FUTURE HISTORIES What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us About Digital Technology

Narrator Cat Gould's Australian accent and warm tone make her an ideal choice to explain the logic that author Lizzie O'Shea proposes: looking backward, rather than forward, to better understand the challenges of our modern mind, society, and self. O'Shea is a specialist in all matters digital and also practices as a public interest attorney. A ''usable past," she says may assist us in our shared digital future. Significant effort is made in knitting the historic movement known as the 1871 Paris Commune, among others, to our age of bits and bytes. Gould's easy-to-assimilate narration shines in the emphatic portions in which O'Shea makes strong comments on class concerns such as the unequal distribution of digital access to all world citizens. This is a well-researched highly academic exercise that is entertaining nonetheless--thanks to narrator Gould. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine [Published: OCTOBER 2019]