In 1994, Berry co-founded, with Gibby Zobel, the radical newspaper SchNEWS whilst living in Brighton and he was involved in the protests against the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.

In 2000, Berry returned to Brighton to study a Masters in Social and Political Thought and in 2002 a PhD at the University of Sussex (funded by the ESRC).

The aim was to situate their ideas and practices within a broader movement of economic change brought on by the digitalisation of the economy and the shift to a so-called information society.

[11] Considering the book was written in 2011 it is remarkably prescient about the direction that technology has taken with the wide adoption of "streams" as a major form of interface in social media and other software products.

[16][17] More recently Berry is a member of the Internation Collectiv led by the late Bernard Stiegler which addressed the challenges of 21st century climate change and sustainability in relation to imagining a new political economy in a post-computational world.

[20] His recent discussions of explainability have built on this previous work, particularly in relation to artificial intelligence, machine-learning and meaning together with theories of explanation.

[23] The original source code was thought to have been long lost but was discovered in the MIT archives and has been made available for public release by Weizenbaum's family.