Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris

Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us About Digital Technology

A highly engaging tour through progressive history in the service of emancipating our digital tomorrow.

When we talk about technology we always talk about tomorrow and the future -- which makes it hard to figure out how to even get there. In Future Histories, public interest lawyer and digital specialist Lizzie O'Shea argues that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and progressive social movements with modern theories of the mind, society, and self, O'Shea constructs a "usable past" that can help us determine our digital future.

What, she asks, can the Paris Commune tell us about earlier experiments in sharing resources--like the Internet--in common? How can Frantz Fanon's theories of anti colonial self-determination help us build digital world in which everyone can participate equally? Can debates over equal digital access be helped by American revolutionary Tom Paine's theories of democratic, economic redistribution? What can indigenous land struggles teach us about stewarding our digital climate? And, how is Elon Musk not a future visionary but a steampunk throwback to Victorian-era technological utopians?

In engaging, sparkling prose, O'Shea shows us how very human our understanding of technology is, and how when we draw on the resources of the past, we can see the potential for struggle, for liberation, for art and poetry in our technological present. Future Histories is for all of us--makers, coders, hacktivists, Facebook-users, self-styled Luddites--who find ourselves in a brave new world.
Country USA
Brand Verso
Manufacturer Verso
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber 53772551
Color Black
ReleaseDate 2019-05-14
UnitCount 1
EANs 9781788734301

Country	USA
Brand	Verso
Manufacturer	Verso
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	53772551
Color	Black
ReleaseDate	2019-05-14
UnitCount	1
EANs	9781788734301

Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us About Digital Technology

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