Author reading: Martin Collins

Description

Martin Collins, curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, reads from his book A Telephone For the World: Iridium, Motorola, and the Making of a Global Age.

The book explores the story of globalization at a crucial period in U.S. and international history. As the Cold War waned, corporations and nations reoriented toward a new global order in which markets, neoliberal ideology, and the ideal of a borderless world predominated. As a planetary-scale technological system, the Iridium project became emblematic of this shift and of the role of the United States as geopolitical superpower. In its ambition, scope, challenges, and organizing ideas, the rise of Iridium provides telling insight into how this new global condition stimulated a re-thinking of corporate practices—on the factory floor, in culture and knowledge, and in international relations.