Image Source: Humans are Free.
BOOK GIVEAWAY EXTENDED TO 29 NOVEMBER 2017.
Today, I am sending out a HUGE thank you to my readers for sticking with this blog since 2010! It's been seven long years. I know how much noise and information there is on the Internet, and I am so grateful to everyone who has stopped here and helped build Histories of Things to Come to 3 million total hits this October.
Writing this blog has been hugely rewarding for me, and I appreciate all the readers who have lurked, commented, donated, and written to me privately. Thank you! To celebrate, I am offering a holiday book giveaway to my readers.
I was going to run this giveaway in December, but after checking the mail service, I'm running it now so that winners receive the books in time for the holidays.
How it Works
Over the next two weeks, from 8 November 2017 (starting 12:00 a.m. UTC) to 29 November 2017 (ending 23:59 p.m. UTC), if you want any of the books listed below, please send me a note in my 'Contact Me' message box in the right hand margin.
In the message, provide your email address and which books you want. If you want more than one book, list which ones in order of your preference (yes, you can list all of them). I won't acknowledge receipt of messages because of time limits but rest assured, the contract form is reliable. Don't leave your request in the comments box below.
For each book, I will put all related emails in a hat and choose one email. If your email gets picked more than once, I'll pick your top choice of book and redraw so someone else gets the other books.
Once I've drawn the winners, I'll email the winners personally and ask for their names and addresses and will mail the book directly to them. In the case of Scott Bembenek's work, I'll pass on the winner's information and his publicist will mail the book directly.
I'll also announce when the winners are chosen on the blog, so you will know if you didn't win.
Privacy: I won't share your e-mail or private information with anyone else. Please indicate when you contact me whether you want your e-mail to be included on my mailing list or not.
The Books
Sorry that these are only books in English - maybe next time I can find non-English publishers who wish to share copies.
- THE COSMIC MACHINE: Scott Bembenek, The Cosmic Machine: The Science that Runs Our Universe and the Story Behind It (San Diego: Zoari, 2017).
ENERGY, ENTROPY, ATOMS, AND QUANTUM MECHANICS form the very foundation of our universe. But how do they govern the world we live in? What was the difficult path to their discovery? Who were the key players that struggled to shape our current understanding?The Cosmic Machine takes you from the earliest scientific inquiries in human history on an exciting journey in search of the answers to these questions. In telling this fascinating story of science, the author Scott Bembenek masterfully guides you through the wonderment of how scientific discoveries (and the key players of those discoveries) shaped the world as we know it today.With its unique blend of science, history, and biographies, The Cosmic Machine provides an easily accessible account without sacrificing the actual science itself. Not only will this book engage, enlighten, and entertain you, it will inspire your passion and curiosity for the world around us.
[From Zoari Press:] Paperback: 358 pagesPublisher: Zoari Press; First edition (August 15, 2017)Language: EnglishISBN-10: 0997934107ISBN-13: 978-0997934106
- OURS TO HACK AND TO OWN: Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider, eds., Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, A New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet (NY: OR Books, 2016).
Real democracy and the Internet are not mutually exclusive. Here, for the first time in one volume, are some of the most cogent thinkers and doers on the subject of the cooptation of the Internet, and how we can resist and reverse the process. The activists who have put together Ours to Hack and to Own argue for a new kind of online economy: platform cooperativism, which combines the rich heritage of cooperatives with the promise of 21st-century technologies, free from monopoly, exploitation, and surveillance.
The on-demand economy is reversing the rights and protections workers fought for centuries to win. Ordinary Internet users, meanwhile, retain little control over their personal data. While promising to be the great equalizers, online platforms have often exacerbated social inequalities. Can the Internet be owned and governed differently? What if Uber drivers set up their own platform, or if a city’s residents controlled their own version of Airbnb? This book shows that another kind of Internet is possible—and that, in a new generation of online platforms, it is already taking shape.Included in this volume are contributions from Michel Bauwens, Yochai Benkler, Francesca Bria, Susie Cagle, Miriam Cherry, Ra Criscitiello, John Duda, Marina Gorbis, Karen Gregory, Seda Gürses, Steven Hill, Dmytri Kleiner, Vasilis Kostakis, Brendan Martin, Micky Metts, Kristy Milland, Mayo Fuster Morell, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Rachel O’Dwyer, Janelle Orsi, Michael Peck, Carmen Rojas, Douglas Rushkoff, Saskia Sassen, Juliet Schor, Palak Shah, Tom Slee, Danny Spitzberg, Arun Sundararajan, Astra Taylor, Cameron Tonkinwise, McKenzie Wark, and Caroline Woolard.Publication January 12, 2017 • 252 pagesPaperback ISBN 978-1-682190-62-3 • E-book 978-1-682190-63-0
- BEAUTIFUL RISING: Juman Abujbara, Andrew Boyd, Dave Mitchell, and Marcel Taminato, eds., Beautiful Rising: Creative Resistance from the Global South (NY: OR Books, 2017).
In the struggle for freedom and justice, organizers and activists have often turned to art, creativity, and humor. In this follow-up to the bestselling Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, Beautiful Rising showcases some of the most innovative tactics used in struggles against autocracy and austerity across the Global South.Based on face-to-face jam sessions held in Yangon, Amman, Harare, Dhaka, Kampala and Oaxaca, Beautiful Rising includes stories of the Ugandan organizers who smuggled two yellow-painted pigs into parliament to protest corruption; the Burmese students’ 360-mile long march against undemocratic and overly centralized education reforms; the Lebanese “honk at parliament” campaign against politicians who had clung to power long after their term had expired; and much more.Now, in one remarkable book, you can find the collective wisdom of more than a hundred grassroots organizers from five continents. It’s everything you need for a DIY uprising of your own.272 pages • Illustrated throughout with black-and-white photographsPaperback ISBN 978-1-682191-12-5 • E-book 978-1-682191-13-2
- WHEN GOOGLE MET WIKILEAKS: Julian Assange, When Google Met WikiLeaks (NY: OR Books, 2014).
In June 2011, Julian Assange received an unusual visitor: the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, arrived from America at Ellingham Hall, the country residence in Norfolk, England where Assange was living under house arrest.For several hours the besieged leader of the world’s most famous insurgent publishing organization and the billionaire head of the world’s largest information empire locked horns. The two men debated the political problems faced by society, and the technological solutions engendered by the global network—from the Arab Spring to Bitcoin. They outlined radically opposing perspectives: for Assange, the liberating power of the Internet is based on its freedom and statelessness. For Schmidt, emancipation is at one with US foreign policy objectives and is driven by connecting non-Western countries to American companies and markets. These differences embodied a tug-of-war over the Internet’s future that has only gathered force subsequently.When Google Met WikiLeaks presents the story of Assange and Schmidt’s encounter. Both fascinating and alarming, it contains an edited transcript of their conversation and extensive, new material, written by Assange specifically for this book, providing the best available summary of his vision for the future of the Internet.Publication September 18, 2014 • 223 pagesPaperback ISBN 978-1-939293-57-2 • E-book ISBN 978-1-939293-58-9
Book review: "When Google Met WikiLeaks - "clearest indication yet that the Internet has been militarized" http://t.co/aNitAM5xiK— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) September 6, 2014
- JERUSALEM: Alan Moore, Jerusalem (London: Knockabout, 2016).
Alan Moore says of his work:In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England’s Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap tower blocks. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district’s narrative among its saints, kings, prostitutes and derelicts a different kind of human time is happening, a soiled simultaneity that does not differentiate between the petrol-coloured puddles and the fractured dreams of those who navigate them. Fiends last mentioned in the Book of Tobit wait in urine-scented stairwells, the delinquent spectres of unlucky children undermine a century with tunnels, and in upstairs parlours labourers with golden blood reduce fate to a snooker tournament.Disappeared lanes yield their own voices, built from lost words and forgotten dialect, to speak their broken legends and recount their startling genealogies, family histories of shame and madness and the marvellous. There is a conversation in the thunderstruck dome of St. Paul’s cathedral, childbirth on the cobblestones of Lambeth Walk, an estranged couple sitting all night on the cold steps of a Gothic church-front, and an infant choking on a cough drop for eleven chapters. An art exhibition is in preparation, and above the world a naked old man and a beautiful dead baby race along the Attics of the Breath towards the heat death of the universe.An opulent mythology for those without a pot to piss in, through the labyrinthine streets and pages of Jerusalem tread ghosts that sing of wealth and poverty; of Africa, and hymns, and our threadbare millennium. They discuss English as a visionary language from John Bunyan to James Joyce, hold forth on the illusion of mortality post-Einstein, and insist upon the meanest slum as Blake’s eternal holy city. Fierce in its imagining and stupefying in its scope, this is the tale of everything, told from a vanished gutter.“The endgame of epic modernism. There is nothing quite like this book in scale and bustling frenzy. Gamble everything. Read Jerusalem and you’ll never emerge in the same place.” – Iain Sinclair1200 pages 3 paperbacks in slipcase | ISBN isbn 9780861662548
Additional Thanks:
I want to thank Katie Schnack at Smith Publicity and Emma at OR Books. OR Books publishes the top names in digital dissidence and cutting-edge analyses of the social, political, and philosophical impacts of technological innovation.
