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

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.

How we engage with the world on an individual level is deeply connected to the context we find ourselves in and the social forces it represents.

The networked computer represents an exciting opportunity to reshape the world in an image of sustainable prosperity, shared collective wealth, democratized knowledge and respectful social relations. But such a world is only possible if we actively decide to build it. Central to that task is giving ordinary people the power to control how the digit

If we are to explore the possibilities of digital technology, we need greater engagement between historians and futurists, technologists and theorists, activists and creatives. Synthesizing thinking across these fields gives us the best chance of a future that is fair.

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

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?”

Objects like clocks and automatons are in many ways the predecessors to modern digital technology. You needed to be both an engineer and an artist to build these kinds of machines—technology was often entertaining, inspiring, frightening and useful, all at the same time. In this sense, the path to the modern networked computer was paved with excruc

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.