In this splendid and entertaining book, arrestingly subtitled ‘what Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine and the Paris Commune can teach us about digital technology’, Lizzie O’Shea sets out to construct what she calls a ‘usable past’ in order to better understand our digital present and the head-spinning future which technology is devising for us. This ‘re-purposing’ of history is not, O’Shea explains, simply an alternative interpretation of facts; rather, it is an argument about what the future could be, based on ‘what kinds of traditions are worth valuing and which moments are worth remembering’.
In setting out her case, the author deftly defines the iniquities of the digital age: a dystopia of corporate control, data-mining, face recognition software and ubiquitous monitoring by security agencies. In other words, ‘surveillance capitalism’; our modern world in which we are not the user but the product. In this context, O’Shea suggests ‘smart’ means ‘Surveillance Marketed As Revolutionary Technology’.
