History of Science and Technology: Fog of Freedom

Why are new information technologies so frequently associated with freedom? Which cultural and philosophical concepts of freedom are central to technology design, use and critique? Why freedom instead of justice, equality or well-being? How was the link forged and why? This presentation will explore the fog of freedom in episodes from the last 40 years of the development of information technology: the development or UNIX, the rise of free software, the appearance of "social media", cloud computing, and crowdsourcing, and the eternal return of the monopoly tech company.

Speaker: Christopher M. Kelty