Democracy
v the machine: the birth of the digital age and the warnings that were ignored
Many
hoped that the march of technology would usher in an egalitarian utopia – but
some foresaw the threat it would pose to liberal society. Why did nobody
listen?
By Jill
Lepore
Tue 18
Aug 2026 05.00 BST
One of
the stranger things about this dizzying, headlong moment in time is that it
doesn’t have much of a past. Everything is about the future of this, the future
of that: the future of work, the future of humanity, the future of the planet.
It’s as if everyone is screaming (some ecstatically, most terror-stricken):
robots are taking over the world! Meanwhile, you can’t put down your phone,
unplug, delete your AI apps, tell Zoom to piss off; it feels as if you are
racing toward something, and can’t stop, or look back, or think straight.
But of
course this weird moment in history does have a past. It comes from somewhere.
It wasn’t inevitable. Things could have turned out differently. They still can.
And if you look back, one thing you’ll see is that a lot of people saw this all
coming. They foresaw our present when it was still the future. They thought it
might turn out fabulously, a computer utopia. And they worried it might turn
out disastrously. Above all, they issued warning after warning about the rise
of what I call the artificial state, the replacement of the liberal democratic
nation-state, the consent of the governed, with the rule of people by machines.
They warned of a future in which democratic deliberation would be replaced by
prediction by calculation, the public sphere would be supplanted by data-driven
commerce, and drones would take the place of the demos. Why didn’t anyone
listen?
Between
the 1950s and the 1980s, computers got smaller, faster, cheaper and more
powerful; computer languages became more sophisticated; and electronic data,
once a molehill, became a mountain. As data processing and general-purpose
computers moved from the military to industry, business and medicine, sizeable
chunks of public life became automated, driven by computers, calculations,
networks and algorithms that did the political work of rallying support,
running campaigns, communicating with constituents and crafting policy,
especially in the world’s wealthiest nations.
The
adoption and diffusion of such technologies led to wild-eyed speculation about
their possible social and political consequences, a discussion that,
characteristically, ricocheted between dreams of a technological utopia and
fears of an artificial state.
In 1981,
for instance, the Japanese sociologist Yoneji Masuda, a theorist of what he
called “information society”, predicted the arrival of either a computopia that
would bring about the eradication of all distinctions of class and nation and
“a symbiosis in which man and nature can live together in harmony”, or a
compudystopia that he called an “automated state”: government by machine. Yet
the two possible futures had much in common, since the path toward either had
already led humans “to neglect the need for coexistence with nature, while our
impact on nature has grown immeasurably”.
A turning
point in the story of the automated state had come in 1958, when a team of
American researchers and ad men built a machine that they claimed could both
predict and influence voting behaviour. That year, a landmark conference on the
“mechanisation of thought processes” took place at the National Physical
Laboratory in Teddington, near London. Speakers included French, Israeli,
Russian and Hungarian scientists, and they talked of a future in which
computers would one day compose music, resolve legal disputes, control air
traffic, conduct surgery and, in the administration of government, replace not
only clerks but executives.
In New
York, Edward L Greenfield, the head of a Madison Avenue advertising firm,
drafted a proposal for what would become known as a People Machine. Greenfield
proposed to compile hundreds of thousands of punch cards – election returns and
public opinion surveys and census data – to build an “information bank” that
could sort voters by types and their opinions by issues. “There is nothing
mysterious about this on the surface, the input to the machine being the
information about real individuals obtained in surveys”, Greenfield and the MIT
political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool wrote in 1958. But “once this
information is inside the high speed storage facilities of the machine, it is a
different world”. The machine would operate as a “macroscope” that could
simulate the whole of the US electorate.
The next
year, Greenfield and Pool and IBM’s Alex Bernstein formed a company called the
Simulmatics Corporation. By “simulmatics”, they meant the automated simulation
of human intelligence. They believed they had invented “the A-bomb of the
social sciences”.
Their
first client was the Democratic National Committee. In 1959, the DNC hired
Simulmatics to run simulations on an artificial electorate and tell the party’s
nominee what to say, to whom, and when. Not everyone was enthusiastic. “I
shudder at the implication for public leadership of the notion … that a man
shouldn’t say something until it is cleared with the machine,” wrote the
historian Arthur Schlesinger.
After
John F Kennedy won the nomination, his campaign hired Simulmatics to run
predictions on an IBM 704. When Kennedy won, many in the press attributed the
victory to Simulmatics’ People Machine. As the New York Herald Tribune put it,
“a big, bulky monster called a ‘Simulmatics’” had been Kennedy’s “secret
weapon”.
Simulmatics
went on to new campaigns, heralded by the press. But the People Machine turned
out to have been ahead of its time. In 1970 Simulmatics went bankrupt, unable
to find enough paying clients for its services. The problem wasn’t the
computers, or the model. The problem was an insufficiency of data. When
Bernstein met with book and magazine publishers and film distributors in hopes
of selling a market simulation of book sales, magazine subscribers and ticket
sales – the kind of microtargeting done decades later by companies such as
Amazon and Netflix – he reported that there was no way to build a model for any
of these industries.
Simulmatics’
only real successes were in politics, where the company could rely on large
caches of data: censuses, election returns and public opinion surveys. But in
this sector, the company’s work raised considerable alarm. It also inspired
prophecies of political doom, including two dystopian novels. One was published
in 1964: The 480, a political thriller in which a barely disguised “Simulations
Enterprises” meddles with a US presidential election. It was written by Eugene
Burdick, who’d been asked to join the company but had declined, for reasons
that became clear in The 480, in which he described Simulmatics as part of a
sinister political landscape.
The new
underworld is made up of innocent and well-intentioned people who work with
slide rules and calculating machines and computers which can retain an almost
infinite number of bits of information as well as sort, categorise, and
reproduce this information at the press of a button. Most of these people are
highly educated, many of them are PhDs, and none that I have met have malignant
political designs on the American public. They may, however, radically
reconstruct the American political system, build a new politics, and even
modify revered and venerable American institutions – facts of which they are
blissfully innocent.
Burdick
died in 1965, but his concerns about an automated state were bubbling up all
over the place. In 1966, in The Myth of the Machine, the American critic Lewis
Mumford lamented the rise of “cybernetic intelligence”, warning that under its
“automatic operation … man will become a passive, purposeless,
machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret
man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and
controlled for the benefit of depersonalised, collective organisations”.
Mumford
described technological determinism – the idea that machines determine the
course of history and represent a march of progress – as “a radical
misinterpretation of the whole course of human development”. This mistaken
belief, he wrote in The New Yorker the next year, had to be abandoned “if we
are to get an adequate grip on our mechanised culture before we lose both our
consciousness of human purpose and our confidence in being able to control our
own creations”.
No one
really ever paused to get that grip. Instead, data collection became crucial to
industries that began accumulating, as stored computer files, everything from
credit card transactions to car rentals to library checkout records, which made
possible the kinds of predictions that Simulmatics Corp had only been able to
dream of. With so much data, computers – increasingly linked together – stood
poised to become far more than simple question-and-answer devices.
While all
this was going on – the accumulation of data, refinements in computer
architecture and the use of computers not only to calculate but also to
communicate – the best thinkers of the age wondered what it might mean for
humanity: computopia, or the automated state? The answer appeared to depend, in
large part, on what these technologies might mean for humans’ capacity to
understand the world. As ever, the nature of government would depend on the
nature of knowledge. “Organised knowledge puts an immense amount of power in
the hands of people who take the trouble to master it,” as a director of
medicine and science at the Rockefeller Foundation put it.
Meanwhile,
the nature and form of knowledge was changing. In 1965, the brilliant engineer
JCR Licklider, the man most appropriately credited with inventing the internet,
wrote Libraries of the Future, in which he considered the many disadvantages of
books. “Surveying a million books on 10,000 shelves,” he said, is a nightmare.
“When information is stored in books, there is no practical way to transfer the
information from the store to the user without physically moving the book or
the reader or both.” But convert books into data that can be read by a computer
and you can move data from storage to the user, and to any number of users,
much more easily.
Using the
contents of all the books held in the Library of Congress as a proxy for the
sum total of human knowledge, Licklider calculated its size in 1960 and
estimated that it was doubling every year. Using these numbers, the sum total
of human knowledge, as data, would be about a dozen petabytes in the year 2020.
No one really knows how big the internet was in 2020, but some people said it
was dozens of zettabytes. If they were right, Licklider was way off. In any
event, the library of human knowledge seemed, suddenly, breathtakingly vast.
Would the
libraries of the future be available to everyone? And what about the libraries
of the present: the troves of data in the possession of governments? In the US,
a proposal to establish a National Data Center, meant to provide, for
electronic data, what the Library of Congress provided for books and the
National Archives for manuscripts, was abandoned due to privacy concerns.
(Critics dubbed the proposed National Data Center the “snooping machine”.)
Licklider
proved an excellent futurist. In 1963, he’d sent a memo to colleagues at the
Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa), proposing “to develop a capability
for integrated network operation”, what would become first Arpanet and,
eventually, the internet.
Licklider’s
vantage on this project, and his involvement in most of the cutting-edge
research done in the 1960s, gave him exceptional clarity about the future. In
April 1968, in an essay for the magazine Science and Technology, Licklider and
the psychologist Robert W Taylor predicted that “in a few years, men will be
able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face”. They
also predicted the emergence of “online interactive communities” that would
change how people engage with each other: “Life will be happier for the online
individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be
selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of
proximity.”
Simulmatics
Corporation’s co-founder Ithiel de Sola Pool also contributed an essay to that
issue, in which he predicted that developments such as personalised newspapers
would lead to an era of hyperindividualism. “A reader starts by asking for a
digest of the news,” Pool imagined. “He can ask for details on any story that
interests him.”
Pool
believed the hyperpersonalisation of news would transform politics. “In the
21st century, the sort of critic who now attacks conformity in society may be
complaining of an atomised society,” Pool predicted. “Modern technology, he’ll
assert, has destroyed our common cultural base and has left us living in a
little world of his own.”
He was
not wrong. “In the coming atomised society, the information the citizen gets
will arise from his own specific concerns,” he wrote, and “when everyone can
select his own fund of information, the political problem of gathering an
effective body of support behind a particular rational issue or candidate will
become very different and very much more difficult”.
More
common in the 1960s and 70s than Pool’s predictions of an atomised society
under an automated state – or at least louder, and more attention-getting –
were predictions of computer-driven socialist revolution or democratic
liberation as types of computopias. In Chile between 1971 and 1973, during the
rule of the democratically elected Salvador Allende, cyberneticists developed
Project Cybersyn, a network whose chief purpose was to manage Chile’s socialist
economy. Political reality intervened: the entire project was abandoned after
Augusto Pinochet took power in a coup in 1973.
Elsewhere,
optimism only grew. “Ready or not, computers are coming to the people,” Stewart
Brand predicted in Rolling Stone in December 1972. The personal computer, Brand
predicted, would bring “power to the people”. Brand, an LSD advocate, had
studied at Stanford, and he described the arrival of Arpanet as the best news
“since psychedelics”.
Computopianism
found many adherents. Writing in 1975, the Israeli-American sociologist Amitai
Etzioni and his co-authors predicted that the computer revolution would bring a
return to “the form of democracy found in the ancient Greek city-state, the
kibbutz and the New England town meeting, which gave every citizen the
opportunity to directly participate in the political process”. Historian Daniel
Boorstin, the librarian of Congress, predicted in 1978 that the new ties of
communication would create new ties of community, a development he called the
“republic of technology”.
Yet there
were, as ever, sceptics. Joseph Weizenbaum, an MIT engineer who in 1966 had
developed Eliza, the first of what would come to be called a chatbot, objected
to the development of artificial intelligence as leading, inevitably, to the
automation of the functions of the state. Writing in 1976, he described as
“obscene” any project that proposed “to substitute a computer system for a
human function that involves interpersonal respect, understanding and love”. He
also warned against research that would one day result in “a fully automated
battlefield”, and, as he wrote bitterly, months after the US evacuation from
Saigon: “I see no reason to advise my students to lend their talents to that
aim.”
Licklider
was himself too careful a thinker to subscribe to either prediction: computopia
or an automated state. In 1969, he predicted that by the year 2000 “an
international network of digital computer communication networks” – he called
it the multinet – would serve “as the main and essential medium of
informational interaction for governments, institutions, corporations and
individuals”, replacing everything from the telephone and the postal system to
shops and banks.
Licklider
was somewhat less confident about what the multinet would mean for politics. He
knew that “interactive politics would function well only to the extent that the
citizens were informed” and warned of the possibility of “new vistas for dirty
tricks”, including “clandestine artificial intelligence programs, searching
through the databases, altering files, fabricating records and erasing their
own audit trails”. Nevertheless, Licklider echoed Brand when he concluded that
“computer power to the people is essential to the realisation of a future in
which most citizens are informed about, and interested and involved in, the
process of government”. Yet society seemed to be moving in a different
direction, towards an automated state rather than one in which citizens became
more active participants.
As the
1970s came to an end, consultants employed by Ronald Reagan’s presidential
campaign invented their own People Machine, a computerised political
information system. A reporter explained that it worked like a massive
chessboard on which the Reagan campaign could try out possible scenarios: “If
the unions scare half their members about Reagan’s labour record, should he
step up his attacks on Carter or try to rebut their specific claims? Or, if
John Anderson’s vote begins to drop, should Reagan add a campaign stop in
Connecticut, or can he afford to cancel one?”
In 1980,
it helped carry Reagan to victory. The language of an “information society”
yielded to the language of an “information revolution”. In 1982, Time named
“the computer” man (machine) of the year. “The computer will smash the pyramid”
of wealth and render all people equal, one giddy forecaster promised in 1984.
Yet the
metaphor of revolution was ill-considered, the political theorist Langdon
Winner argued, because revolutionaries have answers to questions such as
whether their movement seeks “to uphold a valid ideal of human freedom” and
“Does it aspire to a system of democratic rule?” and “Will there be frequent,
open elections?” By contrast, “the computer revolution is conspicuously silent
about its own ends”. And, as Winner saw it, little evidence supported any of
these computopian predictions. So far, “current developments in the information
age suggest an increase in power by those who already had a great deal of
power, an enhanced centralisation of control by those already prepared for
control, an augmentation of wealth by the already wealthy.” He was shouting
into a void.
“Scarcely
a new invention comes along that someone doesn’t proclaim it as the salvation
of a free society,” Winner remarked. There seemed no better example than the
1984 television advert for Apple’s new Macintosh personal computer. “Today we
celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the information purification … a
garden of pure ideology,” intoned a thunderous voice, as masses of humans,
hairless and looking like androids marched in lockstep, and sat in rows to
watch Big Brother on a giant computer monitor. They were dressed in grey
uniforms, as if they lived under fascism. “On January 24, Apple Computer will
introduce Macintosh,” the ad continued. Apple was suggesting that only its
personal computer could prevent the rise of a totalitarian state machine. “And
you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”
Yet there
were already signs that networking computers could lead to or contribute to
social decay. Usenet, an online bulletin board, opened in 1980 on what was
sometimes called the “poor man’s Arpanet”, a dial-up network linking
universities and research centres. It offered users the ability to join
newsgroups, and it included a reply function. Usernames could be anonymous.
“Together immateriality and anonymity were an invitation to test social limits
and boundaries,” the University of Winnipeg scholar Jason Hannan wrote.
“Liberated from the personal repercussions and consequences of life offline,
some newsgroup users discovered a sordid pleasure in transgression for its own
sake.”
Sometime
in the 1980s, this practice came to be called “trolling”. Viral hate dates to
the 1980s as well. The American neo-Nazi George Dietz opened a bookstore in
West Virginia in 1974 and began publishing a small subscription magazine called
Liberty Bell. In 1983 he announced that he’d been “working, for the past two
weeks, until four to five o’clock in the morning, trying to learn ‘computerese’
so that Yours Truly may talk to that monster in ITS language and on ITS own
terms.” He soon after launched the first white supremacy bulletin board,
Liberty Bell Network, on an Apple IIe personal computer.
His
efforts were quickly followed by the launch, in 1984, of more bulletin boards,
including the Aryan Nations Liberty Net, Aryan Nations/Ku Klux Klan Computer
Net and White Aryan Resistance. Members of these groups also brought their
style and their ideas into discussion groups on America Online and CompuServe.
As the internet became the world wide web, these efforts disappeared, replaced,
in the 1990s, by websites and, a decade later, by social media platforms.
Newcomers
tended to break the existing conventions of the very early internet era by
trolling, by instigating and participating in flame wars (an early term for
bitter online arguments), and by being, generally, obnoxious. Old hands grew
alarmed. “When i went into cyberspace i went into it thinking that it was a
place like any other place and that it would be a human interaction like any
other human interaction,” wrote Carmen Hermosillo, known by the username
“humdog” in 1994, but “i was wrong when i thought that … it is a black hole; it
absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as spectacle.”
Alarmed
cyberspace veterans tried to coach newcomers in “netiquette”, as in a set of
guidelines written by Sally Hambridge of Intel in 1995. “A good rule of thumb:
be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive. You should
not send heated messages (we call these ‘flames’) even if you are provoked.”
Another rule concerned email, online chatting and online messages: “Remember
that the recipient is a human being whose culture, language and humour have
different points of reference from your own. Remember that date formats,
measurements and idioms may not travel well. Be especially careful with
sarcasm.”
The hope
that the internet would obey rules existed at one end of a spectrum; at the
other end was the more widely held enthusiasm for the idea that the internet
would be a place without rules. Acolytes of Brand saw it as a mystical
counterculture utopia called Cyberia, where, as the media theorist Douglas
Rushkoff wrote in 1994, the “shamanic experience” of psychedelic drugs would be
joined with the “cybernetic experience” of a networked personal computer to
usher in a “new dimensional plane”.
Neoliberals
and libertarians had different ideas: computers would – somehow – solve the
inequalities of wealth and income and attendant political instability that
characterised advanced capitalism in an age of globalisation. In the 1990s,
Democrats promised that “thanks to the near-miraculous capabilities of
microelectronics, we are vanquishing scarcity”. In 1993, Wired magazine
reported that “life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas
Jefferson would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a
commitment to pluralism, diversity and community”.
Meanwhile,
the public, understandably, had very little idea what to expect of the coming
transformation. In 1994, on the Today show, Bryant Gumbel asked, “What is
internet, anyway?” More people knew the answer to that question in 1995, after
the entrepreneur and computer scientist Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen, a
24-year-old coder from Wisconsin, launched Netscape Navigator, a browser, and
earned $58m on the first day its stock was publicly traded. Overnight,
Andreessen became, as the New York Times reported, “the newest member of
Silicon Valley’s instant millionaires club”. That sale set off the tech company
gold rush known as the dotcom boom. A year later, Andreessen was on the cover
of Time, barefoot and in blue jeans, sitting on a golden throne, laughing.
Across
the second half of the 20th century, liberal democracy made possible the rise
of the artificial state. It didn’t make it inevitable. The digital revolution
didn’t have to play out the way it did in the realm of politics and government;
it played out the way it did because of the failure of liberal democracy to
limit corporate power over politics and government, its failure to heed decades
of warnings about the dangers of an automated state.
Techno-libertarianism,
which married the technocracy crusade of the 1930s – an anti-democracy movement
led, in the US, by Elon Musk’s grandfather – to the computopianism of the
1980s, was born in the 1990s. Beginning in the previous decade, Silicon Valley
had fallen under the spell of the libertarian Ayn Rand. Rand had been a cult
figure of the far right since the publication in 1943 of her novel The
Fountainhead, and she became even better known after the 1957 publication of
Atlas Shrugged. Rand embraced radical individualism and saw a very narrow role
for the state in human affairs, arguing that every individual ought to be
completely free to pursue personal gain through heroic, self-interested
achievement. “I’m challenging the moral code of altruism, the precept that man
must live for others”, she said in 1959. “I say that man is entitled to his own
happiness and that he must achieve it for himself.”
Some
people in Silicon Valley even named their children Ayn and Rand and their
companies after characters from her books. Steve Jobs considered Atlas Shrugged
his “guide in life”. Under Rand’s influence, some leading Silicon Valley
investors and inventors stopped believing in both democracy and the liberal
nation-state, subscribing instead to a hybrid Brandian/Randian vision of a
world requiring no controls but a keyboard, a mouse and a stock exchange.
In the
1990s, this vision became messianic. Tech companies started talking about their
mission, and their mission was always magnificently, impossibly, extravagantly
world-changing: transforming the future of work, connecting all of humanity,
making the world a better place, saving the planet.
Under the
influence of Rand, the internet became what conservatives and
techno-libertarians wanted it to become. In 1995, when Newt Gingrich came to
power in Congress as speaker of the house, under the banner of a Contract with
America, one of his first moves was to close the federal government’s Office of
Technology Assessment, which had been formed in 1972. The office hadn’t been
especially powerful, but its mandate included assessing the implications of any
new technology supported by the federal government. Its closure gave Gingrich a
free hand in directing any policy relating to the opening of the internet in
accordance with the tenets of techno-libertarianism.
One of
the contract’s earliest manifestos appeared – online – in 1996, John Perry
Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: “Governments of the
industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace,
the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave
us alone,” Barlow wrote. “You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty
where we gather … You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any
methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear … Cyberspace does not lie
within your borders.”
Libertarian
futurists weren’t the only people proposing new rules for cyberspace; they just
happened to be the people who ended up making the rules. In 1995, Michael
Hauben, a computer science student at Columbia University and an active user of
Usenet (he coined the term “netizen”), drafted a Proposed Declaration of the
Rights of Netizens. He saw himself as a leader of what he described as “the
fight to keep the net an uncommercialised public commons”.
Hauben’s
declaration, co-authored with his mother, listed rights that included
“universal access at no or low cost, freedom of electronic expression to
promote the exchange of knowledge without fear of reprisal,” and “universal and
equal access to knowledge and information”, as well as “protection of the
public purpose from those who would use it for their private and money-making
purposes”. Much of the idea that the internet could be a democratising force
can be traced to Hauben’s writings, including his 1997 essay The Computer as a
Democratizer.
Douglas
Adams, the author of the 1970s satirical science fiction series The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, had a vision for the internet, too. In 1996,
he founded a company called The Digital Village – appointing himself chief
fantasist – with the idea of building a web platform, h2g2, that, echoing his
series, would be an “online guide to Life, the Universe, and Everything”. In
2001, both Adams and Hauben died, the former of a heart attack and the latter,
at the age of 29, after an accident. Their frameworks for free and equal access
to an internet structured by public interest, not commercial interest, died
with them.
But by
then, the techno-libertarians had already won. In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the
bipartisan Telecommunications Act, which delivered exactly what everyone from
Newt Gingrich to John Perry Barlow wanted: an almost entirely unregulated
internet. Four years later, Wired announced with characteristic, computopian
swagger, “We are as a nation, better educated, more tolerant and better
connected because of – not in spite of – the convergence of the internet and
public life.” No such era of tolerance arrived.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário