Anthony J. Pennings, PhD

WRITINGS ON DIGITAL ECONOMICS, ENERGY STRATEGIES, AND GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS

Electric Money Never Sleeps

Money used to sleep a lot. It would nap while waiting for a telex message to go out. It would doze off while waiting for a telephone connection. It would slumber on railroad routes. It would hibernate on transoceanic crossings. By the mid-20th century, money developed insomnia. Computers and telecommunications were being used together to […]

Smith Effect III: 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.

All Watched Over by Heroes of Loving Grace

I took an interest in the 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. What was emerging was a new cultural era of self-based “heroic” philosophies espoused by a divergent group of proponents. These included: authors such as Rand and George Gilder (Wealth and Poverty); economists such as Arthur Laffer, who championed supply-side economics and Milton Friedman of the Chicago School; and Self-help gurus such as Scientology’s L. Ron Hubbard, est’s Werner Erhard and fire-walker Tony Robbins. Even heroic popular culture icons in Star Wars and the Superman movies helped characterize the new era.

The FCC’s First Computer Inquiry

Any use of a communications carrier to connect remote terminals to computers brought 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. As early computers were being developed, his task of regulating computer communications was […]

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

The transistor emerged from the research efforts of AT&T, the corporate behemoth that was formed by JP Morgan and guided by US policy to become the nation’s primary telecommunications provider. Fed by AT&T’s monopoly profits, Bell Labs became a virtual “patent factory”, producing thousands of technical innovations and patents a year by the 1930s. One of its major challenges was to find a more efficient successor to the vacuum tube.

Seeing from Space: Cold War Origins to Google Earth

President Eisenhower had 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 the […]

From Sputnik Moment to the Reagan Revolution

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 Union’s space […]

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  • About Me

    Professor at State University of New York (SUNY) Korea since 2016. Moved to Austin, Texas in August 2012 to join the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University. Spent the previous decade on the faculty at New York University teaching and researching information systems, digital economics, and strategic communications.

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    apennings70@gmail.com
    anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr

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    The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of my employers, past or present.