documented account of what was already happening at the time of writing, organized by domain of threat, from identity theft and financial crime through to nation-state cyberattacks, bioterrorism enabled by synthetic biology, and the security implications of the Internet of Things. Robertson Dean narrates the full twenty hours and nine minutes with the controlled urgency that Goodman's material demands, making this audiobook a sustained argument rather than a sequence of alarming anecdotes. Reviewer Ron Immink described Future Crimes as a very scary book, contextualizing it against earlier technology-culture critiques and noting that Goodman goes further into the dark side than those titles. That positioning is accurate. Goodman is specifically interested in the criminal and state-level exploitation of systems that most people treat as neutral infrastructure.
Our Take on Future Crimes
Goodman's central argument is structural rather than technical. The problem is not that any particular technology is malicious, but that the technological infrastructure underlying modern life was built with connectivity as the primary design goal and security as an afterthought. No computer has ever been created that could not be hacked, and that statement carries different weight when applied to medical pacemakers, electric grid management systems, and air traffic control than when applied to personal laptops. Goodman works through these domains systematically, covering baby monitors that can be activated by remote hackers, GPS exploitation by stalkers, drone fleets used for drug smuggling, and 3D printers that can produce functioning firearms.
The sections on the Internet of Things and its security implications remain among the clearest explanations available of why ubiquitous connectivity carries systemic risk. Reviewer Phillip Skaga called it a sobering reality, noting that technological change has always created new problems but that the scale and speed of current changes put us in a qualitatively different situation from any previous technological transition. Goodman makes that argument without resorting to technophobia. He is careful to distinguish between the genuine benefits of the technologies he describes and their exploit potential, and that distinction gives the book intellectual honesty that pure alarmism would lack. He is not arguing against technology but against the casual disregard for security that has accompanied its rapid adoption across infrastructure, consumer devices, and medical systems alike.
Why Listen to Future Crimes
Dean's narration carries the book's shifting register effectively across its length. Future Crimes moves between granular technical explanation, reported narrative of specific crimes and attacks, and broader policy argument in a sequence that could easily lose coherence in audio form. Dean maintains enough variety in his delivery to signal these register shifts without being theatrical about them. The book reads, as Goodman intends, like science fiction based in science fact, and Dean's narration honors that quality by keeping the tone engaged without letting it tip into sensationalism. At twenty hours, the audiobook is a substantial commitment, but the material justifies the length. Goodman covers enough ground that a shorter version would inevitably feel selective in ways that undercut the systemic argument he is making about the entire digital ecosystem and its vulnerabilities.
Reviewer F. Scholl, who encountered Future Crimes at an airport bookstand, observed that it finally delivers security messaging in a form that business executives will actually engage with. The audiobook format extends that accessibility further. The material is demanding but not technical in ways that require prior expertise in cybersecurity or computer science. Goodman is addressing intelligent general readers and Dean's narration serves that audience by keeping the pace brisk enough to sustain attention without sacrificing the specificity that makes the argument credible and alarming in equal measure.
What to Watch For in Future Crimes
The book was published in 2015 and some specific technology examples show their age. Goodman was writing about emerging threats that have since either materialized, evolved significantly, or been partially addressed by regulation and industry response, and listeners should calibrate their reading of specific projections accordingly. The core structural argument about connectivity-security trade-offs and the asymmetric advantage enjoyed by attackers over defenders remains largely valid, but particular claims about the capabilities of specific tools or the state of specific industries should be verified against more current sources. The final section, where Goodman offers steps that individuals and organizations can take to protect themselves, is more actionable at the general level than the specific. The book is stronger at documenting the problem than prescribing solutions, which is honest about the scale of the challenge but may leave some listeners wanting more concrete guidance.
Who Should Listen to Future Crimes
Anyone working in technology, security, policy, or corporate leadership who wants to understand the threat landscape in a form fully accessible to non-specialists will find this audiobook one of the better entry points available. General readers who want to understand why digital security is not merely a technical problem but a social and political one will find Goodman's framing genuinely useful. Listeners who responded to Edward Snowden's Permanent Record will recognize Future Crimes as working in a related space with similar public-education intent and comparable ambition in scope. Be aware that some specific examples are dated by a decade, and pair this audiobook with more current cybersecurity journalism for an up-to-date picture of specific threats. The structural argument at the book's core, however, has only grown more relevant with time as the Internet of Things has expanded exactly as Goodman warned it would.
