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

Society is often treated as an object, which digital technology does things to, rather than a community of people with agency and a collective desire to shape the future.

Digital technology is treated as a force of nature, without an agenda, inevitable and unstoppable. The past that has survived in the minds of the current generation is one that reflects what has happened rather than what is possible.

Our current society reveres some kinds of labor and debases others, and the power of technology to improve our world and livelihood is not equally distributed.

This led him, in 1918, to call for the creation of what he called a “usable past.” Speaking to his contemporaries in an intelligent and vivid essay, he outlined the need for history that creative minds could draw upon. “The present is a void,” he wrote, “and the American writer floats in that void because the past that survives in the common

History can weigh like a millstone; archaic distinctions and practices can drag upon our freedom and agency. But detachment from the past has its own pitfalls. It means that the past that survives is a default genealogy, a mere reflection of the status quo, fixed and irrelevant. It loses its living value, its capacity to help the current generation

The friar is a piece of craftsmanship that has lasted four centuries, whereas a comparable artifact today might be built in a Chinese factory, under appalling conditions, complete with planned obsolescence. Such a contrast demonstrates how technology is a field of creativity and skill, especially in its early, innovative stages. But when it is scal

This kind of thinking sees the future as defined by universal progress—rather than by a messy, contradictory struggle between different interests and forces—and never driven by the aspirations of those from below. It reduces the value of human agency to entrepreneurialism and empty consumerism.

Our past tells us about our present—how it was just one of many possible futures claimed by those who came before. In this context, both the creation and use of technology express a kind of power relation.

Knowing that others have desired the things we desire and have encountered the same obstacles,” Brooks argued, “would not the creative forces of this country lose a little of the hectic individualism that keeps them from uniting against their common enemies?”

Revolutions transform how we live and work, junking ossified practices in favor of brighter futures. They generate an energy and change that drive us forward collectively, in a world where wealth and privilege might otherwise prefer slothful stasis.