What is the internet? How far back in history can we find its precursors, in the form either of mechanical social, or perhaps even biological information networks? What are the political and philosophical ideas that drove early efforts to network human society? And is the internet a fulfilment of these ideas, or does the actually existing internet turn out to be in certain respects fundamentally different from the political and philosophical vision that guided its early development?
In this series of conversations, we will be taking a maximally wide-focused view of these questions, and we will be looking in particular at their importance for understanding the unprecedent technological revolution we are currently living through, as well as its economic, political, cultural, and psychological consequences. We will be focusing in particular on those thinkers who have articulated a theoretical account of the nature of information networks, the possibility of machine intelligence, or the utopian (or dystopian) prospects of a society reliant on machine-aided decision-making.
