One of the strangest things about this frantic, fast-moving moment is that it seems to have no past. Everything is about the future of this or that—the future of work, the future of humanity, the future of the planet. It’s as if everyone is shouting (some with excitement, most with fear): robots are taking over! Meanwhile, you can’t put down your phone, unplug, delete your AI apps, or tell Zoom to get lost. It feels like you’re racing toward something, unable to stop, look back, or think clearly.
But of course, this strange moment in history does have a past. It comes from somewhere. It wasn’t inevitable. Things could have gone differently—and they still can. If you look back, you’ll see that many people saw this coming. They predicted our present when it was still the future. Some thought it might turn out wonderfully, like a computer utopia. Others worried it could end in disaster. Above all, they kept warning about the rise of what I call the artificial state—the replacement of the liberal democratic nation-state, where people give their consent to be governed, with rule by machines. They warned of a future where democratic debate would be replaced by prediction through calculation, where the public sphere would be overtaken by data-driven commerce, and where drones would replace the people. Why didn’t anyone listen?
Between the 1950s and the 1980s, computers became smaller, faster, cheaper, and more powerful. Computer languages grew more advanced, and electronic data—once a small hill—became a mountain. As data processing and general-purpose computers moved from the military into industry, business, and medicine, large parts of public life became automated. Computers, calculations, networks, and algorithms took over political tasks like rallying support, running campaigns, communicating with voters, and shaping policy, especially in the wealthiest nations.
The adoption and spread of these technologies sparked wild speculation about their possible social and political effects. That discussion, typically, swung between dreams of a technological utopia and fears of an artificial state.
For example, in 1981, Japanese sociologist Yoneji Masuda, who studied what he called the “information society,” predicted two possible futures. One was a “computopia” that would eliminate class and national divisions and bring about “a symbiosis in which man and nature can live together in harmony.” The other was a “compudystopia” he called the “automated state”—government by machine. Yet these two futures had a lot in common, because 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 key turning point in the story of the automated state came in 1958, when a team of American researchers and advertising experts built a machine they claimed could both predict and influence voting behavior. That same year, a major conference on the “mechanisation of thought processes” was held at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, near London. Speakers included scientists from France, Israel, Russia, and Hungary. They talked about a future where computers would compose music, settle legal disputes, control air traffic, perform surgery, and—in government—replace not just clerks but executives.
In New York, Edward L. Greenfield, head of a Madison Avenue advertising firm, drafted a proposal for what would become known as a People Machine. He suggested compiling hundreds of thousands of punch cards—election results, public opinion surveys, and census data—to build an “information bank” that could sort voters by type and their opinions by issue. “There is nothing mysterious about this on the surface,” Greenfield and the MIT political scientist involved said, “the input to the machine being the information about real individuals obtained in surveys.”Scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool wrote this in 1958. But “once this information is inside the high speed storage facilities of the machine, it is a different world.” The machine would act as a “macroscope,” capable of simulating the entire US electorate.
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Delegates examine the Automatic Computing Engine, an early computer, at the Mechanisation of Thought Processes symposium at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, then in Middlesex, on 24 November 1958. Photograph: Ron Case/Getty Images
The following year, Greenfield, Pool, and IBM’s Alex Bernstein founded a company called the Simulmatics Corporation. By “simulmatics,” they meant the automated simulation of human intelligence. They believed they had created “the A-bomb of the social sciences.”
Their first client was the Democratic National Committee (DNC). In 1959, the DNC hired Simulmatics to run simulations on an artificial electorate, advising the party’s nominee on what to say, to whom, and when. Not everyone was thrilled. Historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote, “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.”
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 credited 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 moved on to new campaigns, praised by the media. But the People Machine turned out to be ahead of its time. In 1970, Simulmatics went bankrupt, unable to find enough paying clients. The problem wasn’t the computers or the model—it was a lack of data. When Bernstein met with book and magazine publishers and film distributors, hoping to sell a market simulation for book sales, magazine subscriptions, and ticket sales—the kind of microtargeting later done by companies like Amazon and Netflix—he found there was no way to build a model for any of these industries.
Simulmatics’ only real successes were in politics, where it could rely on large data sources like censuses, election returns, and public opinion surveys. But in this field, the company’s work raised significant concerns. It also inspired predictions of political disaster, including two dystopian novels. One, published in 1964, was The 480, a political thriller in which a barely disguised “Simulations Enterprises” interferes with a US presidential election. It was written by Eugene Burdick, who had been asked to join the company but declined, for reasons that became clear in the book. There, 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 worries about an automated state were emerging everywhere. In 1966, in The Myth of the Machine, 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 describedTechnological determinism—the belief that machines shape the course of history and represent steady progress—was called “a radical misinterpretation of the whole course of human development” by one critic. The following year, writing in The New Yorker, he argued that this mistaken idea 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 stopped to take that grip. Instead, data collection became essential to industries that began storing everything—credit card transactions, car rentals, library checkout records—as computer files. This made possible the kinds of predictions that Simulmatics Corp could only have dreamed of. With so much data, computers, increasingly linked together, were ready to become far more than simple question-and-answer machines.
While all this was happening—the buildup of data, improvements in computer design, and the use of computers not just for calculation but also for communication—the best thinkers of the era wondered what it might mean for humanity: a computopia, or an automated state? The answer seemed to depend largely on what these technologies might mean for people’s ability to understand the world. As always, the nature of government would depend on the nature of knowledge. As a director of medicine and science at the Rockefeller Foundation put it, “Organised knowledge puts an immense amount of power in the hands of people who take the trouble to master it.”
Meanwhile, the nature and form of knowledge itself was changing. In 1965, JCR Licklider, the brilliant engineer most often credited with inventing the internet, wrote Libraries of the Future, where he considered the many drawbacks 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 if you convert books into data that a computer can read, you can move that data from storage to the user—and to any number of users—much more easily.
Using the contents of all the books in the Library of Congress as a stand-in for the total sum of human knowledge, Licklider calculated its size in 1960 and estimated that it was doubling every year. Based on those numbers, the total sum 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 far off. In any case, the library of human knowledge suddenly seemed breathtakingly vast.
Would the libraries of the future be open to everyone? And what about the libraries of the present—the vast stores of data held by governments? In the US, a proposal to create a National Data Center, meant to do for electronic data what the Library of Congress did for books and the National Archives did for manuscripts, was dropped due to privacy concerns. Critics called the proposed center the “snooping machine.”
Licklider turned out to be an excellent futurist. In 1963, he sent a memo to colleagues at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa), proposing “to develop a capability for integrated network operation”—what would first become Arpanet and, eventually, the internet.
Licklider’s position on this project, and his involvement in most of the cutting-edge research of the 1960s, gave him exceptional insight into the future. In April 1968, in an essay for the magazine Science and Technology, Licklider and 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 rise of “online intInteractive communities that would transform how people connect with one another: “Life will be happier for the online individual because the people they interact with most will be chosen more by shared interests and goals than by chance of location.”
Ithiel de Sola Pool, co-founder of Simulmatics Corporation, also wrote an essay for that issue. He predicted that developments like personalized newspapers would lead to an era of hyper-individualism. “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 that the hyper-personalization of news would change politics. “In the 21st century, the kind of critic who now attacks conformity in society may be complaining of an atomized society,” Pool predicted. “Modern technology, he’ll argue, has destroyed our shared cultural base and left us living in our own little worlds.”
He wasn’t wrong. “In the coming atomized society, the information a citizen gets will come from their own specific interests,” he wrote, and “when everyone can choose their own source of information, the political challenge of building effective support behind a particular rational issue or candidate will become very different and much harder.”
More common in the 1960s and 70s than Pool’s predictions of an atomized society under an automated state—or at least louder and more attention-grabbing—were predictions of computer-driven socialist revolution or democratic liberation, known as computopias. In Chile between 1971 and 1973, under the democratically elected Salvador Allende, cyberneticists developed Project Cybersyn, a network designed mainly to manage Chile’s socialist economy. Political reality intervened: the entire project was abandoned after Augusto Pinochet seized 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 who had studied at Stanford, described the arrival of Arpanet as the best news “since psychedelics.”
Computopianism found many followers. Writing in 1975, 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 chance to participate directly in the political process.” Historian Daniel Boorstin, the Librarian of Congress, predicted in 1978 that new communication ties would create new community ties, a development he called the “republic of technology.”
Yet there were, as always, skeptics. Joseph Weizenbaum, an MIT engineer who in 1966 had developed Eliza, the first of what would later be called chatbots, objected to the development of artificial intelligence as inevitably leading to the automation of state functions. 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.”
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Joseph Weizenbaum. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
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 postal system to shops and banks. Licklider was somewhat less certain about what the multinet would mean for politics. He knew that “interactive politics would work well only if citizens were informed” and warned of the possibility of “new opportunities for dirty tricks,” including “secret artificial intelligence programs that search through databases, alter files, fabricate records, and erase their own audit trails.” Still, Licklider echoed Brand when he concluded that “giving computer power to the people is essential for a future in which most citizens are informed about, interested in, and involved in the process of government.” But society seemed to be heading in a different direction—toward an automated state rather than one where citizens became more active participants.
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As the 1970s came to a close, consultants working for Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign created their own People Machine, a computerized political information system. A reporter explained that it worked like a giant chessboard on which the Reagan campaign could test possible scenarios: “If unions scare half their members about Reagan’s labor record, should he step up his attacks on Carter or try to counter their specific claims? Or, if John Anderson’s vote starts 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 talk of an “information society” gave way to talk of an “information revolution.” In 1982, Time named “the computer” man (machine) of the year. “The computer will smash the pyramid” of wealth and make all people equal, one excited forecaster promised in 1984.
But the metaphor of revolution was ill-considered, argued political theorist Langdon Winner, because revolutionaries have answers to questions like whether their movement seeks “to uphold a valid ideal of human freedom,” “Does it aim for a system of democratic rule?” and “Will there be frequent, open elections?” In contrast, “the computer revolution is notably silent about its own goals.” And, as Winner saw it, there was little evidence to support any of these computer-utopia predictions. So far, “current developments in the information age suggest an increase in power for those who already had a great deal of power, a stronger centralization of control for those already prepared for control, and a growth of wealth for the already wealthy.” He was shouting into the void.
“Scarcely a new invention comes along that someone doesn’t proclaim as the salvation of a free society,” Winner remarked. There seemed no better example than the 1984 television ad 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 booming voice, as masses of hairless humans, 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 centers. It offered users the ability to join newsgroups and included a reply function. Usernames could be anonymous. “Together immatSeriality and anonymity invited people to test social limits and boundaries, as Jason Hannan, a scholar at the University of Winnipeg, put it. Freed from the personal consequences of offline life, some newsgroup users found a dark pleasure in breaking rules just for the sake of it.
Sometime in the 1980s, this behavior came to be known as “trolling.” Viral hate also dates back to that decade. In 1974, American neo-Nazi George Dietz opened a bookstore in West Virginia and started publishing a small subscription magazine called Liberty Bell. In 1983, he announced that he had been “working, for the past two weeks, until four or five in the morning, trying to learn ‘computerese’ so that yours truly may talk to that monster in its own language and on its own terms.” Soon after, he launched the first white supremacist bulletin board, the Liberty Bell Network, on an Apple IIe personal computer.
His efforts were quickly followed in 1984 by more bulletin boards, including the Aryan Nations Liberty Net, the Aryan Nations/Ku Klux Klan Computer Net, and the White Aryan Resistance. Members of these groups also brought their style and ideas into discussion forums on America Online and CompuServe. As the internet evolved into the World Wide Web, these efforts faded, replaced in the 1990s by websites and, a decade later, by social media platforms.
Newcomers often broke the unwritten rules of the early internet by trolling, starting flame wars (an early term for bitter online arguments), and generally being obnoxious. Longtime users grew worried. “When I went into cyberspace, I thought it was a place like any other, and that it would involve human interaction like any other,” wrote Carmen Hermosillo, known online as “humdog,” in 1994. “But I was wrong. It is a black hole; it absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as spectacle.”
Alarmed veterans tried to teach newcomers “netiquette,” as outlined in 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 messages: “Remember that the recipient is a human being whose culture, language, and humor may differ from your own. Remember that date formats, measurements, and idioms may not translate well. Be especially careful with sarcasm.”
The hope that the internet would follow rules existed at one end of the spectrum. At the other end was the more widespread enthusiasm for the idea that the internet would be a place without rules. Followers of Brand saw it as a mystical counterculture utopia called Cyberia, where, as media theorist Douglas Rushkoff wrote in 1994, the “shamanic experience” of psychedelic drugs would combine with the “cybernetic experience” of a networked personal computer to open a “new dimensional plane.”
Neoliberals and libertarians had different ideas: computers would—somehow—solve the inequalities of wealth and income, along with the political instability that marked advanced capitalism in an age of globalization. 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 little idea what to expect from the coming transformation. In 1994, on the Today show, Bryant Gumbel asked, “What is the internet, anyway?” More people knew the answer by 1995, after the entrepreneur and computerIn the mid-1990s, computer scientist Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen, a 24-year-old programmer from Wisconsin, launched the web browser Netscape Navigator. On its first day of public trading, the company made $58 million. Overnight, Andreessen became, as the New York Times put it, “the newest member of Silicon Valley’s instant millionaires club.” That success sparked the tech industry boom known as the dotcom era. A year later, Andreessen appeared on the cover of Time magazine, barefoot and in jeans, sitting on a golden throne, laughing.
Throughout the second half of the 20th century, liberal democracy helped create the conditions for the rise of the artificial state, but it didn’t make that outcome unavoidable. The digital revolution didn’t have to unfold the way it did in politics and government. It happened that way because liberal democracy failed to limit corporate influence over politics and government, and because it ignored decades of warnings about the dangers of an automated state.
Techno-libertarianism emerged in the 1990s, blending the technocratic movement of the 1930s—an anti-democracy effort led in the US by Elon Musk’s grandfather—with the computer-utopian ideas of the 1980s. Starting in the 1980s, Silicon Valley became captivated by the libertarian writer Ayn Rand. Rand had been a far-right cult figure since her novel The Fountainhead came out in 1943, and she gained even more fame after Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957. Rand championed radical individualism and believed the state should play only a minimal role in human affairs. She argued that every person should be completely free to pursue personal success through heroic, self-interested actions. “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 or Rand, and their companies after characters from her books. Steve Jobs considered Atlas Shrugged his “guide in life.” Influenced by Rand, many leading tech investors and inventors stopped believing in democracy and the liberal nation-state. Instead, they embraced a mix of Rand’s ideas and those of Stewart Brand, envisioning a world that needed no controls beyond a keyboard, a mouse, and a stock exchange.
In the 1990s, this vision became almost religious. Tech companies began talking about their mission, and that mission was always grand, ambitious, and world-changing: transforming the future of work, connecting all of humanity, making the world a better place, saving the planet.
Under Rand’s influence, the internet became what conservatives and techno-libertarians wanted it to be. In 1995, when Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House under his “Contract with America,” one of his first actions was to shut down the federal government’s Office of Technology Assessment, which had been created in 1972. That office wasn’t very powerful, but its job included evaluating the implications of new technologies supported by the government. Closing it gave Gingrich the freedom to shape internet policy according to techno-libertarian principles.
One of the movement’s earliest statements 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 ones proposing new rules for cyberspace.They weren’t the ones who set out to create the rules; they just happened to be the people who ended up making them. In 1995, Michael Hauben, a computer science student at Columbia University and an active Usenet user (he coined the term “netizen”), drafted a Proposed Declaration of the Rights of Netizens. He saw himself as a leader in what he called “the fight to keep the net an uncommercialised public commons.”
Hauben’s declaration, co-written with his mother, listed rights such as “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 back to Hauben’s writings, including his 1997 essay The Computer as a Democratizer.
What technology takes from us – and how to take it back | Rebecca Solnit Read more
Douglas Adams, the author of the 1970s satirical science fiction series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, also had a vision for the internet. In 1996, he founded a company called The Digital Village – appointing himself chief fantasist – with the goal 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 – Adams of a heart attack, and Hauben, at the age of 29, after an accident. Their visions of a free and equal internet, shaped by public interest rather than commercial gain, 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 confidence, “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 ever arrived.
Adapted from The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore, published by Allen Lane on 25 August. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs about the themes in Democracy versus the Machine focusing on the digital age and the warnings that went unheard
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 What does Democracy versus the Machine actually mean
Its a metaphor for the clash between humanled deliberative decisionmaking and the fast automated algorithmdriven processes that now govern much of our information and daily life
2 What are the warnings that went unheard in the title
These are the early red flags raised by internet pioneers journalists and scholars in the 1990s and 2000s They warned that the internet could be used for mass surveillance algorithmic manipulation and the spread of misinformation but they were largely ignored because of the tech boom and utopian optimism
3 Is this book about robots taking over
No not in the physical sense The machine refers to the digital infrastructuresocial media platforms search engines and datacollection systemsthat now shape our opinions and behavior Its about how this system disrupts democratic processes not about Terminatorstyle robots
4 What is surveillance capitalism
Its the business model of tech giants like Google and Facebook They track your online behavior build detailed profiles of you and then sell that data to advertisers or use it to manipulate what you see The user isnt the customer the user is the product
5 How does social media hurt democracy
Social media algorithms are designed to maximize engagement which often means showing you content that is extreme divisive or false This creates echo chambers increases political polarization and allows foreign actors or badfaith groups to spread misinformation that influences elections
IntermediateLevel Questions
6 What were some of the specific early warnings that were ignored
In the 1990s figures like computer scientist Jaron Lanier and writer Evgeny Morozov warned about the dangers of crowdsourced wisdom and the loss of privacy More notably early internet pioneer John Perry Barlow wrote a Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace asking governments to stay out which inadvertently left citizens unprotected against corporate exploitation
7 What is the filter bubble and why is it dangerous
A filter bubble is the personalized world
