Technoprophets

Here is a list of "technoprophets" and resources compiled by Wendy Robinson. (Reposted with permission, with minor additions.)

Elder Statesmen
Technoprophet Intellectuals
Prominent Civil Libertarians
Legal Luminaries
Public Officials
Media Convergence Entrepreneurs
Design and Interface Gurus
Hypermedia Visionaries
Postmodernists
Dystopians and Neo-Luddites
Cyberpunk and Science Fiction Writers
Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence Pioneers

When compiling the list, my aim was to be more representative than comprehensive. I've designated as "technoprophets" those thinkers and innovators:

who've significantly contributed to new technology and emerging media, thus achieving stature that transcends their respective fields,
who've published important books and articles, delivered important speeches, or otherwise produced work that can be accessed and reviewed,
who've changed how we communicate or changed our understanding of how we communicate,
who've produced work that is taken seriously by their peers, from whom they've earned (perhaps grudging) respect.

Additional suggestions are welcome. You may want to check out:

cnet's Movers and Shakers (and for fun, be your own technoprophet by filling in Don Steinberg's Predict-O-Matic)
Digerati
Internet Pioneers collected for Electronic Information Sources
Forbes Digital Thinkers(use pull-down menu to see names)
Wired Bunch
Celebrities in Cognitive Science
Interviewscollected at the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies
David Donnelly's Media Futures Archive quotes numerous technoprophets
Great Thinkers and Visionaries, many of whom could be considered technoprophets
See also Wired's special edition: Scenarios: The Future of the Future

Elder Statesmen

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
Eminent German Marxist literary critic, Benjamin is important to cyberculture because of his influential essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

Jacques Ellul (1912-94)
French sociologist, philosopher, and theologian, Ellul held that machines dehumanize society. His most important book is The Technological Society in which he argued that technology has become sacred in modern society. A selection of Ellul's quotes is available.

Harold Innis (1894-52)
Canadian economist Innis is primarily known for being the teacher of Marshall McLuhan and for the books written toward the end of his life on the role of communication in culture, such as Empire and Communications, The Bias of Communication, and Changing Concepts of Time.

Marshall McLuhan (1911-80)
Patron saint of Wired and cyberculture, McLuhan is best known for The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, and War and Peace in the Global Village. He coined the expression, "The medium is the message."

Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)

A philosopher and sociologist, Mumford is best known for Technics and Civilization, which is both a history and analysis of the normative role of mechanization on society.

Norbert Weiner
A child genius, Weiner became a mathematics professor at MIT who led interdisciplinary research in the fabled Research Laboratory of Electronics, which included among its members Jerome Weisner (who went on to co-found the MIT Media Lab among many other accomplishments). Generally considered to be the "father" of the cyborg, Weiner wrote Cybernetics and was a respected voice for the humane use of technology.

Technoprophet Intellectuals

Richard Dawkins
A zoologist who has developed a theory of evolution that encompasses digital code, in his most recent book, River Out of Eden, Dawkins describes "memes," organic ideas. See his interview in Wired, "Revolutionary Evolutionist."

George Gilder
Harvard-educated economist and political theorist, Gilder writes on telecommunications and the future of technology in Forbes ASAP and serves as an adviser to Newt Gingrich. See his forthcoming Telecosm. An archive of Gilderania is available.

Kevin Kelly
Executive editor of Wired, Kelly recently published Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines.

Nicholas Negroponte
Trained as an architect, Negroponte is the co-founder of the Media Lab at MIT and author of Being Digital. See his back-page columns in Wired.

Paul Saffo
Saffo is an attorney, professor, journalist, and director of the Institute of the Future, a management consulting firm based in Menlo Park, CA. See this interview with Saffo.

Peter Schwartz
Co-founder of the Global Business Network (GBN), an organization of business futurists and scenario planners influenced by the "post-capitalist" management theory of Peter Drucker, Schwartz is the author of The Art of the Long View.

Alvin Toffler
Author of Future Shock, The Third Wave, and the final volume in the trilogy Powershift. He often collaborates with his wife, Heidi, and is known for his affiliations with both Al Gore and Newt Gingrich. See his interview in Wired with Peter Schwartz.

Prominent Civil Libertarians

Hal Abelson
MIT professor in electrical engineering and computer science, Abelson chaired the 1996 Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (CPF), sponsored by the CPSR. Abelson ordinarily teaches the well-regarded Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier, but currently he's on sabbatical at the Hewlett-Packard Lab in Palo Alto.

John Perry Barlow
A retired Wyoming cattle rancher and a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, Barlow co-founded the EFF. A collection of his writings is available. See his Time magazine profile: "Thinking Locally, Acting Globally: An Ex-Cowboy and Rock Lyricist Turned Internet Activist Takes on the Censors of Cyberspace."

Stuart Brand
A co-founder of the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) and the GBN, Brand serves on the boards of the Santa Fe Institute and the EFF. His books include The Media Lab and How Buildings Learn.

David Chaum
Founder and chair of Amsterdam-based DigiCash, Chaum is an expert in the field of cryptography, with many publications that argue the importance of anonymous monetary transactions online. Chaum previously taught in the business school of NYU and was interviewed by Wired.

Esther Dyson
Dyson publishes the influential Silicon Valley trade newsletter Release 1.0, chairs the EFF, and served on the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIIAC), including serving as co-chair of its Information Privacy and Intellectual Property subcommittee. Half-Swiss, half-British, Dyson studied economics at Harvard. She's active with business development in central and Eastern Europe through her company EDventure Holdings.

Mitch Kapor
After founding and steering the development of Lotus Corporation (recently sold to IBM), which produces the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3, the PC revolution's "killer app," Kapor retired, co-founded the EFF, and served on the NIIAC. He currently teaches at MIT but his home page "is taking a rest."

Howard Rheingold
Roving cyber-journalist and member of the WELL, Rheingold has written a number of books on the computer revolution including Tools for Thought, Virtual Reality, and The Virtual Community. See also his Tomorrow columns. Rheingold currently is starting up Electric Minds.

Phil Zimmerman
Zimmerman developed Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) a method of encryption that uses a public and a private key. He ran afoul of the FBI, which classifies some forms of encryption as munitions, which cannot be exported over state or national boundaries. After a highly publicized investigation, all charges were dropped in Jan. Zimmerman is a hero among those who favor online anonymity. He recently received the EFF's Pioneer Award and the CPSR's Norbert Weiner Award "for excellence in promoting the responsible use of technology." Zimmerman is the chair and chief technology officer of Pretty Good Privacy, Inc.

Legal Luminaries

Anne Wells Branscomb
Branscomb is a communications and computer lawyer and professor at Harvard. The author of Who Owns Information?, she recently edited the Emerging Law on the Electronic Frontier issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (JCMC).

Phil Dubois
A solo practitioner based in Denver, Dubois's clients have included Phil Zimmerman.

Mike Godwin
House counsel for the EFF and formerly a journalist and computer consultant, Godwin's writings are collected online.

Paul Goldstein
Goldstein teaches intellectual property law at Sanford University and is part of the Stanford Law and Technology Policy Center. He wrote Copyright's Highway.

Andrew Good

A partner in Silverglate & Good in Boston, Good specializes in criminal defense and civil liberties law. He worked on the David LaMacchia case. Good is a member of the American Bar Association Task Force on Technology and Law Enforcement.

M. Ethan Katsh
A law professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Katsch's main area of expertise is law and computer technology. He wrote Law in a Digital World and The Electronic Media and the Transformation of Law.

Lance Rose
Rose is an attorney with Lewis and Roca in Phoenix, who previously was based in New Jersey, where he handled a variety of new technology cases. The author of NetLaw, Rose writes "Legally Online," a column in Boardwatch, perhaps the longest lived of Net-based print publications, and regularly contributes to Wired.

Pamela Samuelson
Samuelson wrote "The Copyright Grab," a powerful critique of the White Paper on Intellectual Property. A visiting professor of law at Cornell and an EFF fellow, she's also a contributing editor of Communications of the ACM, for which she writes a regular column, "Legally Speaking."

Lawrence Tribe
Author of the now classic "The Constitution in Cyberspace," delivered at the first CPF conference in 1991, Tribe is a professor of Constitutional law at Harvard who wrote On Reading the Constitution.

Public Officials

Bill Clinton
The good news is that construction of the National Information Infrastructure (NII - the GII is the Global Information Infrastructure) began during President Clinton's administration, and with the passage of the Telecom Act of 1996, universal service and media convergence may be more than a nice idea. The (arguable) bad news is that the cost has been the Communications Decency Act (CDA), the Clipper Chip scare, and the White Paper on Intellectual Property. See Brock Meeks's mixed review of the White House's Cyber Rights efforts in the Oct Wired.

John Gibbons
Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the White House, Gibbons co-chairs the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology and manages the National Science and Technology Council. He earned a doctorate in physics from Duke University and previously held high governmental offices in energy conservation and the environment. The still alive-and-kicking Clipper Chip was initiated by the OSTP and the National Security Agency.

Newt Gingrich
Gingrich is Speaker of the House, a techno-enthusiast, and founder of the Progress and Freedom Foundation. "From Virtuality to Reality" captures this former West Georgia College history professor's interest in info-economics. See also his interview with Esther Dyson in Wired, a conversation between Gingrich and John Perry Barlow Barlow in George, and Yahoo's pointers.

Al Gore
Vice President Gore is the architect of the Information Superhighway. See his speech delivered at the Superhighway Summit in Los Angeles in 1994. See also Wired's "The Making of the President 2000" on the Gore-Gingrich futurist battle.

Orrin Hatch
Republican senator from Utah, Hatch served on the WGIP and chairs the Committee on the Judiciary. An advocate of the CDA, last summer he supported a bill that sought to remove control of copyright from the Library of Congress and create a new entity that combines all IP in one office administered by the White House, such as a revamped Patent and Trademark office. The bill has been postponed.

Reed Hundt
Hundt chairs the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is undergoing enormous changes and challenges following the passage of the Telecommunications Act earlier this year. He attended Yale School of Law with the future President, and, in private practice before his appointment, handled cases involving telecommunications and emerging technologies. See Hundt's Internet FAQ.

Mickey Kantor
Secretary of the Department of Commerce, Kantor chairs the President's Information Infrastructure Task Force. See the first Leveraging Cyberspace Conference, held in early Oct. Kantor replaced Ron Brown, former Commerce Secretary, who died tragically in a plane crash last April.

Patrick Leahy
Democratic senator from Vermont, known as the "cyber-senator" and an environmentalist, Leahy was one of the first members of Congress to get an e-mail address, set up a home page, and obtain a PGP key. He was a member of the WGIP and a founding member of the Congressional Internet Caucus, which initiated VoteNet '96. Leahy has been an outspoken opponent of the Clipper Chip, including the latest initiative, and the CDA.

Bruce Lehman
Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Commissioner of Patent and Trademarks, Lehman chaired the Working Group on Intellectual Property (WGIP), which submitted the White Paper on IP. Before his public service, Lehman was an attorney specializing in intellectual property and new technology.

Media Convergence Entrepreneurs

Marc Andreessen
Gen-X wunderkind co-founder (with Jim Clark) and senior VP of Netscape Communications, Andreessen "developed the idea for the NCSA Mosaic browser for the Internet while he was an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois and a staff member at the university's National Center for Supercomputing Applications." See "Why Bill Gates Wants To Be the Next Marc Andreessen," in Wired.

Michael Eisner
Chairman and CEO of Walt Disney Co., Eisner is the nation's highest paid executive and tops most lists of movers and shakers in corporate media convergence.

Larry Ellison
CEO of Oracle, Ellison pioneered the idea of the $500 "Net PC." He's forged alliances with Apple, IBM, Netscape, and Sun to set standards for the nonproprietary Web access device.

Bill Gates
The wealthiest private individual in the world for the second year in a row according to Forbes, Gates is co-founder (with Paul Allen), chairman, and CEO of Microsoft. His speeches and columns are available. Among his many other accomplishments, Gates founded and owns Corbis, which has pioneered the licensing of digital images. See also Yahoo's Gates pointers.

Andy Grove
Founder, president, and CEO of Intel, the microprocessor chip company, Grove is an industry legend who has written widely on engineering and management, and who currently teaches at Stanford Graduate School of Business. His most recent book is One on One with Andy Grove. George Gilder has written about Grove in Microcosm and Telecosm.

Steve Jobs
Charismatic co-founder (with Steve Wozniak) of Apple, Jobs led the development team that created the Macintosh, the first commercial GUI personal commuter, based on R&D taking place at Xerox PARC. Jobs went on to found NeXT and Pixar. See his interview in Wired.

Bill Joy
Co-founder and research VP of Sun Microsystems, Joy significantly contributed to the "open systems" model of the Internet and is a member of the GBN.

Edward McCracken
Chair and CEO of Silicon Graphics (founded by Jim Clark), McCracken co-chaired the NIIAC, which advised the Clinton administration on the development of the NII and GII. He's received many awards and honors, including the President's National Medal of Technology.

Nathan Myhrvold
VP of research and online development at Microsoft, Myhrvold is the software behemoth's "resident genius." After earning a doctorate in theoretical/mathematical physics at Princeton, he studied with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University, where he conducted research on cosmology and quantum physics. A board member of the Institute for Advanced Study and a member of the NIIAC, Myhrvold is also known for his culinary skill.

Steven Spielberg
Perhaps Hollywood's most powerful filmmaker and the founder-owner of Amblin Entertainment, Spielberg is also one-third of DreamWorks SKG, which has joined with Microsoft to form an interactive family entertainment company, initially called DreamWorks Interactive.

Design and Interface Gurus

Walter Bender
Directs the News in the Future consortium at MIT's Media Lab.

Douglas Engelbart
Founder of the Bootstrap Institute at Stanford and former head of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), legendary inventor of "the mouse, display editing, windows, cross file editing, outline processing," and developer of hypermedia. Englebart developed the prototype of ARPANET.

Alan Kay
A fellow in the Apple Research Labs, Kay "is best known for the idea of personal computing, the conception of the intimate laptop computer, and the inventions of the now ubiquitous overlapping window interface and modern object-oriented programming," worked at Xerox PARC, where he was instrumental in the creation of ARPANET, and later joined Atari as chief scientist.

Robert Lucky
Bellcore and Yahoo's pointers to Bell Labs, wrote Silicon Dreams.

Bob Metcalf
Inventor of the Ethernet, the most used local area network protocol. Metcalf is executive correspondent for InfoWorld and vice president of technology for International Data Group. He received an EFF Pioneer Award in 1996.

William Mitchell
Dean of the School of Architecture at MIT and author of City of Bits, Mitchell has taught with Mitch Kapor.

Don Norman
Apple VP of R&D, the Advanced Technology Group, who wrote Things that Make Us Smart.

Bruce Tognazzini
Former Apple interface designer, now at Sun who wrote Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design.

Edward Tufte
Professor of political science, statistics, computer science, and graphic design at Yale, Tufte's award-winning books include The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information, which he publishes himself through Graphics Press.

Terry Winograd
Winograd directs the Project on People, Computers, and Design at Stanford, where he works on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The author of several books, he recently published Bringing Design to Software. Winograd is a founding member of the CPSR.

Hypermedia Visionaries

See also the Voice of the Shuttle's Technology of Writing page, Michael Shumate's Hyperizons, IATH's Hypermedia resources, and Yahoo's Hypermedia pointers.

Tim Berners-Lee
While working at CERN, Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. He currently directs the World Wide Web Consortium. See his talks and an interview with Technology Review.

Jay David Bolter
Storyspace at Eastgate Systems.

Vannevar Bush
"As We May Think" (1945) in The Atlantic Monthly.

George Landow
Professor at Brown in the English and Art History departments, see his books, Hypertext and Hyper/Text/Theory. See also Hypertext at Brown.

Ted Nelson, inspired by Bush and Englebart, Project Xanadu.

Stan VanDerBeek, Multimedia pioneer, film maker and visionary. See documentary Visual Velocity, produced by Dr.David Donnelly, ddonnelly@uh.edu

Postmodernists

See also my Postmodern pointers, Postmodern Culture's Suggested Readings, Speed's list of Places to Go, and this Postmodern Index.

Jean Baudrillard
French theorist and author of Simulations and America, Baudrillard is the most important postmodernist to write on issues essential to digital culture.

Oscar Gandy
Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Gandy writes on the role of the Panopticon (building on Michel Foucault, who built on Jeremy Bentham and George Orwell) in postmodern, networked society. He recently published The Panoptic Sort.

Donna Haraway
Professor in the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz, Haraway has published numerous pieces on feminism and the cyborg, including Simians, Cyborgs, and Women and Primate Visions.

Sadie Plant
Director of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at University of Warwick in Great Britain, Plant is a professor and performance artist who writes on postmodernism and cyberculture. Her book, The Most Radical Gesture, is about the Situationist International, a group led by Guy Debord of which Baudrillard was a member and with which Jean-Francois Lyotard was closely associated.

Sandy Stone
Cultural critic, performance artist, and professor in the radio-television-film department at the University of Texas at Austin where she directs the Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory, Stone recently published The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. In Nov, she'll appear with Baudrillard at Chance in Nevada.

Sherry Turkle
Turkle is a professor of sociology at MIT who uses French postmodern theory to explore the construction of identity in computer-mediated environments. She recently published Life on the Screen and the earlier The Second Self. See her interview in Wired.

Dystopians and Neo-Luddites

See this description of the Luddites and Yahoo's pointers to the Neo-Luddites.

Sven Bikerts
Bikerts wrote the well-received Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. A literary critic, he eloquently argues that we're losing our humanity as we lose the purity of our language when we leave the written word behind and accept electronic substitutes. His elegy is a plea to readers and fellow appreciators of the book not to let it "die." Curiously the very destabilizing that Bikerts finds threatening is what the hypermedia-postmodernists celebrate.

Guy Debord
Leader of the Situationist International and mentor to Baudrillard, Debord's influential Society of the Spectacle argues that society is increasingly becoming subordinated to capitalist interests through the mollifying and deeply fascinating power of the spectacular and television-mediated communication. We've come to accept the unreal as real, and in the process we've developed "false consciousness." Debord comes out of the leftist tradition of futurism, surrealism, and Dada. Active during and perhaps instrumental in fomenting the 1968 student demonstrations in Paris, he committed suicide in 1994.

Neil Postman
Chair of the department of Culture and Communication at NYU, through his books such as Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly, Postman argues that we're so suffused with media that we no longer understand what is important in life, which is basic human values and personal interaction.

Clifford Stoll
An astrophysicist and systems security analyst who wrote about his experiences with tracking down a hacker in The Cuckoo's Egg, Stoll, who now takes the time to smell the roses, recently published Silicon Snake Oil, which explains how we're being hoodwinked into participating in content-less virtual culture in which to be online is coming to mean simply being, existing. He urges users to "just say no."

Stephen Talbott
In The Future Does Not Compute, in the tradition of Ellul (but only superficially Debord), Talbott argues that we're passively letting machines take over our lives and substitute a false reality for "real" reality. Rather than a tool to improve humankind's existence, computers are subjecting us to their limited capacity. In other words, computers are "dumbing down" society (for instance, computers are incapable of intuition). Talbott is a senior editor at O'Reilly and Associates.

Unabomber
Perhaps the most notorious Neo-Luddite, the Unabomber is an anti-technology terrorist whose anarchic tactics have included serial murder. In April, the FBI arrested Ted Kaczynski, who is charged on numerous counts for crimes attributed to the Unabomber. His legal battles are still unfolding. See the " Unabomber Manifesto."

Langdon Winner
Political science professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Science and Technology Studies, Winner argues for the political mediation of technology, which should not be allowed to overrun society without checks and balances. His books include Autonomous Technology, The Whale and the Reactor, and Democracy in a Technological Society. He contributes a regular column, "The Culture of Technology," in Technology Review. See "Who Will We Be in Cyberspace?"

Cyberpunk and Science Fiction Writers