For the last few years I have been working to build The Open Book, an open-source e-book reader. While testing the device, I’ve found myself at the intersection of open hardware and open culture. In particular, I have immersed myself in the literature of the public domain: works that have entered the cultural commons, which, in the United States, happens 95 years after their first publication.
These last few years in particular, fiction of the 1910s and 1920s has opened up, and it’s striking how much those decades seem to rhyme with our own: generation-defining respiratory pandemic, staggering wealth inequality, a world teetering on the brink of (and then tipping over into) all-out war, and of course the rising tide of authoritarianism.
Still, the thread that I keep pulling on is the one tied to technology. The years between 1900 and 1930 saw technological advancement unlike anything anyone had seen before. Consider: a child of five in the year 1900 would have grown up in a home lit by gas and kerosene. Powered flight was the stuff of fantasy. The word “radio” would not be uttered for another seven years. If our child lived in New York or Boston, they might have seen a car. But horses ruled the streets, and the defining urban sanitation crisis was one of manure.
By that child’s twentieth birthday, they would be living in a world defined by the Great War. They would have read news from the Western Front, transmitted wirelessly across the Atlantic using Morse code. That news would have told of the airplane’s swift ascent as a weapon of war: from the Wright Brothers’ first seconds-long flight in 1903, to the very first fighter planes in 1915. The initial prototype of a mechanized tank would be built that same year; by 1918, tanks and planes would become decisive factors. The distance from “this technology doesn’t exist” to “this technology wins the war” took three years.
Another fifteen years on, by 1930, that child is thirty-five. They’re more likely than not to have electricity in their home, where they can tune their radio to hear voices from around the world under the glow of incandescent light. Outside, the manure crisis is solved: the streets once roamed by horses now belong to twenty-three million cars. Commercial aviation is a reality, if an exotic one — but imagine! Lindbergh had flown his legendary solo flight from New York to Paris three years prior, and now one could buy a ticket to fly from New York to Los Angeles. The Graf Zeppelin was lifting demonstration tours across the Atlantic. It must have felt as if the whole world was within reach.
It feels in many ways like our present moment, if not for the nature of the change, for its pace: the relentless accelerando that drives the tempo to a point that seems it might break the piano, if not the player. Tim Berners-Lee shared the “WorldWideWeb” project on Usenet in 1991; by 1995, it was remaking culture at 28,800 baud. Speeds doubled, then doubled again. Modems gave way to broadband; desktop workstations became pocket supercomputers that rendered whole product classes obsolete, while putting an infinite scroll of information (and misinformation) into every glowing hand. It took barely more than a decade to go from fiction about loneliness and the perils of dating AI, to a tech CEO bragging about “her”.
Instagram took two and a half years to grow to 100 million users. TikTok reached that milestone in nine months. ChatGPT took sixty days: a November launch that would send universities scrambling to issue emergency academic integrity policies in the spring.
Decade by decade, year by year, sometimes month by month, the landscape seems to shift underfoot. And yet, these seismic forces are not forces of nature. They represent choices made by people — but not always the best people, and not always the best choices. The good news: today, thanks to some of these very same shifts in the landscape, more people than ever have the tools to make different choices: to design, to fabricate, to build, to put something new into the world.
I drew the title of this anthology from the first essay that appears in it, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism. Intoxicated with speed and violence, lionizing masculinity and conflict, convinced that the past had nothing useful to teach us, Marinetti laid out a manifesto that reads like Silicon Valley’s “Move Fast and Break Things” ethos, fully a century before Facebook: a driving, propulsive faith in technological progress no matter the cost. “We stand on the outermost promontory of the centuries!” he wrote. “Why should we look behind us?”
A decade later he would co-write the founding document of Italian Fascism.
The seven pieces in this anthology are writings from the past, meant to inform those who would invent the future. All of them come from those first three decades of the 20th century: that dizzying moment when technology seemed to advance faster than humankind’s ability to reckon with it. They are stories about machines: both the mechanisms we build, and the machinery of society. They are stories of action and of aftermath, of decisive moments and of the quiet times in between.
There are no answers, in this volume, to the question of what we should build and why. But for those of us who do believe the past has something useful to teach us, I hope this anthology shares some of the sensations that were felt the last time we stood at the summit of the world, looked outward, and chose the future we would build.