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How The Computer Became Personal, by Laine Nooney.
I heard an interview with the author on an episode of The Vergecast, saying something I hadn’t really heard or considered before – the personal computing revolution wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t inevitable, and it wasn’t entirely in our best interests. Charting how “microcomputing” was driven from being a small but valuable hobbyist industry into a world-changing global phenomenon by capital and competing ideologies around openness and control. The digitisation of our lives was sold to us as something that would empower us, but it ended up doing the opposite. She closed that thought with this banger:
We are structurally incapacitated from negotiating around these systems, and it is to the advantage of these corporations who want to make all of these interactions seamless, smooth and easy.
Laine Nooney, 31st May 2023 on The Vergecast
I love computers, but I’m a tinkerer, a hobbyist. I host a bunch of open-source projects at home, I write (fun!) software professionally. I am empowered by computers, but that’s because I invested a huge amount of time and energy into learning, which required a dizzying stack of privileges, not the least of which was access in the first place. Everybody living in what could be considered modern society anywhere in the world needs to interact with computers and digital systems, and without being able to deploy them entirely for your own purposes, owning your data, controlling your own hardware, then that technology exists only to tilt the balance of power away from you.
I’m absolutely loving this book – it’s evocatively-written with a strong backbone of cited and sourced material. Nooney researched thousands of magazine issues and news items and interviewed developers to build a clear picture of how computers changed our world, and who drove the change.
Get the book here (physical or digital).
P.S. I was just polishing up this post before hitting publish and an interview with Laine Nooney by Adam Conover dropped into my RSS reader, enjoy!