Long read: Democracy v the machine — the warnings that were ignored

Jill Lepore is a Pulitzer Prize winning American historian, journalist (at the New Yorker) and academic (professor at Harvard). She writes about American history, law, literature, and politics and The Guardian has published a superb essay adapted from her new book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State”. The essay is worth reading in full not least because it is a lesson in what happens to people like us when, indifferent to all the evidence around us that the world is changing for the worse, we continue living our daily lives.

Ms Lepore’s argument is that our dizzying digital moment – where all of us are scrolling, texting and videocalling as if our lives depended on it – behaves as though it has no past. This she says is precisely the problem. The life we are living today wasn’t inevitable; and plenty of people, she shows, saw it all coming, and issued warning after warning that nobody heeded.

What they foresaw split in two. On one side lay a computer utopia; on the other, what Ms Lepore calls the “artificial state” — the quiet replacement of the liberal democratic nation-state, and the consent of the governed, with the rule of people by machines. In this darker future, democratic deliberation would give way to prediction by calculation, the public square to data-driven commerce, and, in her arresting phrase, “drones would take the place of the demos.” The Japanese sociologist Yoneji Masuda caught the fork in 1981, prophesying either a “computopia” of harmony or an “automated state” of government by machine. The two futures, he noticed, shared a habit of neglecting man’s coexistence with nature.

In 1958, at a conference near London on the “mechanisation of thought processes,”scientists imagined computers that would one day compose music, settle lawsuits, direct air traffic, perform surgery and, in government, replace not just clerks but executives. That same year a Madison Avenue adman, Edward Greenfield, sketched a “People Machine”: hundreds of thousands of punch cards — census data, election returns, opinion polls — assembled into an “information bank” that could sort voters by type and, as a kind of “macroscope,” simulate the whole American electorate. The company he co-founded in 1959, Simulmatics, believed it had built “the A-bomb of the social sciences.” Its first client was the Democratic National Committee; after Kennedy took the nomination his campaign put it to work on an IBM 704, and when he won, the press called the machine his “secret weapon.” Yet Simulmatics went bankrupt in 1970 defeated by a shortage of data. The microtargeting it dreamed of would have to wait for another 40 years.

The most unsettling predictions Ms Lepore says were the ones that came true. In 1968, J.C.R. Licklider — the man most often credited with envisioning the internet — and the psychologist Robert Taylor forecast that, within a few years, people would “communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face.” They imagined “online interactive communities” in which life would be happier because one’s closest contacts would be chosen “more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity” — a description of the social network, and of the echo chamber, decades before either existed. Writing alongside them, Simulmatics’ co-founder Ithiel de Sola Pool went further: he pictured a reader who “starts by asking for a digest of the news” and then “can ask for details on any story that interests him,”and warned that such personalisation would atomise society, leaving each citizen in a little world of his own and making it far harder to gather “an effective body of support”behind any shared cause. “He was not wrong,” Ms Lepore notes.

The sceptics were not cranks either. The alarm even reached the bestseller list — Eugene Burdick’s 1964 thriller The 480 imagined a thinly disguised Simulmatics meddling in a presidential election. The historian Arthur Schlesinger recoiled at the notion that “a man shouldn’t say something until it is cleared with the machine.” In 1966 the critic Lewis Mumford warned that under cybernetic automation man would become “a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal.” A decade later Joseph Weizenbaum — the MIT engineer who had built Eliza, the first chatbot, in 1966 — called it “obscene” to hand functions of human respect and understanding to a computer, and, months after the fall of Saigon, foresaw “a fully automated battlefield.”

Louder than the doubters, though, were the dreamers, and much of their optimism turned on what computers might do to knowledge itself. In his 1965 Libraries of the Future, Licklider catalogued the failings of the humble book — which, he complained, offered “no practical way to transfer the information from the store to the user”without physically moving the book or the reader — and imagined data that could travel instantly to any number of readers at once. Taking the Library of Congress as a proxy for the sum of human knowledge, he reckoned it was doubling every year and would come, by 2020, to “about a dozen petabytes.” Ms Lepore says that Licklider had underestimated by a factor of millions, the library of human knowledge proving more breathtakingly vast than even its prophet dared guess. Licklider also foresaw, by 2000, a global “multinet” that would swallow the telephone, the post, the shop and the bank, and was clear-eyed enough to warn of “new vistas for dirty tricks” — clandestine programs “fabricating records and erasing their own audit trails” — yet still believed “computer power to the people” would make citizens better informed. Stewart Brand promised in Rolling Stone that computers were coming to the people, the best news, he wrote, “since psychedelics.” Sociologists dreamed of a return to the direct democracy of the Greek city-state and the New England town meeting. In Chile, Salvador Allende’s technocrats even built a cybernetic network to run a socialist economy — until Pinochet’s 1973 coup ended the experiment.

Nor did anyone need social media to glimpse the internet’s capacity for cruelty. When the Usenet bulletin board opened in 1980, anonymity and distance proved an “invitation to test social limits”; by the decade’s end the practice had a name — trolling — and the first white-supremacist boards were already up and running. As early as 1994 the writer Carmen Hermosillo, posting as “humdog,” called cyberspace “a black hole” that “absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as spectacle” — a line that reads today like a verdict on the whole social-media age.

What finally tipped the balance was ideology, not hardware. Through the 1980s Silicon Valley fell under the spell of Ayn Rand, whose gospel of radical self-interest — “man is entitled to his own happiness and that he must achieve it for himself” — Steve Jobs is said to have treated as his “guide in life.” Lepore traces this techno-libertarianism back further still, to the anti-democratic “technocracy” movement of the 1930s, which in America was led, she notes, by Elon Musk’s grandfather. The mood turned messianic, then victorious. Reagan’s 1980 campaign built its own People Machine; Apple’s celebrated 1984 advertisement cast its computer as the thing that would stop the world becoming Orwell’s — “you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” Then the politics followed the money. In 1995 Newt Gingrich shut the Office of Technology Assessment, the one federal body charged with weighing the consequences of new technology. The 1996 Telecommunications Act delivered an almost entirely unregulated internet. The money had already arrived: Netscape’s 1995 market debut minted Silicon Valley’s first instant fortunes, and its young co-founder Marc Andreessen was soon on the cover of Time, barefoot on a golden throne. Rival visions of a public-interest web, from Michael Hauben’s “rights of netizens” to Douglas Adams’s utopian online guide, faded when both men died in 2001.

Ms Lepore says liberal democracy made the artificial state possible without making it inevitable; it arrived because democracies failed to heed the warnings and failed to limit corporate power over public life. The political theorist Langdon Winner had seen the shape of it in the 1980s: the computer revolution, he complained, was “conspicuously silent about its own ends,” and what it actually produced was “an augmentation of wealth by the already wealthy” and a concentration of power among those who already held it. However, Ms Lepore refuses to treat any of this as fate: it wasn’t inevitable, she reminds us; things could have turned out differently — and, she insists, “they still can.