The Philosopher of Palo Alto

“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 many ways, the era of rapid technological growth we find ourselves in currently can be traced back to the work of the pioneering computer scientist, Mark Weiser… . Driven by a wealth of relevant source data and deep archival research, Tinnell’s biography offers a thoughtful and in-depth analysis of how Weiser came to influence the direction of technological growth in Silicon Valley during the 1980s and 1990s… . [Tinnell] offers an objective and factual account of Weiser’s life that is meticulously researched and well analyzed.” * Metascience *
“John Tinnell’s book is an excellent study, rich in material and very well narrated… . Today, when communicative AI is becoming increasingly incorporated into everyday life, looking back at the original ideas of ubicomp is incredibly valuable…” * Technology and Culture *
“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.”

“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.”

John Tinnell is director of digital studies and associate professor of English at the University of Colorado Denver. He is the author of Actionable Media: Digital Communication Beyond the Desktop, and he has written for the Los Angeles Times and Boston Review.

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