by Yasha Levine
22. Golumbia, Cultural Logic of Computation, 60.
23. “The transfer to this thinking machine.… It’s a thing that may be very useful to a sane world, but I can’t say we’re living in one. It is a very dangerous thing socially. If we are going to sell man down the river and replace him, he’s going to be a very angry man, and an angry man is a dangerous man,” he told the Associated Press in 1949. Hal Boyle, “Writer Claims Machine Gradually Taking Over Duties of Man Until Soon None Will Be Left,” San Bernardino Daily Sun, April 20, 1949.
24. Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings, 189.
25. Interestingly, in the 1950s, the official Soviet position on cybernetics was critical and mirrored Wiener’s own denunciations of corporate America’s use of cybernetic systems to grab more political and economic power. Here’s the entry on cybernetics in the 1954 Concise Dictionary of Philosophy, published in the Soviet Union: “Cybernetics: a reactionary pseudoscience that appeared in the U.S.A. after World War II and also spread through other capitalist countries. Cybernetics clearly reflects one of the basic features of the bourgeois worldview—its inhumanity, striving to transform workers into an extension of the machine, into a tool of production, and an instrument of war. At the same time, for cybernetics an imperialistic utopia is characteristic—replacing living, thinking man, fighting for his interests, by a machine, both in industry and in war. The instigators of a new world war use cybernetics in their dirty, practical affairs.” Quoted in Benjamin Peters, How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
26. Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age, “When his death notice appeared in the Boston Globe, agents in the FBI’s Boston Field Office … ”
27. J. C. R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, March 1960.
28. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 36.
29. Waldrop, Dream Machine, 204.
30. Lick seemed to be channeling a 1960s version of One Laptop per Child, an organization launched in 2005 by Nicholas Negroponte, another member of ARPA’s Cambridge Project, to give every poor child in the world a laptop in the belief that lack of access to computers was the impediment to global literacy and education. J. C. R. Licklider, “Motivation and Education through Interaction with Computer-Mediated ‘Dynamations,’” MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Cambridge Project records, 1970s (exact date uncertain).
31. Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency.
32. Waldrop, Dream Machine, 203.
33. J. C. R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis.”
34. Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency.
35. An Interview with J. C. R. Licklider Conducted by William Aspray and Arthur Norberg (Cambridge, MA: Charles Babbage Institute, October 28, 1988), https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107436/oh150jcl.pdf.
36. “The objective of this program is to identify and solve problems that arise when a number of digital computers, some of them remote from others, are operated together in a network, and when the information-processing capabilities of a network of computers are distributed among several or many users operating at consoles, some of which are remote from the computers.” “ARPA Order No. 471,” Advanced Research Projects Agency, April 15, 1963.
37. Thomas A. Sturm, “The Air Force and the World Wide Military Command and Control System 1961–1965” (secret, declassified), USAF Historical Division Liaison Office, August 1966.
38. Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 36.
39. Interview with J. C. R. Licklider, 28.
40. A record of the symposium’s proceedings shows that Lick’s command and control work was considered to be vital to the issue. There was also some discussion about having his division work with Project Agile. “Programs and projects are now being considered by a representative group under the Chairmanship of Dr. Licklider, who will head ARPA programs in Behavioral Sciences and Command and Control. Command and control research involves behavioral scientists and in part meets the recommendations for man-machine systems research outlined in the Smithsonian Report. ARPA may also pursue social science research in Project Agile—its program of research and development in remote area conflict.” US Army Limited-War Mission and Social Science Research symposium, Special Operations Research Office, American University, Washington, DC, June 1962.
41. Sharon Weinberger, in The Imagineers of War, points out that Project Agile and Command and Control Research were intertwined from the very beginning: “And just a month before Godel traveled to Vietnam, ARPA was handed a new assignment in command and control, which would in less than a decade grow into the ARPANET, the predecessor to the modern Internet. The following year, Godel personally signed off on the first computer-networking study, giving it money from his Vietnam budget.” She adds, “DARPA’s Vietnam War work and the ARPANET were not two distinct threads but rather pieces of a larger tapestry that held the agency together” (prologue).
42. Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency, 303.
43. One example: two contracts issued by Licklider for time-sharing and remote information processing with UCLA and UC Berkeley drew almost $900,000 from Project Agile. “These new contracts put Dr. Licklider $666,000 over his FY 63 program in information processing. This amount plus an additional amount to support another $200,000 prospective new requirement in the month of May has been transferred into his program from AGILE.” “ARPA Order No. 471,” Advanced Research Projects Agency, April 15, 1963.
44. Robert M. White, “Anthropometric Survey of the Royal Thai Armed Forces,” US Army Natick Laboratories, sponsored by Advanced Research Projects Agency, June 1964.
45. “Like its Vietnamese counterpart, this new CDTC would also research and develop techniques and gadgets but with a focus on longer-term counterinsurgency goals, including Licklider’s plans for computer-assisted teaching, gaming, and simulation studies.” Jacobsen, Pentagon’s Brain, chap. 9.
46. Geoffrey Austrian, Herman Hollerith: Forgotten Giant of Information Processing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
47. Dennis Hodgson, “Ideological Currents and the Interpretation of Demographic Trends: The Case of Francis Amasa Walker,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 28, no. 1 (January 1992): 28–44.
48. North’s essay is reprinted by the American Statistical Association: The History of Statistics: Their Development and Progress in Many Countries (Boston, MA: American Statistical Association, 1918).
49. Kevin Maney, The Maverick and His Machine: Thomas Watson, Sr. and the Making of IBM (New York: Wiley, 2003).
50. A pioneering study explains the role that statistics and early computer technology played in the Holocaust: “It was the use of raw numbers, punch cards, statistical expertise, and identification cards that made it all possible. Every military and labor column existed first as a column of numbers. Every act of extermination was preceded by an act of registration; selection on paper ended with selection on the ramps.” Götz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth, The Nazi Census: Identification and Control in the Third Reich (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004).
51. Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (New York: Crown, 2001).
52. Robert Sproull, former director of ARPA, stated in an interview that, although ARPA’s command and control project did not originate in Project Agile, it overlapped with ARPA’s counterinsurgency mission and “may have had some origins.” Dr. Robert Sproull, interview commissioned by DARPA, December 7, 2006, http://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20Room/DARPA/15-F-0751_DARPA_Director_Robert_Sproull.pdf.
53. J. C. R. Licklider, “Memorandum for Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network,” Advanced Research Projects Agency, April 25, 1963, Edward A. Feigenbaum Pa
pers collection, Stanford University, https://exhibits.stanford.edu/feigenbaum/catalog/wj409km7108.
54. Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 76.
55. Licklider, “Memorandum for Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network.”
56. Waldrop, Dream Machine, 254, 305.
57. An Interview with Lawrence G. Roberts, Conducted by Arthur L. Norberg (San Mateo, CA: Charles Babbage Institute, April 1989), https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107608/oh159lgr.pdf.
58. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 48.
59. Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 48.
60. An Interview with Keith Uncapher, Conducted by Arthur L. Norberg (Minneapolis, MN: Charles Babbage Institute, July 1989), https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107692/oh174ku.pdf.
61. The smart money was on Raytheon, a major military contractor with deep ties to MIT going back to World War II. But at the last moment, ARPA awarded the IMP contract to Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN). Licklider, the man who initiated the ARPANET project, was a partner at BBN. Now his company was awarded a major contract by the very project he had created. It was more than just the money. The contract placed BBN at the center of the next wave of computing: networking. The selection showed the tiny, insular world of public agencies and private contractors that created the Internet. BBN a few decades later became one of the largest Internet service providers in the country.
62. Guy Raz, “‘Lo’ And Behold: A Communication Revolution,” All Things Considered, NPR, October 29, 2009.
63. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 153.
64. Vinton Cerf, interview by Judy O’Neill, April 24, 1990, https://web.archive.org/web/20170104132550/http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/vc1.html.
65. Lawrence G. Roberts, “The Evolution of Packet Switching,” November 1978, https://web.archive.org/web/20170310205146/http://www.packet.cc/files /ev-packet-sw.html.
66. “250 Jam Harvard Office,” Boston Globe, September 27, 1969.
67. Victor McElheny, “Sympathy for Protests, but… : How MIT Authorities See Student Scene,” Boston Globe, October 5, 1969.
68. Project Cam Exposed, pamphlet 1, 1969, MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections, Cambridge Project.
69. Project Cambridge Demonstrate, flier at Harvard, 1969, MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections, Cambridge Project.
70. Project Cam Exposed, pamphlet 2, 1969, MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections, Cambridge Project.
71. Judy Kaufman and Bob Park, eds., The Cambridge Project: Social Science for Social Control (Cambridge, MA: Imperial City, 1969). Held in MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Cambridge Project records.
72. Sasha Issenberg, The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns (New York: Crown, 2012).
73. Pool’s political work was well known by the public at the time. It even inspired a popular 1964 political thriller, The 480, by Eugene Burdick, about a dangerous presidential candidate who uses computer simulation technology to manipulate voters and win the election. Jill Lepore, “Politics and the New Machine,” The New Yorker, November 16, 2015.
74. Joy Rohde, “The Last Stand of the Psychocultural Cold Warriors—Military Contract Research in Vietnam,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 47, no. 3 (2011): 232–250.
75. Ibid., 239.
76. Jennifer S. Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
77. Gene Sosin, Sparks of Liberty: An Insider’s Memoir of Radio Liberty (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999), 112.
78. Joseph Hanlon, “The Implications of Project Cambridge,” New Scientist and New Science Journal, February 25, 1971.
79. Joy Rohde, email interview with author, January 9, 2017.
80. Joy Rohde, “Gray Matters: Social Scientists, Military Patronage, and Democracy in the Cold War,” Journal of American History, June 2009.
81. Joy Rohde, “‘The Social Scientists’ War’: Expertise in a Cold War Nation” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, January 1, 2007). ProQuest AAI3271806. http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3271806. Rohde expanded her dissertation, “‘The Social Scientists’ War,’” into a full book titled Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Science during the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). Both are great histories of military involvement in social science and the quest to build predictive technologies to manage the world.
82. Howard Margolis, “McNamara Ax Dooms Camelot,” Washington Post, July 9, 1965.
83. Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
84. David I. Bruck, “Brass Tacks: The Cambridge Project,” Harvard Crimson, September 26, 1969.
85. J. C. R. Licklider, “Establishment and Operation of a Program in Computer Analysis and Modeling in the Behavioral Sciences” (2nd draft), December 5, 1968, MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Cambridge Project records.
86. “DOW Chemical,” Resistance and Revolution: The Anti-Vietnam War Movement at the University of Michigan, University of Michigan History Department, michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu/antivietnamwar/exhibits /show/exhibit/military_and_the_university/dow_chemical.
87. “Army Experts Sift Rubble for Bombing Clues at U. of Wisconsin Math Center,” New York Times, August 26, 1970.
88. “Explosion Goes Off on Harvard Campus,” New York Times, October 14, 1970.
89. Jacobsen, Pentagon’s Brain, chap. 13, “In America, antiwar protests raged on…” Student protests against the ILLIAC-IV quickly devolved into violence: a campus armory and a US Air Force recruiting station were firebombed, and thousands of students protested on campus, smashing windows and breaking into the chancellor’s office. The protests put the supercomputer in physical danger, and the university was forced to relocate it across the country to the NASA Ames Research Center, which is today located next door to Google in Mountain View, California.
90. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer (New York: Viking Adult, 2005).
91. The protests against the Stanford Research Institute were persistent and violent enough that the university regents decided to spin off the Stanford Research Institute as a private entity, hoping to mollify students by officially distancing the university from classified military research.
92. One professor critical of the project recommended that, to placate protesters, all data and research done on Project Cambridge computers be made public. He got a nasty reply from one of the project’s original backers at Harvard: “The Department of Justice can arrange with you to do some research on how to keep blacks quiet and when the Cambridge Project has a useful system going, you may utilize that system to do the work you have undertaken. The Cambridge Project will not refuse access to its facilities because it disagrees with your politics,” wrote Edward Pattullo, director of Harvard’s Center for Behavioral Sciences. “However, if I am doing some work on how to make blacks noisy, also using the Cambridge Project facilities, you and I, individually, have control over the decision on whether or not to share our data.” Letter from Edward Pattullo, September 30, 1969, MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Cambridge Project records.
93. Judy Kaufman and Bob Park, eds., The Cambridge Project: Social Science for Social Control (Cambridge, MA: Imperial City, 1969). Held in MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Cambridge Project records.
94. Waldrop, Dream Machine, 316.
95. Ibid., 316.
96. “M.I.T.’s March 4: Scientists Discuss Renouncing Military Research,” Science, March 14, 1969.
97. Robert A. Young, “An Assessment of the Utility of the ARPA Network of Computers for the International Security Affairs Analyst,” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, September
1, 1973.
Chapter 3
1. Transcripts of Ford Rowan’s June 1975 NBC broadcasts were read into the Congressional Record. “Surveillance Technology,” Joint Hearings before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Comm. on the Judiciary and the Special Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Commerce of the Comm. on Commerce, US Senate, 94th Cong., 1st sess. (June 23, September 9 and 10, 1975).
2. Ibid.
3. “That is interesting to me. I had not heard that,” Christopher Pyle, a US Army whistleblower and today’s leading expert on American military surveillance in the 1970s, told me. “It doesn’t terribly surprise me. They often do stuff like that simultaneously. They both shut the system down and transfer the information to other people. But I never found that they had given stuff to ARPA.” Christopher Pyle, interview with author, April 2016.
4. Bobby Allyn, “1969: A Year of Bombings,” New York Times, August 27, 2009.
5. Joan Herbers, “250,000 War Protesters Stage Peaceful Rally in Washington; Militants Stir Clashes Later,” New York Times, November 16, 1969.
6. Richard Halloran, “An Expert in Counterintelligence,” New York Times, February 25, 1975.
7. Christopher Pyle, “Vast Army Intelligence Operation Monitors Political Scene,” Hartford Courant, January 25, 1970 (reprint from Washington Monthly).
8. At the symposium, one general remarked on the disparity between the North Vietnamese and the American soldiers in their motivation and willingness to die for the cause and wondered how the army could go about closing that gap. Like others at the conference, he stressed the need to collect more data on the culture and people in places like Vietnam in order to make the army’s counterinsurgency ops more effective. So here his concern was in reverse: to understand the enemy so America could make its soldiers just as tough and ready to die for the cause. US Army’s Limited-War Mission and Social Science Research symposium, Special Operations Research Office, American University, Washington, DC, June 1962.