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

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 E...