Dan Hancox (ed.): Fight Back! A Reader on the Winter of Protest (2011)

The first book to be produced by an ‘editorial kettle’ – all seven of its editors are under 30 and have been kettled by the police during 2010 winter protests in United Kingdom. Fight Back! features 350 pages of reports, analysis, images, reflections and overviews on the UK’s winter of protests by 43 authors. It asks: Is this the start of a successful movement against fees and cuts? From a 15-year-old UK Uncut flash-mob activist to a rebel Lib Dem peer – Fight Back! captures both the spirit and arguments of Britain’s winter revolt, bringing together the best reportage and analysis of an extraordinary political moment.

Editorial Kettle: Guy Aitchison, Siraj Datoo, Cailean Gallagher, Laurie Penny, Aaron Peters and Paul Sagar
Published by openDemocracy via OurKingdom, London, February/March 2011
ISBN 978 0 955677 502
340 pages
Licensed under Creative Commons

editor
publisher and more on the protests

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Jon Agar: The Government Machine. A Revolutionary History of the Computer (2003)

In The Government Machine, Jon Agar traces the mechanization of government work in the United Kingdom from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. He argues that this transformation has been tied to the rise of “expert movements,” groups whose authority has rested on their expertise. The deployment of machines was an attempt to gain control over state action—a revolutionary move. Agar shows how mechanization followed the popular depiction of government as machine-like, with British civil servants cast as components of a general purpose “government machine”; indeed, he argues that today’s general purpose computer is the apotheosis of the civil servant.

Over the course of two centuries, government has become the major repository and user of information; the Civil Service itself can be seen as an information-processing entity. Agar argues that the changing capacities of government have depended on the implementation of new technologies, and that the adoption of new technologies has depended on a vision of government and a fundamental model of organization. Thus, to study the history of technology is to study the state, and vice versa.

Publisher MIT Press, 2003
History of Computing series
ISBN 0262012022, 9780262012027
554 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-17)

This Is Tomorrow (1956)

“This Is Tomorrow was a seminal art exhibition in August 1956 at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery, facilitated by curator Bryan Robertson. The core of the exhibition was the ICA Independent Group.

It has become an iconic exhibition notable not only for the arrival of the naming of Pop Art but also as a captured moment for the multi-disciplinary merging of the disciplines of art and architecture.

The exhibition included artists, architects, musicians and graphic designers working together in 12 teams—an example of multi-disciplinary collaboration that was still unusual. Each group took as their starting point the human senses and the theme of habitation.

The exhibition catalogue featured essays by Reyner Banham and Lawrence Alloway. McHale wrote the text for the page Are they Cultured? and it was intended to be featured with the McHale designed collage that got mispaginated in the catalogue.”

Edited by Theo Grosby
Designed by Edward Wright

Commentary: this is tomorrow 2 (2008), James Lingwood (2009).
Reinterpretation (2019)
Wikipedia

HTML (the website is down as of 2019-3-15)