Iain Boal is a social historian of science and technics, affiliated with the University of California and Birkbeck College, London. He is associated with Retort, a group of writers, artists and artisans based for two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is particularly interested in the relations between art, science, and representation. He is a founder of the new field of agnotology (a term he coined), the systematic study of ignorance and the long shadows cast by enlightenment. With James Brook he edited Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (City Lights). He is the author, with T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts, of Retort’s Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso). He is co-editor of West of Eden: Commoning and Utopia in Northern California (PM Press, 2011), and his brief history of the bicycle, The Green Machine, is forthcoming from Notting Hill Editions. In 2005/6 he was a Guggenheim Fellow in Science and Technology.