Technomanifestos : Visions from the Information Revolutionaries

Technomanifestos is the story of the information revolution as it was shaped and imagined in the writings of its most inspired revolutionaries. Each manifesto-writer is a "technological humanitarian"; each has a worldly, bold, optimistic vision of how computers will change and serve humankind. Manifestos include Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" (1945), Alan Turing's "Computing Machinery & Intelligence" (1950) Norbert Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings (1951), Doug Englebart's "Augmenting Human Intellect (1962), JCR Licklader's "Man-Computer Symbiosis (1962), Seymour Papert's Mindstorms (1980), Richard Stallman's "GNU Manifesto (1984), Ted Nelson's "The Future of Information" (1993) and Jaron Lanier's "1/2 a Manifesto" (2000), among others. Key to this book are the evolution of concepts like "information", "computer", "intelligence", "system", "noise", "feedback", "network", "ownership", and "life". Technomanifestos will link these individuals, their writings and the information revolution to larger social movements of the post World War II era onward: education reform, environmentalism, anti cold war and nuclear arms, anti-monopolization, and anti-globalization. It will draw associations and conclusions based on the manifestos, autobiographical and biographical writings about the manifesto-writers, and period histories. It will examine the decisions — good and bad — made by the technologists. It will reveal tensions among one another or with the "establishment," and chronicle the legacies of each milestone idea. Most of all, this book will examine the interplay between technology and society, computers and culture, information and meaning.

Adam Brate is a technology writer who lives in downtown Manhattan, just around the corner from Silicon Alley. A product of a liberal arts education in Amherst, MA, he has dabbled in the hard sciences, television, publishing, music, and programming and has an MA in English. He seeks to understand how it all relates. Adam's first book was Making the Cisco Connection, a business history of the super corporation that builds the Internet's infrastructure. His inspiration is the reclusive Thomas Pynchon, who contemplates the interchange between technology and imagination in all his writings.