BOOKS
Future Histories
by Lizzie O’Shea
(Verso, ISBN 9781788734301)
In this splendid and entertaining book, arrestingly subtitled ‘what Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine and the Paris Commune can teach us about digital technology’, Lizzie O’Shea sets out to construct what she calls a ‘usable past’ in order to better understand our digital present and the head-spinning future which technology is devising for us. This ‘re-purposing’ of history is not, O’Shea explains, simply an alternative interpretation of facts; rather, it is an argument about what the future could be, based on ‘what kinds of traditions are worth valuing and which moments are
