In this episode, Columbia literature curator Melina Moe sits down with historian and curator of NYU’s AI Now Institute and author of A People’s History of Computing in the United States, Joy Lisi Rankin. Melina and Joy discuss urgent questions about the social history of computing; the ethical dilemmas posed by the power of tech industry giants today; and how race, class, and gender factor into online culture.
Melina and Joy also speculate on the paths not taken in computing. Instead of understanding computers as commodities for purchase, for example, computers could have been considered necessary public goods, similar to utilities.
Joy provides fascinating archival stories that shift the paradigms of computer history, like how instant messaging was created as an educational tool decades before AOL popularized it–or how a Minnesota librarian wrote the early software for what became Apple’s music library, but was never paid for it.
Overdue Conversations is a podcast about the ways archives inform our discussions around history, literature, and politics. From digital publishing to reparative justice, climate change to public health, this series of overdue conversations takes archival documents out of the stacks and into the public forum to consider how collecting practices, selective reading, and erasure of past knowledge informs and distorts contemporary debates.
Music is by Poddington Bear via the Free Music Archive used under Creative Commons license.
Overdue tile design by Amy Howden-Chapman. Researched and produced by Melina Moe and Anirbaan Banerjee with assistance from Amanda Martin-Hardin.