From Gutenberg to Google and on to AI

Before he became chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in 2013, Tom Wheeler started or helped found several companies offering new cable, wireless, and video communications services. He is also a historian with a deep interest in how the events and trends of today reflect—or don’t—what happened in the past.

Contents:

Acknowledgments

Preface

Prologue

Part I: Perspective

1. Connections Have Consequences

Part II: Predicates

2. The Original Information Revolution

3. The First High-Speed Network and the Death of Distance

4. The First Electronic Network and the End of Time

Part III: The Road to Revolution

5. Computing Engines

6. Connected Computing

7. The Planets Most Powerful and Pervasive Platform

Part IV: Our Turn

8. The History We Are Making

9. Connecting Forward

Epilogue

Notes

Index

Sometimes we have to take a step back in order to understand what’s under our noses. With his entertaining account of three historical network revolutions, and the reactions they inspired, Tom Wheeler gives us the tools to understand the one we are living through today—and where it might take us tomorrow.

— Tom Standage, author, The Victorian Internet

A fascinating review of 500 years of new technology and the challenges as well as opportunities of technological change.

— Steve Case, American entrepreneur, founder AOL

Tom Wheeler’s From Gutenberg to Google contains page after page of insight about the unexpected ways in which technologies—from movable type and the telegraph to blockchain—have altered what we know and do. Drawing on his sure-footed command of the history of networks and from his time on the regulatory front lines, Wheeler has written a classic.

— Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania

An entertaining and erudite tour of the great networks that have defined our civilization. Wheeler makes it clear that confronting the technological challenges of our time without the perspective provided by history is much like flying an airplane blindfolded.

— Tim Wu, professor, Columbia Law School; author, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires and The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads