The Value Crisis: 2. We've Been Here Before

Technology is transforming what we value at breakneck speed. But is this really new?

In this episode, Ros Atkins looks to four moments when earlier technologies forced a reckoning with value: the printing press, which flooded the world with words and upended who got to claim knowledge and authority; the Luddite rebellion, a skilled workforce fighting not technology itself but their own devaluation by it; the scandalous arrival of photography in Victorian England, when images could suddenly be captured, copied and faked; and the dot-com boom and bust of the 1990s, when a generation learned how quickly value can be invented, and lost.

Featuring historian Ada Palmer, technology reporter Brian Merchant, cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins and New Yorker journalist John Cassidy.

A Tempo & Talker production for BBC Radio 4