Politics of Technology
A recent idea floated by an English professor reveals our complete lack of understanding in all regards to the politics of technology. The FT writes, Professor Richard Susskind, technology adviser to the Lord Chief Justice and a director of think-tank LegalUK, advocates an independent body necessary to “spot gaps in the law thrown up by technologies such as crypto assets and AI, and promote the greater use of English law in global business contracts.” The last bit about promoting English law is just a Brit's eternal nostalgia for a sun never setting empire, eh wot? However, the professor emphasizes, “The business world will be changed by technology and a challenge will be providing a platform for the supporting law for these new technologies.”
The professor is correct about the change effected by technology, though not just to the business world, but every aspect of society. He is also correct showing the law is reacting to technology, that is “supporting” it. Technology is defining the law. Politics always trails far behind the economic, social and indeed, the political environments technology creates. This was clearly illustrated across the Industrial Era. Agrarian Era institutions were crushed by the forces unleashed by industrial technology. Today, already archaic government institutions face the onslaught of a new technological era, our politics entirely reactionary. A look at the creation of the computer industry provides insight to how we've come to this place.
Computers were birthed by government, the military particularly. Presently, the industry remains awash in military funding. The origins of today's computers were in America's World War II military efforts, including the atomic bomb developing Manhattan Project.
Before the machines we know today, computing was largely done by hand with the assistance of mechanical counting machines. People doing these calculations were called “computers.” This term was applied to the machines that replaced them. With American entry into World War II, the army needed countless calculations for two things; first, relatively old ballistics, how to target artillery shells of a specific weight over a specific distance; second, brand new calculations were necessary to figure out the triggering of the chain reaction necessary for the atomic bomb.
In 1943, the University of Pennsylvania gained a contract from the army to build the first computer for ballistic calculations. It wasn't finished until 1946. Simultaneously, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the bomb was created, the incredible mathematician John von Neumann worked on and became familiar with IBM calculating machines. He was primarily responsible for tabulating the implosion forces necessary to set off the bomb's chain reaction.
Von Neumann was an amazing character, a math prodigy born in the Budapest of the short-lived, infamously ended Austro-Hungarian empire. He immigrated to the US in the late 1920s to become a professor of mathematics at Princeton University. Von Neumann should probably be most remembered for a pithy summing up of the ethos of many who worked on the bomb, which seems to be a dominant ethos of much technology development today. Von Neumann told Richard Feynman, then a young physicist at Los Alamos struggling with the bomb's monstrous implications, “You don't have to be responsible for the world you're in.”
After the war, von Neumann ran the first calculations of U Penn's finished Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), helping design the even more destructive thermonuclear hydrogen bomb. Returning to the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton, with extensive knowledge of the IBM calculating machines he had gained at Los Alamos, von Neumann designed an IAS computer.
The U Penn and IAS machine architectures, the design and interactions of their hardware components, became the basic machine architecture for much of the computer industry. The creators of the ENIAC left U Penn and started their own company with funding from giant defense firm Northrop. The machine they built was the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC). IBM hired Von Neumann as a consultant and six years later launched their own computer, the IBM 701, known during its development as the “Defense Calculator.”
Government funding, particularly military funding, essential to building the first computers is largely lost to the industry's popularly promoted myths of the lone genius, bootstrap entrepreneur. This is nothing new, government integrality in capitalism has long been written out of our preeminent free market myths. For a better understanding of government's essential role in capitalism's development, try another Autro-Hungarian birthed thinker, the sublime Karl Polanyi and his seminal, The Great Transformation.
Military funding remains essential to today's information technology industry. The story of the post-war entwining of the US military industrial complex and the computer industry is exceptionally told by Yasha Levine's excellent Surveillance Valley.
It's important to understand, at their core, all computers just add numbers. This in no way denies the technology's power. Information technology is changing the world. Paradoxically, endless government funding for the development of these technologies, directly contradicts any democratic capability to beneficially discern and decide how or why to use them. Existing politics of technology are entirely controlled by an extremely small tech-aristocracy. As the London professor demonstrated at the top of this piece, all other technological politics are reactionary, codifying what has already been implemented.
A great example of this political incapacity is the story of Microsoft and its founder William Gates. Despite great popular misconceptions, Gates did not invent the computer or even software. In 1980, IBM, yes the company whose first computer came from US military funding, bestowed upon Microsoft exclusive control of the operating system for their soon to be released Personal Computer (PC). The operating system is a piece of software interacting between the machine's hardware components and its software applications. The IBM PC would be the desktop machine that first made computing ubiquitous across society, with it came the MS-Virus.
In the next decade, Gates and Microsoft ruthlessly used control of the operating system to leverage control over most of the PC's software. If you want to know the character of Mr. Gates, ask the people from the 1980s who led the making of PC spreadsheets, data bases, word processors, and countless other applications, by the mid-1990s, Microsoft software would dominate them all.
In the early 1990s, the rest of the industry grew increasingly concerned Microsoft's domination of the PC would allow them control of the burgeoning internet. The notoriously libertarian anti-government industry funded the creation of an antitrust case, handing it over to the Department of Justice, who filed an anti-monopoly case against Microsoft in 1998.
Antitrust, most notably the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, was always a limited reactionary political response to the power of industrial technology and its great social construct – the corporation. Over the course of the 20th century, as ever larger corporations consolidated control over the US government, antitrust’s 19th century thinking floundered. Despite these limitations, antitrust did manage a few successes, most famously the breaking up of Standard Oil and AT&T, and the freeing of knowledge from the Bell Labs. Despite all the corporate lamenting on the supposed anti-market government intrusion of antitrust, these actions proved tremendously beneficial to the respective industries and beyond.
In 1999, the Court's findings against Microsoft were unequivocal,
“Microsoft's market share and the applications barrier to entry together endow the company with monopoly power...Microsoft has waged an unlawful campaign in defense of its monopoly position....Microsoft violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act by engaging in a series of exclusionary, anticompetitive, and predatory acts to maintain its monopoly power.”
In direct contradiction to Microsoft's and the industry's innovation PR mantra the Court's finding stated,
“Most harmful of all is the message that Microsoft's actions have conveyed to every enterprise with the potential to innovate in the computer industry. Microsoft's past success in hurting such companies and stifling innovation deters investment in technologies and businesses that exhibit the potential to threaten Microsoft.”
Most amusing were Microsoft's actions against its own parent,
“Microsoft consistently pressured IBM to reduce its support for software products that competed with Microsoft's offerings, and it used its monopoly power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems to punish IBM for its refusal to cooperate.”
In popular lore, Gate's is just a good businessman, bringing to mind old Joe Kennedy's observation to his son Jack, “The biggest sons of bitches I've ever dealt with were all businessmen.” It's imperative to understand, the entire ability for the PC software industry to develop was based on the ability to interact with an operating system controlled by one company. The result of Microsoft's unlawful actions exclusively for their own interest would be the accumulation of a seemingly infinite pirate's treasure.
The final judgment called for the breakup of Microsoft into two separate entities. Unfortunately, before officially releasing his findings, the judge gave them to a couple media outlets. Microsoft used the judge's actions in appellate court to stop the breakup, though the court concurred with the judge's findings of Microsoft's unlawful monopoly actions. In the end, the case did stop Microsoft's march to internet dominance, though looking at what the internet's become, doubtful MS would have done much worse.
Eventually, Mr Gates would take his MS-pirate booty and go around the world spouting any tomfool thing on any topic he wanted. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against any person's right to be a fool, but it's a much different matter when that fool has a giant megaphone and the ability to forcefully act based on ill-gotten gains.
Gates' most recent foolishness, and there's been plenty, was coming out against making the knowledge for producing Covid vaccines publicly available, allowing others across the planet and public health in general to more quickly benefit. No Jonas Salk is Chairman Bill. But those who know him understand he's long understood the power and profit of controlling knowledge in this Information Era, just as John D. Rockefeller understood the power of controlling oil in the Industrial Era. In the mid 1970s, Gates castigated the nascent software community for its free movement of information. Chairman Bill always wanted his vig – a classically epic greed.
What the Microsoft case clearly demonstrated was the complete inadequacy of the almost century and half old antitrust legislation. It is an entirely archaic method for meeting the challenges of information technology, and, just as importantly, in dealing with corporate power. Paradoxically, the 1956 antitrust case against Bell Labs illuminated part of a better path for the future. Bell Labs was the research arm of the great telephone monopoly AT&T. Just like the computer industry, Bell Labs got a lot of money from the military. Along with telephone technologies, Bell Labs invented such things as lasers, transistors, and photovoltaic cells.
Bell’s 1956 antitrust ruling left AT&T's telephone system monopoly intact, but ordered Bell Labs to license, at no cost, all their existing patents. No less a Valley icon than Intel Founder Gordon Moore said opening Bell's licensing was one of the most important developments for the commercial semiconductor industry “to really get started in the United States.” A subsequent hearing by a House Antitrust Subcommittee, disgruntled the judgment had not broken-up AT&T's vertical monopoly, concluded the reason this hadn't happened was because of the “intense lobbying of the Department of Defense.”
Industrial Era government and especially the military have been the main funders of a tremendous amount of technology development. At the same time, Wizard of Oz corporate propaganda, particularly emanating from their main communication channels, university economics departments, continuously spouts, “Pay no attention to those men behind the curtain. It's all been accomplished by great lone innovators and the power of markets.”
Whatever “markets” are today, predominately just a small number of massive corporations, they are grossly insufficient and even detrimental sole controllers of technology development. And however one wants to define money today, it is an entirely unsatisfactory method for valuing information technology, even more so exploding bio-technology.
At it's foundation, democracy is an information system. Looking across the globe, it is quite clear our democratic institutions are archaic, incapable of meeting the growing challenges of a new technological era. From the US to Russia to Nigeria to Brazil, corruption is the word unanimously used to describe government dysfunction.
In dealing with technology, government and politics has always trailed the technology itself, paradoxically having funded much of its creation. In the spot-on words of the London professor, government's role is limited to creating laws supporting the technology, at this point a distasteful recipe for disaster. Government and politics need radical reform.