John Markoff

An analysis of the political and cultural forces that gave rise to the personal computer chronicles its development through the people, politics, and social upheavals that defined its time, from a teenage anti-war protester who laid the groundwork for the PC revolution to the imprisoned creator of the first word processing software for the IBM PC. Reprint.

How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

What the Dormouse Said

As robots are increasingly integrated into modern society—on the battlefield and the road, in business, education, and health—Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times science writer John Markoff searches for an answer to one of the most important questions of our age: will these machines help us, or will they replace us? In the past decade alone, Google introduced us to driverless cars, Apple debuted a personal assistant that we keep in our pockets, and an Internet of Things connected the smaller tasks of everyday life to the farthest reaches of the internet. There is little doubt that robots are now an integral part of society, and cheap sensors and powerful computers will ensure that, in the coming years, these robots will soon act on their own. This new era offers the promise of immense computing power, but it also reframes a question first raised more than half a century ago, at the birth of the intelligent machine: Will we control these systems, or will they control us? In Machines of Loving Grace, New York Times reporter John Markoff, the first reporter to cover the World Wide Web, offers a sweeping history of the complicated and evolving relationship between humans and computers. Over the recent years, the pace of technological change has accelerated dramatically, reintroducing this difficult ethical quandary with newer and far weightier consequences. As Markoff chronicles the history of automation, from the birth of the artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation communities in the 1950s, to the modern day brain trusts at Google and Apple in Silicon Valley, and on to the expanding tech corridor between Boston and New York, he traces the different ways developers have addressed this fundamental problem and urges them to carefully consider the consequences of their work. We are on the verge of a technological revolution, Markoff argues, and robots will profoundly transform the way our lives are organized. Developers must now draw a bright line between what is human and what is machine, or risk upsetting the delicate balance between them.

The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

Machines of Loving Grace

Katie Hafner

Profiles computer hackers who overstep ethical boundaries and break the law to penetrate society's most sensitive computer networks.

Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, Revised

Cyberpunk

From one of our greatest chroniclers of technology and society, the definitive biography of iconic serial visionary Stewart Brand, from the Merry Pranksters and the generation-defining Whole Earth Catalog to the marriage of environmental consciousness and hacker capitalism and the rise of a new planetary culture—the story behind so many other stories Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” Steve Jobs’s endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live. The contradictions are striking: A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a through line of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was “Access to Tools”; with rare exceptions he rejected politics for a focus on direct power. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world. Brand's life can be hard to fit onto one screen. John Markoff, also a great chronicler of tech culture, has done something extraordinary in unfolding the rich, twisting story of Brand’s life against its proper landscape. As Markoff makes marvelously clear, the streams of individualism, respect for science, environmentalism, and embrace of Eastern and indigenous thought that flow through Brand’s entire life form a powerful gestalt, a California state of mind that has a hegemonic power to this day. At its best, it is the wellspring for a true planetary consciousness that may be the best hope we humans collectively have.

The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

Whole Earth

From one of our greatest chroniclers of technology and society, the definitive biography of iconic serial visionary Stewart Brand, from the Merry Pranksters and the generation-defining Whole Earth Catalog to the marriage of environmental consciousness and hacker capitalism and the rise of a new planetary culture—the story behind so many other stories Stewart Brand has long been famous if you knew who he was, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” Steve Jobs’s endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live. The contradictions are striking: A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, he went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he was an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a through line of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was “Access to Tools”; with rare exceptions he rejected politics for a focus on direct power. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world. Unlike most people, who make a mark in one field, Brand has a life that can be hard to fit onto one screen. John Markoff, also a great chronicler of tech culture, has done something extraordinary in unfolding the rich, twisting story of Brand’s life against its proper landscape. As Markoff makes marvelously clear, the streams of individualism, respect for science, environmentalism, and embrace of Eastern and indigenous thought that flow through Brand’s entire life form a powerful gestalt, a California state of mind that has a hegemonic power to this day. At its best, it is the wellspring for a true planetary consciousness that may be the best hope we humans collectively have.

Professor John Markoff

Markoff John

Waves of Democracy looks at two centuries of history of democratization as a series of multicontinental episodes in which social movements and elite power holders in many countries converged to reorganize political systems. Democracy is defined and redefined in these episodes. John Markoff examines several ways in which governing elites of national states mimic each other and ways in which social movements and elites interact. There is no other book written for undergraduates that looks at democracy over such a broad sweep of time and across so many countries and cultures.

Social Movements and Political Change

Waves of Democracy

Tsutomo Shimomura

The dramatic true story of the capture of the world's most wanted cyberthief by brilliant computer expert Tsutomu Shimomura, describes Kevin Mitnick's long computer crime spree, which involved millions of dollars in credit card numbers and corporate trade secrets. Reprint. NYT.

The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw - By the Man Who Did It

Takedown

Kathy Sullivan

The Instant Expert's Guide to the Apple Macintosh

Tsutomu Shimomura

Persecución y captura de Kevin Mitnick, el forajido informatico mas buscado de Norteamerica : Una cronica escrita por el hombre que lo capturo

Timothy Tackett

Philip Dawson

Gilbert Shapiro

This pathbreaking work reports on the methods, and some of the results, of a content analysis of the cahiers de doléances, the well-known lists of grievances in which, in 1789, the French people expressed their dissatisfactions with the state of their society and their hopes for a better future. The analysis is an outgrowth of a larger research project, "Quantitative Studies of the French Revolution," conducted by the authors and others over a thirty-year period. The central data of the research for this book are a coding of a national sample of documents representing the views of rural parishes, the Nobility, and the Third Estate. These codes, together with data on the economic, social, and political conditions of the regions of France under the Old Regime and data on political behavior during the revolutionary period, form a computerized data archive to be made available to researchers. The book is in four parts. Part I describes content analysis as a method and its varieties, controversies, and problems. Part II discusses the cahiers and their authenticity and usefulness as a historical source. Part III considers the coding procedures, information about the sample, and studies bearing on the evaluation of the coding process. Part IV, the largest part of the book, presents some of the authors' findings to date, including a summary of the concerns expressed by the nation in 1789, a study of the attitudes toward the monarchy, an analysis of consensus and conflict among the Estates, and the influence of social mobility upon political radicalism. Appendixes provide details of the coding, the national frequencies of many grievance categories, lists of sources of coded cahiers, and maps indicating the data's coverage of France.

A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de Doléances of 1789

Revolutionary Demands

An international computer security expert offers an account of his pursuit of Kevin Mitnick

John Markoff

About

Books

Join the club