George H. Eastman

Philosophy

The Digital Revolution explores how digital algorithms reshape our minds, lives, and society and offers a powerful call to reclaim time, attention, and humanity in an AI-driven world.

Digital algorithms are reshaping our minds and lives, trading convenience for a loss of agency, self, connection, and humanity. The Digital Revolution, based on over a decade of research across multiple fields—including psychology, technology, and philosophy—pursues a holistic approach to answering the question of how digitization affects us and our relation to the world around us.

The Digital Revolution takes the reader on an unexpected journey, starting from the great revolutions of our age and the invention of the first modern computers in the post-World War II era to inside our very own minds, exploring the neural mechanisms of addiction, hypnotic trances and age-old questions around perception versus reality.

Today, despite unprecedented connectivity and access to information, we feel lonelier, adrift in an era that consumes our time and attention. By college, most young people have already spent tens of thousands of hours on screens, immersed in a silent Digital Revolution that alters our lives without protests or barricades. Instead, it has quietly established a subversive foothold in our previously analog lives. You want to put down your phone but can’t. You want to quit social media, yet you hesitate. You want to read a book but keep picking up your phone instead. You feel like time is slipping away. These devices promise to save us time and make life more convenient, but all they do is keep us busy—and not with the tasks we want to do. Though we sense the negative impact, breaking free is difficult.

Despite clear evidence of harm, the people most affected—parents, teachers, children, and adolescents—lack accessible information on this topic. Drawing on George’s long career as a philosopher and educator, this book offers insights from personal experience, tracing technological shifts from the 1930s to today. It aims to empower readers to become intentional participants in this revolution, reclaiming time, connection, and self-awareness. As AI is becoming increasingly dominant in shaping our daily lives, professional endeavors, and social interactions, The Digital Revolution is both a warning and a guide to conscious change.

The Digital Revolution seeks not only to understand this development—what is “artificial intelligence” and how should we understand its role in our lives?—but also suggests how we can maintain human control in a world where digital algorithms set the tone and the pace of work, leisure, communication, consumption and so much more.

Neil Gray

Urban Studies / Capitalism / Philosophy

Forthcoming, ships July 2026

Take Over the City provides the first comprehensive spatial
analysis of Italian operaismo and the extraordinary urban struggles of 1970s Italy.

Take Over the City is the first systemic spatial account of Italian operaismo. Drawing on the Marxist urban theory of Henri Lefebvre and others, the book situates the struggles of operaismo, especially in the 1970s, within an incipient-yet-tendential phase of global urbanization. In doing so, the book draws attention to previously neglected urban struggles in the wider social factory, recognizing these as immanent to the new spatial composition of capital in Italy.

The book argues that these innovative urban struggles carry important lessons for contemporary forms of organization and social conflict in the sphere of social reproduction. They drew attention to, and acted within, a tendency that has only become more entrenched since the 1970s: the centrality of urbanization and real estate to national political economies. If urbanization has become increasingly central for capital accumulation processes, it follows that urban struggle must become increasingly central to anti capitalist struggle. The struggles to ‘Take Over the City’ in 1970s Italy provide an important marker of how this might be done in the current era.

By excavating the urban struggles of 1970s Italy with a spatialized understanding of operaismo’s signature theoretical contribution—class composition—the book provides both an important contribution to radical urban history and a window into how current urban struggles might be theorized. It seeks to both spatialize readings of operaismo through the concept of spatial composition and to radicalize urban theory with Italian autonomist Marxist thought and practice. This should be of interest to those interested in autonomist praxis more generally, and those interested in radical urban history, contemporary urban struggles and
social reproduction.