Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village

16 artworks created by me that feature in the book publication: Imaginary Futures, From Thinking Machines to the Global Village (author: Richard Barbrook, Pluto Press, 2007).

The artworks are listed and accredited to me as the author on pp.vi & vii

This book is a history of the future. It shows how our contemporary understanding of the Internet is shaped by visions of the future that were put together in the 1950s and 1960s.

At the height of the Cold War, the Americans invented the only working model of communism in human history: the Internet. Yet, for all of its libertarian potential, the goal of this hi-tech project was geopolitical dominance: the ownership of time was control over the destiny of humanity. The potentially subversive theory of cybernetics was transformed into the military-friendly project of ‘artificial intelligence’. Capitalist growth became the fastest route to the ‘information society’. The rest of the world was expected to follow America’s path into the networked future.

Today, we’re still being told that the Internet is creating the information society – and that America today is everywhere else tomorrow. Thankfully, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the DIY ethic of the Internet shows that people can resist these authoritarian prophecies by shaping information technologies in their own interest. Ultimately, if we don’t want the future to be what it used to be, we must invent our own, improved and truly revolutionary future.

Publication date: April 2007
Ebook ISBN: 9781783716470
Paperback page count: 336
Paperback ISBN: 9780745326603
Paperback dimensions: 135 × 215 mm

• https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/43076/
• https://www.plutobooks.com/product/imagi...