Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xvii I “We Defend Every Place”: Building the Cold War World |. 2 Why Build Computers?: The Military Role in Computer Research 43 3 SAGE sa 4 From Operations Research to the Electronic Battlefield 113 5 Interlude: Metaphor and the Politics of Subjecti: 6 The Machine in the Middle: Cybernetic Psychology and World Warll = 175 7 Noise, Communication, and Cognition 209viii Contents 8 Constructing Artificial Intelligence 239 9 Computers and Politics in Cold War IT 275 10 Minds, Machines, and Subjectivity in the Closed World 303 Epilogue: Cyborgs in the World Wide Web 353 Notes 367 Index 429Preface The primary weapons of the Cold War were ideologies, alliances, ad- visors, foreign aid, national prestige—and above and behind them all, the juggernaut of high technology. Nuclear warheads, intercontinen- tal jet bombers, ICBMs, and satellites formed the war's strategic back- bone. Even this close to the Gold War's end, we can begin to see how the existence of these technologies shaped patterns of thought in both military and civilian life. The strange but compelling logic of nuclear deterrence required ever-expanding, ever-improving, ruinously ex- pensive arsenals of high-technology weapons; these weapons played a double role as arms and as symbols of power, prowess, and prestige. Without their intercontinental reach and prodigious destructive force, the Cold War could never have become a truly global contest. Without their power as symbols—both of apocalypse and of the suc- cess or failure of entire social orders—it could never have become so wuly total, such a titanic battle for hearts and minds as well as hands. Of all the technologies built to fight the Cold War, digital computers have become its most ubiquitous, and perhaps its most important, legacy Yet few have realized the degree to which computers created the techno- logical possibility of Cold War and shaped its political atmosphere, and virtually no one has recognized how profoundly the Cold War shaped computer technology. Its politics became embedded in the machines— even, at times, in their technical design—while the machines helped make possible its politics. This book argues that we can make sense of the history of computers as tools only when we simultancously grasp their history as metaphors in Cold War science, politics, and culture. Historiography is always guided by specific tropes, genres, and plot structures. These are what enable any narrative to achieve its sense of coherence—its sense of “being a story” and therefore of embodying ax Preface possible truth. The favored tropes and plots of any given history re- flect the perspective of the historian and influence how material is deemed relevant.! This book is built around a history of computers as a central tech- nology of Cold War military forces, on the one hand, and as an axial metaphor in psychological theory, on the other. It thus responds to a large existing literature on computers and cognitive science, one that is dominated by two major genres of historiography. As Michael Ma- honey has observed, these genres correspond to the two major histor ical sources of digital computer technology: machine logic, on the one hand, and machine calculation, on the other. The first genre is an intellectual history in which computers func- tion primarily as the embodiment of ideas about information, sym- bols, and logic. This is the version of history that is usually told by computer scientists,> cognitive scientists, and historians concerned with the evolution of concepts. It focuses on the logical power and psychological insights made possible by the computer. According to the canonical story, recounted in most textbooks as well as in pract cally every major study of cognitive psychology and artificial intelli- gence, computer technology opened the intellectual door to the solution of certain essentially philosophical problems about knowl- edge, perception, and communication first posed in a primitive fash- ion by the ancient Greeks. The invention of programmable machines capable of complex symbolic processing made it possible to pose such questions in ways more tractable to the theoretical and experimental methods of scientific inquiry. ‘The standard lineage here runs from Plato's investigations of the foundations of knowledge and belief, through Leibniz’s rationalism, to Lady Lovelace’s notes on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine and Boole’s Laws of Thought in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, Alan Turing’s invention of the digital logic machine in 1936 (and later his test for machine intelligence), Norbert Wiener’s cyber- netic theory, the McCulloch-Pitts theory of neuron nets as Turing ma- chines, and John von Neumann's comparisons of the computer and the brain are taken as founding moments. This tale reaches its climax in the 1956 consolidation of artificial intelligence research by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon and the movement of information theory into psychology through the work of George Miller, J. C. R. Licklider, and others in the late 1950s. In the late 1980s, the rise of parallel distributed processing and neural net-Preface xi works marks ever-closer convergence in the study of human and ma- chine intelligence. Most of the characters in this version of the story are philosophers, scientists, or mathematicians concerned with logic. Very late in the game, some are psychologists using concepts of infor- mation processing to extend or overturn behaviorist models in favor of new cognitive theories. All are intellectuals and theorists. Some pose this story as one in which the confusion of philosophy is gradually replaced by the precision and clarity of science. Others tell it as one of convergence and complementarity between scientific progress and philosophical ideas, with computers finally opening the Way to experimental modeling of otherwise untestable theories. But every story in this genre makes the history of computers and cognitive science primarily a history of ideas. The genre’s major tropes are progress—knowledge expanding through a steady stream of new dis coveries—and revolution. The “computer revolution” of the 1950s linked calculation to communication, control, and simulation through new theories of information and symbolic programming. The “cogni- tive revolution” of the late 1950s carried these ideas to a wide range of previously divergent disciplines, such as psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience, bringing them new direction, linkage, and coherence.> The second genre is an engineering/economic history focusing on computers as devices for processing information. This version, natu- rally enough, is the one told by computer engineers, business histori- ans, and others with a primary interest in the technology and its social impacts. It focuses on the insights and technical capabilities needed to create and develop the computer as a digital calculating machine. This version typically begins (after bows to the abacus and the early calculating machines of Pascal, Leibniz, and others) in the 1820s with Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine and his later, more sophisti- cated Analytical Engine.® It then runs from Herman Hollerith, the 1890s inventor of punched-card tabulation, to Vannevar Bush and his 1930s analog differential analyzers. George Stibitz, John Atanasoff, and Howard Aiken and their World War II-era electromechanical calculators are next, followed by Presper Eckert, John Mauchly, Tur- ing, and von Neumann and their stored-program electronic comput- ers, completed just after the war’s end. The story moves on to UNIVAG, IBM, and the many other corporate developers of com- mercial computer equipment, as computers spread from military and university installations through factories and offices and into the home. In the 1980s, personal computers and computer networks capxii Preface the triumphant tale of a rising information economy, the vigorous backbone of an equally potent information society. While some of the characters are the same, this story is mainly about engineers, their inventions, and the companies that developed and sold them. Usually these histories focus on technical and eco- nomic facts about computers: how they came to be invented and com- mercialized, the jobs they automated or wansformed, and. the technological achievements that build on their abilities. The com- puter’s effects, in this story, are practical. The computer is a business machine, a tool of science, and a complex, ingeniously designed arti- fact. Information is a commodity rather than a concept. Calculation, control, and communication are significant because they allow the economic exploitation of information. Like its intellectual-history counterpart, the major tropes of this engineering/economic history are progress (of technology rather than ideas) and revolution. The in- ventors and engineers behind the “computer revolution,” here driven by inevitable market forces, are cast as towering visionaries whose technological achievements have led or will lead to major social change.” These parallel stories exist for a reason. Computers display, Janus- like, a double aspect. They consist simultaneously of hardware, whose heritage lies within the history of technology, and software, whose an- cestry lies in mathematics and formal logic. With few exceptions, these realms remained largely separate until World War I, when the ma- chine calculation (hardware) and machine logic (software) traditions converged in the stored-program electronic digital computer. This partly explains the divided character of computer historiography, which to date has consisted largely of accounts written by authors de- scended from one of these two traditions. What is important here is that the tropes and plot lines of both gen- res impose requirements that lead authors to ignore or downplay phenomena outside the laboratory and the mind of the scientist or engincer. Both versions of the story explain developments in a given field solely from the perspective of actors within it. As Mahoney puts it, the authors of this “insider history...take as givens...what a more critical, outside viewer might see as choices.” There is litde place in such accounts for the influence of ideologies, intersections with popular culture, or political power. Stories based on the tropes of progress and revolution are often incompatible with these more contingent forms of historyPreface xiii This book is built on an implicit critique of existing computer histo- riography. Instead of progress and revolution, the plot structure I shall use emphasizes contingency and multiple determination. I shall cast technological change as technological choice, tying it to political choices and socially constituted values at every level, rendering tech- nology as a product of complex interactions among scientists and en- gineers, funding agencies, government policies, ideologies, and cultural frames. The Closed World emphasizes linkages and problems ignored or downplayed by most of the extant texts. My ultimate goal is to prove the utility of a more integrated historical approach by showing how ideas and devices are linked through politics and culture. To this end, I follow both concepts and technologies through many layers of rela- tionships: of individual scientists and engineers with military technical problems; of computer development projects with military agencies and their problems; of large-scale political trends with the direction and character of research; of computer metaphors with scientific re- search programs; and of cultural productions with scientific and tech- nological changes. As for my own tropes, I will employ the concepts of metaphor and discourse. This latter term, not an entity but an analytical construct, refers to an ensemble of heterogeneous elements loosely linked around material “supports,” in this case the computer. Discourses, in my usage, include techniques, technologies, metaphors. and experi- ences as well as language. Closed-world discourse articulated geopolitical strategies and metaphors (such as “containing” Communism) in and through military systems for centralized command and control. C)- borg discourse articulated metaphors of minds as computers in and through integrated human-machine systems and technologies of arti- ficial intelligence. Though scientists, engineers, and politicians wied to hold them separate, Cold War popular culture grasped the inti- mate connection between the closed world and the cyborg. Closed- world drama, in film and fiction, repeatedly dramatized them together, articulating the simultaneous construction of the material realm of technology, the abstract realm of strategy and theory, and the subjective realm of experience. One criticism that may be leveled against my account is that I un- derstate or ignore the roles of the computer industry and of economic incentives in the development of computer technology. Thus, some will conclude, I inevitably overstate the influence of military agenciesxiv Preface and their priorities. In reply, I would emphasize two points. First, during the period I discuss, the role of industry was often closely co- ordinated with military plans.’ Second, I am writing against the back- drop of a field almost entirely dominated by engineering/economic studies. This book attempts a kind of “counterhistory,” a corrective to perspectives that create the impression of an inevitable progress driven by impersonal market forces and technical logics. In rendering technological change as a matter of politically significant choices, and technological metaphor as a fundamental element of culture and poli- tics, I aim to set the history of computers on a new course. Some will also object that to treat Cold War politics as an American theater is to ignore its leading actor, namely the Soviet Union. On this view, Soviet actions and policies tightly constrained the grand strategy I will describe. The decisions taken by U.S. leaders were often the only politically possible responses to the Soviet military buildup and its declared hostility to Western powers. The closure of Soviet society forced American decisionmakers to act on the basis of small amounts of very uncertain information. Lacking firm intelligence and facing awesome weapons against which no real defense was possible, pru- dence dictated only one possible course: a massive military buildup on every conceivable axis.!° Therefore, picturing the Cold War as a drama constructed by and within the United States reverses the causal arrow, granting American leaders a wider range of choices than they actually had. 1 believe that this view apologizes too easily for the vigorous Ameri- can role in history’s most expensive and dangerous arms race. My own concept of that role will become clear enough in what follows. Yet even the most benign possible view of American goals and tactics in the Cold War is compatible with the argument I make in this book. It was precisely the political closure of Soviet society that allowed it to function in American political discourse as an enigmatic and terrify- ing Other. This Other led, incontestably, an ideological as well as a politico-military life, and it was in part this double nature that pro- duced the strange political culture of the closed world. American leaders probably did have more choices than they realized. But in my view, the reasons they did not realize this had everything to do with the discourse they applied to the interpretation of their situation. My picture of politics as discourse in no way denies the reality of events or the important influence of Soviet actions. Instead, it frames them in a way that allows their strategic dimensions to be grasped simultane-Preface xv ously as technological forms and subjective spaces—as design impera- tives and prescriptions for political identities as well as descriptions of objective situations. This book views three apparently disparate histories—the history of American global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of mind and subjectivity as reflected in science and culture— through the lens of the American political imagination. The links, 1 will argue, are partial and sometimes contradictory, and for this rea- son my presentation is kaleidoscopic, often more collage than linear narrative. But the links are real, and without some attempt to trace their patterns any effort to understand the place of computers in American culture is incomplete. Not only as tools but also as models and metaphors, computers connect cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence to high-technology warfare and to the institutional struc- ture of the modern state. A very different kind of history lies hidden in the interstices of the received intellectual and engineering/economic histories. It is a story neither of ideas alone nor of machines and their effects, but of ideas, experiences, and metaphors in their interaction with machines and material change. At its heart are political ends and cultural transi- tions ignored by the canonical tale. By exploring not the history of computers and computer metaphors, but @ history, constructed as a counterpoint to those the field itself has generated, this book attempts to shift the focus of historical inquiry from the power of computer technology and the truth of cognitive science to their meaning for po- litical and cultural identity. In writing The Closed World I have tried to consider the needs of a va ety of audienci Historians of technology and science will find a revi- sionist account of the coevolution of computers and theories of mind. Political and cultural historians will find an extended exploration of the interplay between technology, politics, and culture in the Cold War. People interested in cultural studies and science and technology studies will, I hope, find the concepts of discourse, political identity, subjectivity, and closed-world vs. green-world drama useful as analyti- cal tools. Computer professionals will find a different perspective on the larger history surrounding computer science and engineering, as well as detailed accounts of major computer projects of the 1950s. Fi- nally, for the growing numbers of scientifically and technologically lit- erate generalists, the book tenders an extended exploration of thewi Preface subtle and intricate relations of science and engineering with the evo- lution of modern society. To speak plainly and intelligibly to such diverse groups, I have at- tempted wherever possible to avoid technical language or analytical jargon. Where necessary, I have provided concise definitions of sig- nificant terms, but technical details are rarely crucial to my argument. Readers completely unfamiliar with the principles of computer tech- nology may, however, wish to keep a book like Joseph Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason by their side for ready reference For readers interested in a more extended historical survey of the in- tellectual problems and conceptual frameworks of cognitive psychol- ogy, I suggest Howard Gardner’s The Mind’s New Science. Notes throughout the text provide pointers to the existing historical litera- ture, but readers entirely unacquainted with work in this field might wish to peruse Stan Augarten’s highly readable and comprehensive (though sometimes inaccurate) Bit by Bit: An Ilustrated History of Com- puters or Kenneth Flamm’s definitive two-volume economic history, Targeting the Computer and Creating the Computer. Finally, I want to mention two terminological points. I will be dis- cussing several kinds of computers, including mechanical calculators and electromechanical analog computers. My convention throughout will be to use the term “computer” in its ordinary modern sense as re- ferring to the electronic stored-program digital computer.!! When speaking of manual, analog, and pre-electronic computing technolo- gies, I will specify them as such. In general I have avoided the use of gendered pronouns, except in direct quotations from other authors and when discussing groups, such as Air Force pilots, historically made up exclusively or over- whelmingly of men. References to “him” or “his” should thus be taken literally. Although gender ideology is only a tertiary theme in this book, I have tried in this way to gesture toward historical links (which I have discussed elsewhere) between the traditionally extreme masculinity of the military world, the political culture of democracies, and the rationalistic masculinity of many computer cultures.'?