RISE OF THE MACHINES the lost history of cybernetics

‘The major disruptions in our modern society all belong to one big story. A common theme connects war machines, computer networks, social media, ubiquitous surveillance and virtual reality. For 50 years or more the same people and the same ideas weave through these innovations united by the term cyber, as in cyberspace and cybernetics. Read this amazing history and you’ll go: aha!’

KEVIN KELLY, FOUNDER OF WIRED MAGAZINE, AUTHOR OF WHAT TECHNOLOGY WANTS AND THE INEVITABLE

Thomas Rid’s revelatory cybernetic history pulls together disparate threads in the history of technology, from the invention of radar and pilotless flying bombs in World War Two to today’s age of CCTV, cryptocurrencies and virtual realities. Rid traces how our anxieties about privacy and security have long shaped the new digital future that we have been steadily, sometimes inadvertently, creating for ourselves. Rise of the Machines makes a singular and significant contribution to the advancement of our clearer understanding of our gadget-obsessed future — and of the puzzling past that has generated it. The line between utopia and dystopia turned out to be disturbingly thin.