In this j’accuse, Professor Edwards prosecutes the 20th century for its crimes against time. The major charges include disrupting biological time, mechanizing time, killing eternity, chopping time up, accelerating time, multiplying futures, and enfeebling the past. The primary and most serious charge, however, is that the 20th century occupied the planetary future, colonizing it for its own needs with reckless disregard. By altering characteristics of the Earth itself—in ways likely to endure throughout all future human history and even beyond, into geological time—the 20th century asserted a murderous and tyrannical power over time, far beyond the feeble attempts of any of its predecessors to do the same.

The evidence in his case will reference infrastructures and sociotechnical systems built and spread across the planet during the long 20th century. Among them are electric power, standard time zones, fossil fuels, digital computers, nuclear weapons, and nuclear power. His primary exhibit—connecting all of the others in sometimes unexpected ways—will be the history of meteorology and global climate science. Ironically, the latter willingly participated in these terrible crimes even as it rose up to stop them.

Paul N. Edwards is a professor in the School of Information and the Department of History at the University of Michigan. His research explores the history, politics, and cultural aspects of computers, information infrastructures, and global climate science. Professor Edwards is co-editor (with Geoffrey C. Bowker) of the Infrastructures book series (MIT Press), and he serves on the editorial boards of Big Data & Society: Critical Interdisciplinary Inquiries and Information & Culture: A Journal of History. His most recent book is A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010).

Free and open to the public.

This lecture is part of the Thursday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.