Little Blue Dot
How the Global Positioning System Shaped the Modern World
-
- ¥1,600
発行者による作品情報
In this thrilling and utterly unique work of narrative non-fiction, Katherine Dunn explores the acute vulnerability of the GPS satellite system – in a book that lifts the lid on the invisible connections of the globe, from the space race to the phone in our pockets
This is the story of the Global Positioning System, the network of U.S. government satellites that encircle the earth: a vast web that, in a matter of decades, has transformed the way we understand space and time, making us critically dependent on vulnerable technology we often forget is even there.
It is a system that was conceived of as a military product designed for war, but which has since evolved into a vital everyday tool that tells us where we are and when at any given point. But its use doesn’t stop there: GPS has transformed our navigation systems and our global trade, our farms and our supermarkets, our stop lights, banking networks, and our energy systems. It overturned online dating, exercise regimens, travel planning and takeaways. It reshaped our daily lives, and then it transformed us. When GPS took away our familiarity with getting lost, it also stripped us of our ability to hide – turning our place in the world into a mappable, knowable entity, and put us, a blinking blue dot on a screen, at its centre.
In this thrilling, page-turning work of narrative non-fiction that touches on tech, geopolitics, international relations and economics – Katherine Dunn explores the acute vulnerability of an essential global system that touches all our lives. With echoes of Kleptopia, The Fifth Risk and Prisoners of Geography, as well as echoes of Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flynn and Entangled Life by Merlion Sheldrake in the way it exposes a hidden, esoteric system that we all rely on – this is a book that lifts the lid on the invisible connections of the globe, from the space race to the phone in our pockets.
Reviews
It’s the invisible network that runs our world. The story of the Global Positioning System is the story of modern life itself. In Little Blue Dot, Katherine Dunn tells the explosive, untold history of the twentieth century’s most important technology. A gripping narrative of spies, scientists, and the secret history of how we came to map the world. You’ll never look at that little blue dot the same way again. – Bradley Hope, co-author of BILLION DOLLAR WHALE and BLOOD AND OIL
'The story of how you came to have, in your pocket, a way of knowing where you are, wherever you are, is an epic of human ingenuity. With pace, verve, and an eye for an illuminating anecdote, Katherine Dunn is the perfect guide to the greatest revolution in navigation since the age of sail.' Tom Whipple
About the author
Katherine Dunn is a business reporter and editor based in London. She has worked at Fortune, S&P Global, The Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones, and the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, where she worked on the Oxford Climate Journalism Network, an international network to help improve climate journalism worldwide. She lives in London. This is her first book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Dunn recaps the invention and expansion of GPS in this riveting debut history. Starting with the use of radio to guide bombing runs during WWII and the earliest satellite networks, Dunn traces the development of the technology through advancements and crisis points, such as a period in the 1970s when competing U.S. military networks were forced to combine, birthing the modern American GPS. (Today, competing systems exist in Europe, China, Russia, and elsewhere.) While noting that the incentives and pressures to perfect satellite mapping were mainly military—such as the failure of U.S. bombing raids over Vietnam to hit their targets—or emerged as a result of catastrophes, such as the the Exxon Valdez disaster, Dunn also spotlights how GPS innovation was often the cumulative result of the efforts of passionate seekers, like amateur astronomer Charlie M. Noble, whose Dallas planetarium, staffed by kid volunteers, was among those tasked by NASA with tracking early satellites in the 1950s. Painting GPS as a trial run for other socially destabilizing technologies, such as AI, Dunn notes that in the past few years, GPS systems have become vulnerable, with an exponential rise in efforts to disrupt them through blocking and spoofing, and the emergence of new competing systems like Starlink's mesh network. Readers will find this a fascinating account of a singular technology that changed humanity's relationship to the world.
