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Contents

Foreword by Danny Dorling

Introduction

1 Technofatalism and the future – is a world without Foxconn even possible?

Two paradoxes about new technology

Humanity began with technology

Technology emerges from egalitarian knowledge economies

The myth of creative competition

Why capitalism inhibits innovation

Capitalism didn’t make computers… but took computing down the wrong path

2 From water mills to iPhones: why technology and inequality do not mix

Egalitarian hopes for computing

The return of medieval economics

The first modern environmental crisis

An unequal society is a dangerous place for powerful ideas

Water mills, and how new technology can be a curse

Firearms take a European turn

3 What inequality does to people

Inequality reduces life expectancy

Equality and the Soviet Union

Autonomy and solidarity: the essential nutrients

Inequality makes people shorter

Today’s inequality will damage future generations

4 The environmental cost of human inequality

Are the rich destroying the earth?

Inequality turns humans into a geological force

Malthus’s mistake: not too many babies, but too much debt

Ehrlich’s last gasp: technology and ‘eye-pat’

The power to choose a low-impact life

5 Ever greater impact, ever less benefit: high-tech capital’s mysterious lack of growth

‘Keep your nerve’ or ‘tough it out’

Why computers have grown nothing but themselves

Inequality: the elephant in the room

6 The invisible foot: why inequality increases impact

Technology plus inequality equals meltdown

‘Positionality’ and ‘human nature’

Traffic waves and why faster is slower

Computers and the positional economy: obsolescence gone mad

The rise of financial services, trailed by women in old cars

Putting a girl on the moon: the cost of education

How ‘e-learning’ rebounded on the poor

7 Enclosure in the computer age: the magic of control

The supernatural enters everyday life: the magic of commodities

Power over the future: the magic of intellectual property

Computers and the making of money

The world gets smaller and hotter

Closing the technological frontier (or trying to)

Other routines are possible!

8 Sales effort: from the automobile to the microchip

The all-steel automobile as an energy sump

How the sales effort shaped the chip

Moore’s self-fulfilling prophecy: chips with everything

Dictating the future

The visionary turn

Embracing carnage: faith in disruption

9 Technoptimism hits the buffers

The toxic deWmands of purity

Obsolescence and e-waste: a total system

Displacing the problem to Africa

Entropy: measuring what’s possible

Maxwell’s demon: the spoiler in the green growth dream

Puncturing the weightless economists

10 The data explosion: how the cloud became a juggernaut

Forced migration: corporate flight into the cloud

How the web became an entropy pump

The cost of the dotcom bubble and Web 2.0

11 ‘The least efficient machine humans have ever built’: how capitalism drove the computer down a dead end

The buried world of analog computing

Clocks: why today’s computers mostly do nothing, but very quickly

Soviet computing: diversity under scarcity and bureaucracy

Time-sharing: another abandoned road

Competitive pressure narrows all options

12 Planning by whom and for what? The battle for control from the Soviet Union to Walmart

The benefits and dangers of centralized planning

Electrification of the Soviet Union: heteronomous planning becomes the global norm

Linear programming, with and without computers

The curious incident of the capitalist calculation debate

Connection-making and the ecology movement

Operational Research and cybernetics

Variety engineering: the difference between amplification and shouting

13 A socialist computer: Chile, 1970-1973

A global crisis of inequality

The Unidad Popular: a moderately egalitarian program

Stafford Beer and ‘cybernetic socialism’

How much computer hardware does a viable society need?

Cheap, radical technology

‘War’ is declared

14 Utopia or bust

Envisioning Utopia: the world turned right way up

Utopian practicalities: food and work

Beauty and lower impact, from the bottom up

Shrinking roads, expanding diversity

Putting babies and children at the heart of the economy

Shared work: Utopia’s powerhouses

Community is stronger than we think: ‘Disaster Utopias’

The Right knows the power of solidarity, even if the Left doesn’t

Equality, truth and the experience of being believed

The ‘apparatus of justification’