Electric Money Never Sleeps

Wall Street: Money Never Sleep picks addresses the financial crisis of 2007-2008 that one could say started with the securitization of student loans for college students in the 1980s, accelerated in the 1990s when Fannie Mae and Sallie Mae began to use the techniques for home mortgages, and turned a major fiasco when Wall Street began to package mortgage-backed securities for global distribution.

Adam Smith, the Census Machine, and the Beginnings of IBM

This post further develops the thesis that Adam Smith’s new conception of the wealth set the foundation for modern information practices and calculating technologies.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace – The Poem

I’m following and commenting on the BBC documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis. So I wanted to post the actual poem and reading by American poet Richard Brautigan. I think it beautifully textualizes the early utopian vision of computers and nature working in harmony to provide a stable [...]

All Watched Over by Heroes of Loving Grace

I’m working on my manuscript How IT Came to Rule the World this summer so not surprisingly I took an interest in the recent BBC documentary by Adam Curtis called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, named after American poet Richard Brautigan’s publication of the same name. The title poem was written in [...]

The FCC’s First Computer Inquiry

The use of a communications carrier to connect remote terminals to computers brings the system into the realm of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). By virtue of the Communications Act of 1934, all telecommunications traffic needed to be regulated by the FCC. This task of regulating computer communications was neither welcomed nor clearly understood by [...]

Why AT&T Invented and Shared the Transistor that Started the Digital Revolution

Share Tweet The transistor provided an extraordinary capability to control an electrical current which was initially used for amplifying electromagnetic frequencies and then for switching the 1s and 0s needed for digital computing. An unlikely scenario unfolded in the 1950s when AT&T’s fear of government anti-trust action and regulation sparked the sharing of this seminal [...]

Seeing from Space: Cold War Origins to Google Earth

President Eisenhower had actually been secretly coordinating the space program as part of the Cold War since the early 1950s. He had become accustomed to the valuable photographic information obtained from spy planes and considered satellites a crucial new Cold War technology. The D-Day invasion of Europe which he had managed as the head of [...]

From Sputnik Moment to the Reagan Revolution

Share Tweet President Obama has mentioned the Sputnik satellite several times in speeches over the last few years to refer to the contemporary challenges facing the US such as climate change, oil depletion and the decline of the American economy. Most recently in the 2011 State of the Union address, he spoke of the Soviet [...]