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Technology and Culture 44.3 (2003) 639-640



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Technomanifestos: Visions from the Information Revolutionaries. By Adam Brate. New York: Texere, 2002. Pp. vii+371. $29.95.

Technomanifestos celebrates a dimension of the information revolution that has been largely obscured by the explosive and helter-skelter growth of computer technologies in the post-World War II era. A freelance science writer, Adam Brate is an unabashed admirer of the people who made that revolution. Geniuses such as Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Alan Turing, J. C. R. Licklider, Seymore Papert, and Alan Kay invented the theories and machines that have defined our age. But in the process they also hatched grand schemes of human liberation based on a hoped-for symbiosis of humans and computers.

Tracts such as Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1950) and Licklider's Libraries of the Future (1965) are little read today. Yet Brate ranks them with such sacred texts as the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Technomanifestos, Brate argues, were inspired by the same set of democratic principles. He sums up the goal of the information revolutionaries as one of creating "new systems—technological, social, political, and economic—that adapt to people, instead of the other way around." Overthrown were the old structures of the Industrial Revolution that had made people the tools of machines.

Brate divides our latter-day revolution into four periods. The first three are: "Frontier," the 1940s and 1950s, when cybernetics and other theories were born; "Revolution," the 1960s and 1970s, when the seminal information technologies gained momentum and began to displace the older ones of the Industrial Revolution; and "Power," the period from 1970 to the present, when the battle is waged for control of these technologies. On one side are arrayed the government and corporate forces of command and control; on the other, Brate's information revolutionaries, who want to guide the technology toward individual and collective empowerment—that is, toward "Symbiosis," the fourth period, which he sees not as a stage of ultimate harmony between man and machine but as the twenty-first-century infusion of computers into everything.

The philosophical writings of the information revolutionaries are high-flown, audacious, utopian, amazing. Among the most impressive were Internet pioneer Licklider's "Intergalactic Network" of computer researchers and the Bootstrap Institute, set up by Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse. Dedicated to augmenting human intelligence, Engelbart saw the computer as a tool to boost human beings up the evolutionary ladder. Nobel physicist Richard Feynman, using the analogy of the information stored in the double helix (whose discovery Brate erroneously dates to 1958), conjectured that all of written knowledge could someday be stored in a space the size of a speck of dust. Inspired by Feynman, Kim Drexler, a [End Page 639] pioneer of nanotechnology, imagined a future in which tiny information machines will reshape both the mental and physical world. The information revolutionaries also had some unlikely fellow travelers, such as Yippie ringleader Abbie Hoffman, who believed in the power of Marshall McLuhan's vision of communications technology to overthrow the old order of industrial society.

Somewhat in awe of his cast of characters, Brate repeats some timeworn anecdotes, such as those about Norbert Wiener's legendary absent-mindedness. But by and large he conveys a feeling for the humanity and passion that motivated them. Although fundamentally optimistic, Brate is not so naive as to believe that cybernetic paradise is at hand. He allows that the jury is still out on whether the information revolution is truly liberating or a new form of domination. He describes, for example, the continuing struggles of Eric S. Raymond and other leaders of the open-source movement, as well as Bill Joy's recent "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," the Sun Microsystems cofounder's dystopian rebuke to Raymond Kurzweil's vision of the coming age of spiritual machines. At times Brate seems to see the information revolutionaries as engaged in an epic struggle of good against evil.

It is indeed remarkable to see the...

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