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Future Histories:What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us About Digital Technology
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How can we use digital technology for the common good?
Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award, Australia
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.
Reviews
"There has never been a better time to pull the politics of platform capitalism into the foreground where it belongs. Lizzie O’Shea brings a hacker’s curiosity, a historian’s reach and a lawyer’s precision to bear on our digitally saturated present, emerging with a compelling argument that a better world is there for the taking. "
A potent, timely, and unrepentantly radical reminder of history’s creative potential. Lizzie O’Shea’s Future Histories should be required reading for anyone planning on surviving—and even repairing—our grim technological moment.
There has never been a better time to pull the politics of platform capitalism into the foreground where they belong. Lizzie O'Shea brings a hacker's curiosity, a historian's reach, and a lawyer's precision to bear on our digitally saturated present, emerging with a compelling argument that a better world is there for the taking.
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In this splendid and entertaining book, arrestingly subtitled ‘what Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine and the Paris Commune can teach us about digital technology’, Lizzie O’Shea sets out to construct what she calls a ‘usable past’ in order to better understand our digital present and the head-spinning future which technology is devising for us. This ‘re-purposing’ of history is not, O’Shea explains, simply an alternative interpretation of facts, rather it is an argument about what the future could be, based on ‘what kinds of traditions are worth valuing and which moments are worth remembering.’
In setting out her case, the author deftly defines the iniquities of the digital age; a dystopia of corporate control, data-mining, face recognition software and ubiquitous monitoring by security agencies. In other words, ‘surveillance capitalism’; our modern world in which we are not the user but the product. In the context, O’Shea suggests ‘smart’ means ‘Surveillance Marketed As Revolutionary Technology.’
If Future Histories did no more than anatomize our present digital entanglement, it would merely be a useful addition to an established area of inquiry. It is the yoking together of technological advancement and progressive social movements that makes this book truly valuable. In viewing our networked world through the prism of the long (and ongoing) struggle for human rights, O’Shea has given us usable tools in the struggle to wrest control of the digital world from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. As the old Trade Union slogan has it; ‘The Past we inherit, the Future we build.’, The New Internationalist