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Title details for Future Histories by Lizzie O'Shea - Available

Future Histories

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

by Lizzie O'Shea
Cat Gould
Audiobook
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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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 14, 2019

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781541466869
      • File size: 340170 KB
      • Duration: 11:48:41

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrator Cat Gould's Australian accent and warm tone make her an ideal choice to explain the logic that author Lizzie O'Shea proposes: looking backward, rather than forward, to better understand the challenges of our modern mind, society, and self. O'Shea is a specialist in all matters digital and also practices as a public interest attorney. A ''usable past," she says may assist us in our shared digital future. Significant effort is made in knitting the historic movement known as the 1871 Paris Commune, among others, to our age of bits and bytes. Gould's easy-to-assimilate narration shines in the emphatic portions in which O'Shea makes strong comments on class concerns such as the unequal distribution of digital access to all world citizens. This is a well-researched highly academic exercise that is entertaining nonetheless--thanks to narrator Gould. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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