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37.96.21.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OBEGK0ojC_sRWy4kfuKKs2kLODCnstkGaSiPd61dyrE/edit#

In 1937, Alan Turing published “On Computable Numbers”. He proposed inventing a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence. Claude Shannon, an MIT graduate student, published a paper showing electrical circuits could execute logical operations using an arrangement of on/off switches. John Vincent Atanasoff, an assistant professor at Iowa State, had an eureka moment crossing the river to Illinois on a long impetuous night drive and conceived the first partly electronic digital computer. Konrad Zuse, a German engineer, finished a prototype for a binary calculator that could read instructions from a punched tape. Howard Aiken wrote a twenty two page memo to his Harvard superiors and executives at IBM making the case that they should fund a modern version of Babbage’s digital machine. William McCabe, Jesuit priest and chair of Saint Louis University English Department ushered a young Canadian, Marshall McLuhan, to start his phD dissertation.

In 1996, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, was writing his first computer programs. The United States Congress had just attempted for the first time to regulate the Internet and take back control. Creative communities were ill prepared in the face of the outbreak of digital technology and the swarm of data.

Now 25 years later, the year 1996 appears as a juncture to understand why a failure of liberal imagination contributed to an assault on liberal democracy. Steward Brand, the Rockford boy, starts his Whole Earth Catalog by the words: “We are gods”. Founder of the first online community The Well, he has come to embody the ideal relationship between information, technology, and community. He influenced the generations of Silicon Valley founders - don’t be evil. Today, we may ask the question: have we followed the gods to hell?

37.96.21. provides a probe into the role of computers in the design, control and making of the public life. The release of historical documents

Bio

Isaiah Sellers is a St. Louis based writer. She weaves together threads of the past with the present, for an unknown future. From cyberpunk, phrack, to media literacy, she writes often about the underground history of St. Louis.