Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Weiser’s pioneering ideas, which he refined in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, led to the present-day Internet of Things, but his vision lost out to the surveillance-capitalist imperatives of Big Tech. Tinnell’s profound biography evokes an alternative paradigm, in which technology companies did not seek to monitor and exploit users." * New Yorker *
"The story of Weiser’s undertaking is told by John Tinnell, a professor of English at the University of Colorado at Denver, in his new biography
The Philosopher of Palo Alto, and it’s refreshingly strange. . . . Tinnell presents Weiser both as a progenitor of this state of affairs—his PARC was where 'the seeds for the Internet of Things had been sown”—and as the prophet of an alternative paradigm that might “hold some conceptual tenets for building a better Internet of Things today,' one that rejects 'total surveillance and zero privacy, runaway automation, and diminished agency.'” * New York Review of Books *
"In the life of Mark Weiser, John Tinnell has found a morality tale for our times. For anyone looking to understand how technology is shaping society today,
The Philosopher of Palo Alto is a compelling and necessary read."
-- Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows and The Glass Cage
"This riveting, up-close account reveals how one man’s dream of benevolent computing helped set us on the road to the hyper-connected, surveillance-driven nightmare we inhabit today. A deeply unsettling and cautionary tale." -- Fred Turner, author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
"Along with Doug Engelbart’s intelligence augmentation and Alan Kay’s Dynabook, Mark Weiser’s ubiquitous computing is one of the three big concepts that Silicon Valley has fed off of for decades. Tinnell has done a wonderful job of capturing the arc of Weiser’s ideas."
-- John Markoff author of Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
“The Philosopher of Palo Alto is a really interesting read in the context of the latest developments in AI. I do have a boundless appetite for books about the history of the industry and was intrigued by this as I’d never heard of Mark Weiser. The reason for that gap, even though he ran the computer science lab at Xerox PARC, is probably that his philosophy of computing lost out. In a nutshell, he was strongly opposed to tech whose smartness involved making people superfluous.”
-- Diane Coyle * Enlightened Economist *
Table of ContentsPrologue
Introduction: Googleville
Chapter 1: Messy Systems
Chapter 2: The Innovator as a Young Seeker
Chapter 3: Asymmetrical Encounters
Chapter 4: Tabs, Pads, and Boards
Chapter 5: One Hundred Computers per Room
Chapter 6: Retreat
Chapter 7: Tacit Inc.
Chapter 8: The Dangling String
Chapter 9: Smarter Ways to Make Things Smart
Chapter 10: A Form of Worship
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
