The Fall of Midcentury Progress
The Second World War was a paradigm of the power of progress. This war was not only won on tactics, skill, and luck—but also on industrial capacity and innovation. The United States, for instance, produced well over 300 thousand airplanes, 22 aircraft carriers, 349 destroyers, and over 2 million military trucks. Germany, on the other hand, produced around 120 thousand airplanes, no aircraft carriers, 17 destroyers, and around 350 thousand military trucks.
Germany’s equipment was often technically superior to American arms, but the average American in the field was adept at repairing just about everything with an engine and wheels, American arms were simpler, and American arms were more plentiful.
At some point in a war—like much else in life—quantity becomes a quality to be reckoned with.
The aftermath of the Second World War, however, many horrors of technological progress were laid bare. About two-thirds of the world’s Jewish population—six million Jews—were killed in concentration camps in less than a decade, along with millions of prisoners of war, Romanies, disabled people, and others considered “undesirable.” The technology that enables large-scale farming and transportation also enabled 200 thousand murders and at least 20 thousand rapes in a matter of months in Nanjing, China.
All of this was piled on top of the horror of the millions who died in the First World War—a war that ultimately served no purpose other than to set the stage for the Second World War. Tens of thousands migrated from the United States to the Soviet Union in the 1930s to “build a new society grounded in technology,” and ended up dying in forced labor concentration camps.[1]
It is no coincidence dystopian novels became very popular between the 1940s and the 1970s.
Material life was markedly improving because of technological progress, but hard questions still hung in the collective conscious. Would technological progress just make the rich ever richer, and create a permanent underclass? Even if technology could be used to keep the new permanent underclass “happy,” was the form of happiness afforded in such a world worth chasing?
Would technological progress lead to universal human flourishing, or would mankind, like Samson, use technology to pull the world’s foundations down in one final act of self-destruction? Technology might give us better washing machines, but could it really solve fundamental human problems? Would the “poor always be with us” no matter how much technological progress mankind made?
While there was still a veneer of progress in advertisements and propaganda, an underlying gloom pervaded the world.
It seemed technology was the god that failed.
In the grip of a cold war between communism and Western economies, the military-industrial complex turned to a group of scientists as Stanford University. Just as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford worked together to build many of the technologies enabling the United States, and the Western nations, to overcome in the Second World War,[2] military and government leaders looked to scientists to find some new technological breakthrough enabling them to win the cold war.
The answer, this time, could not be the kinds of war machines that enabled victory in Europe or the South Pacific. Instead, it needed to be something that could win wars without the war going “hot.” Wars needed to move from being about boots on the ground to overwhelming an enemy with something else—especially in the wake of Korea and the ongoing war in Vietnam.
Government planners invested massive resources into programs at Stanford and other Southern California universities (along “the Valley”) developing digital computers. These programs followed in the footsteps of earlier inventors, such as Babbage and Turing, but went much farther.
While the original goal was to build fast, reliable, and almost superhuman computing machines, this quickly morphed into connecting computing machines into global networks.
If the military and government funders had chosen Boston, or some other region, to draw this research, history would tell a different story. As scientists flooded into the Valley to invent this new technology, the Beats were emerging from San Francisco and launching the hippie movement.
Hippies contributed a belief in human improvement through communal living—the human network. Institutions were recast in the form of a computer network as: “living organisms, social networks as webs of information, and the gathering and interpretation of information as keys to understanding not only the technical but also the natural and social worlds.”[3]
Computer and human networks are modeled Ecosystems Theory, which holds “up the natural order as a self-balancing, perfect machine.”[4] If we could just get back to the natural state of the human person in some way humanity could find a way out of the morass of politics, war, economics and religion.
The result was a culture built around a new vision a new kind of society, where:
Information technologies . . . empower the individual, enhance personal freedom, and radically reduce the power of the nation-state. Existing social, political and legal power structures will wither away to be replaced by unfettered interactions between autonomous individuals and their software.[5]
Cyberspace became the new frontier where humans could interact, overcoming all the differences caused by geography, religion, and culture. “At what cost” was a question no-one ever asked—it was too dangerous, given the bright new shining future just around the corner of tomorrow.
As a resident of the modern world, you know this is not where the story ends.
[1] Tim Tzouliadis, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia, First Edition (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008).
[2] Wes Davis, American Journey: On the Road with Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and John Burroughs (W. W. Norton & Company, 2023).
[3] Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, Kindle ed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) loc 110.
[4] Jason Rhode, “The Religious Creed of Silicon Valley,” April 2018, https://www.salon.com/2018/04/01/the-religious-creed-of-silicon-valley/.
[5] Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” September 1995, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology.