Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine & the Paris Commune can teach us about digital technology
Author: O’SHEA LIZZIE
Format: PAPERBACK
Publication date: 30/11/2021
Imprint: VERSO
Price: $23.00
Publishing status: Active
The key to understanding technology lies not in the future–but in the past. That’s the contention of Lizzie O’Shea’s Future Histories, a grand tour through past and present to explore the practical–and sometimes revolutionary–possibilities of our digital age.
Searching for new ways to think about our networked world, O’Shea asks what the Paris Commune can tell us about the ethics of the Internet and finds inspiration in the revolutionary works of Thomas Paine and Frantz Fanon. She examines Elon Musk’s futuristic visions only to find them mired in a musty Victorian-era utopianism. Instead of current-day capitalist visionaries, O’Shea returns us to the Romantic age of wonder, when art and science were as yet undivided, narrating the collaboration between Ada Lovelace–the brilliant daughter of Lord and Lady Byron–and polymath Charles Babbage, who together designed the world’s first computer.
In our brave new world of increased surveillance, biased algorithms, and fears of job automation, O’Shea weaves a usable past we can employ in the service of emancipating our digital tomorrows.
ISBN: 9781788734318
Weight: 8oz
Dimension: 8in X 5in
Pages: 352