The
Knowledge
Loom
The Audiobook
The narration is a voice clone of James Burke at forty-one, built from restored 1978 Connections audio — best of three takes per passage, chosen by speaker similarity. Further chapters are being woven. The voice announcing the author's own premature obituary is, we feel, in the spirit of Chapter Ten.
About the Book
How could a Frenchman weaving flowered silk in 1804 have known his punched cards would one day become software?
Nobody planned the talking machine. Nobody ever plans anything — that is the whole story of technology, and nobody told it better than James Burke. A million years ago somebody handed us the first axe, and the deal has never changed: powers beyond your dreams, price beyond your knowing, no returns. The talking machine is the latest axemaker's gift — woven from everything we ever wrote down. And now it's weaving us back.
From silk looms and frog's legs to the Rosetta Stone, a chess-playing hoax, Betty Shannon's parlour game and the end of scarcity itself: a detective story about how we got here, and the first honest look at what we do now that everybody gets the axe.
Twelve chapters, an introduction declared posthumous by its own subject, and an afterword about a postcard. Fact-checked twice; the machine's errors were corrected by the machine, which is either reassuring or the whole problem, depending on which chapter you have reached.
Editions
Full Disclosure
The future is only ever the past, waiting to happen.