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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 purpose of a usable past is not simply to be a record of history. Rather, by building a shared appreciation of moments and traditions in collective history, a usable past is a method for creating the world we want to see. It is about “cutting the cloth” of history, as Brooks put it, to suit a particular agenda. It is an argument for what the fu

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?”