R420.00
In A Will for the Machine, Mark Sanders examines South Africa’s entry into the computer age during the 1960s and 1970s, showing how automation and computerisation intersected with apartheid at its height. Tracing connections to earlier struggles over mechanisation in mining and telephony, Sanders also considers responses in literature and art, from Miriam Tlali and JM Coetzee to William Kentridge and Handspring Puppet Company. Insightful and original, the book is a compelling study of technology, labour, ethics and power in South African history.
Description
In A Will for the Machine, Mark Sanders outlines South Africa’s entry into the computer age in the 1960s and 1970s and explains how it coincided with apartheid’s zenith. The government viewed automation and computerisation as one way of barring black Africans from skilled work and reserving it for whites. Sanders unpacks this peculiar history, relates it to early twentieth-century struggles around mechanisation in local mining and telephony, and analyses responses by the writers Miriam Tlali and JM Coetzee, as well as the artists William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company. Showing how the arts realise ideas about the ethics and politics of automation, Sanders contributes to debates about locally divergent understandings of computer technology and human–computer interaction.