Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan traces the shared intellectual and political history of computer scientists, cyberneticists, anthropologists, linguists, and theorists across the humanities as they developed a communication and computational-based theory that grasped culture and society in terms of codes.
The book explores how Progressive Era technocracy and crises of industrial democracy and colonialism influenced early cybernetics and digital media theories. It examines contributions from key theorists and highlights the evolution of various fields, such as structural anthropology and literary semiology, through the collaborative efforts in 1930s MIT and 1960s Paris. Geoghegan presents a fresh perspective on the history of French theory and digital humanities, linking interwar colonial ethnography to Cold War-era scientific developments, emphasizing their transcontinental and political dimensions.