Information History

Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes, or filled with bean bags and children’s drawings - the history of the library is rich, varied, and stuffed full of incident.

From acclaimed tech writer Clive Thompson comes a brilliant anthropological reckoning with the most powerful tribe in the world today, computer programmers, in a book that interrogates who they are, how they think, what qualifies as greatness in their world, and what should give us pause. They are the most quietly influential people on the planet, and Coders shines a light on their culture.

In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher offers not only an information theory of art but an aesthetic theory of information. Applying close readings of the information theories of Claude Shannon and Gilbert Simondon to 1960s American art, Hoelscher proposes that art is information in its aesthetic or indeterminate mode—information oriented less toward answers and resolvability than toward questions, irresolvability, and sustained difference. In this way, art constitutes information that remains in formation---a difference that makes a difference that keeps on differencing.

The machine that kills secrets is a powerful cryptographic code that hides the identities of leakers and hacktivists as they spill the private files of government agencies and corporations bringing us into a new age of whistle blowing. With unrivaled access to figures like Julian Assange, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and Jacob Applebaum, investigative journalist Andy Greenberg unveils the group that brought the world WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, and BalkanLeaks.

From one of the world’s leading data scientists, a landmark tour ofthe new science of idea flow, offering revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influence.

In Living in Data, Thorp proves that thinking about data in a human context makes us better problem solvers and builds a healthier relationship between us and our data - one that puts our well-being front and center - and that there is a path forward beyond the extractive, impersonal nature of the “big data” era.

If you buy a book at the bookstore, you own it. You can take it home, scribble in the margins, put it on the shelf, lend it to a friend, or sell it at a garage sale. But is the same thing true for the eBooks or other digital goods you buy? Retailers and copyright holders argue that you don't own those purchases, you merely license them. That means your eBook vendor can delete the book from your device without warning or explanation - as Amazon deleted Orwell's 1984 from the Kindles of surprised readers.

In The New Nexus, we move beyond the headlines to offer a groundbreaking systems thinking analysis of this epic battle. This analysis isn't just another report on AI; it's a map of the entire information ecosystem, revealing the hidden forces and feedback loops that will shape the next digital era. Don't just watch the future unfold—understand the forces that shape it. Whether you're a business leader navigating disruption, a tech professional building the future, or simply a curious mind who needs to understand what's next, The New Nexus is your essential guide.

Well over 100 years ago the data industry put in place a business model that trades our attention for news and entertainment. That model has evolved into a complex art and science of message targeting and content ownership that has splintered communities while simultaneously concentrating media ownership to a few massive corporations. Forged in War takes a critical look at the systems we use and how we ended up in a society that values data over personal liberty and commerce over the public good.

In this book, Lamdan contends that privatization and tech exceptionalism have prevented us from creating effective legal regulation. This, in turn, has allowed oversized information oligopolies to coalesce. In addition to specific legal and market-based solutions, Lamdan calls for treating information like a public good and creating digital infrastructure that supports our democratic ideals.

Fearlessly taking aim at the seemingly impressive façade of modern military power, Dirty Little Secrets is an unusual, entertaining and thought provoking look at the myths, mysteries and arcana unknown to the rest of us. Did you know that. Modern tanks use as much fuel standing still as they do when moving?

Most of us take for granted that our books are vertical on our shelves with the spines facing out, but Henry Petroski, inveterately curious engineer, didn’t. As a result, listeners are guided along the astonishing evolution from papyrus scrolls boxed at Alexandria to upright books shelved at the Library of Congress. Petroski takes us into the pre-Gutenberg world, when books were so scarce they were chained to lecterns for security.

This book delves into all the conflicts in the war, including Germany’s disastrous invasion of Russia, the air raids that decimated much of London, and why the US started communicating in the Navajo language.

Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation - to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? Find out.

Joseph Julius Jackson was an African-American preacher who published The History of the Black Man (1921). The book discusses the influence of African civilization upon ancient history, and covers the black kingdoms of Ghana, Sudan, Melle, Hausa, Songhay, as well as the Moorish dynasty of Spain in some detail.

“Three lessons are interwoven throughout the historical case studies of information operations during large-scale combatis the information regardless of the capabilities employed to effect it; 2. successful information operations are operations integrated, synchronized, resourced and commander-led from inception to execution; and 3. information operations are, at their core, adversary/enemy-focused operations conducted to gain a relative advantage for friendly decision-makers…

In this fascinating account, cultural historian Kathy Peiss reveals how book and document collecting became part of the new apparatus of intelligence and national security, military planning, and postwar reconstruction. Focusing on the ordinary Americans who carried out these missions, she shows how they made decisions on the ground to acquire sources that would be useful in the war zone as well as on the home front.

If you want to discover the captivating history of the Cambridge Five, then pay attention.... During the poverty-stricken years of the Great Depression, when Britain’s financial markets plummeted and the poor and wealthy alike doubted the economic systems in which they participated, the potential of one political ideal shone like no other: Communism. Young intellectuals from the country’s very best schools discussed the premise of labor-value versus wealth-value, and a great many of them became card-carrying members of the Communist Party in Britain.

Militaries with state-of-the-art information technology sometimes bog down in confusing conflicts. To understand why, it is important to understand the micro-foundations of military power in the information age - and this is exactly what Jon R. Lindsay's Information Technology and Military Power gives us. As Lindsay shows, digital systems now mediate almost every effort to gather, store, display, analyze, and communicate information in military organizations. He highlights how personnel now struggle with their own information systems, as much as with the enemy.

Today’s major technology companies - Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tesla, and others - wield more power than national governments. In this comprehensive, engaging, and prescriptive audiobook, Alexis Wichowski considers their growing and unavoidable influence in our lives, showing in eye-opening detail how these net states are conquering countries, disrupting reality, and jeopardizing our future - and what we can do to regulate and reform the industry before it does irreparable harm to the way we think, how we act, and how we’re governed.