Essay argues technology does not drive repression, norms do

possibility that machines threaten a new fascism must be weighed against the vigor of the liberal ideas, institutions, and norms that Wiener championed throughout the book. The flaw in today’s dystopian prophecies is that they disregard the existence of these norms and institutions, or drastically underestimate their causal potency. The result is a technological determinism whose dark predictions are repeatedly refuted by the course of events. The numbers “1984” and “2001” are good reminders. I will consider two examples. Tech prophets often warn of a “surveillance state” in which a government empowered by technology will monitor and interpret all private communications, allowing it to detect dissent and subversion as it arises and make resistance to state power futile. Orwell’s telescreens are the prototype, and in 1976 Joseph Weizenbaum, one of the gloomiest tech prophets of all time, warned my class of graduate students not to pursue automatic speech recognition because government surveillance was its only conceivable application. Though I am on record as an outspoken civil libertarian, deeply concerned with contemporary threats to free speech, I lose no sleep over technological advances in the Internet, video, or artificial intelligence. The reason is that almost all the variation across time and space in freedom of thought is driven by differences in norms and institutions and almost none of it by differences in technology. Though one can imagine hypothetical combinations of the most malevolent totalitarians with the most advanced technology, in the real world it’s the norms and laws we should be vigilant about, not the tech. Consider variation across time. If, as Orwell hinted, advancing technology was a prime enabler of political repression, then Western societies should have gotten more and more restrictive of speech over the centuries, with a dramatic worsening in the second half of the 20th century continuing into the 21st. That’s not how history unfolded. It was the centuries when communication was implemented by quills and inkwells that had autos-da-fé and the jailing or guillotining of Enlightenment thinkers. During World War I, when the state of the art was the wireless, Bertrand Russell was jailed for his pacifist opinions. In the 1950s, when computers were room-size accounting machines, hundreds of liberal writers and scholars were professionally punished. Yet in the technologically accelerating, hyperconnected 21st century, 18 percent of social science professors are Marxists”*; the President of the United States is nightly ridiculed by television comedians as a racist, pervert, and moron; and technology’s biggest threat to political discourse comes from amplifying too many dubious voices rather than suppressing enlightened ones. Now consider variations across place. Western countries at the technological frontier consistently get the highest scores in indexes of democracy and human rights, while many backward strongman states are at the bottom, routinely jailing or killing government critics. The lack of a correlation between technology and repression is unsurprising when you analyze the channels of information flow in any human society. For dissidents to be influential, they have to get their message out to a wide network via whatever channels of communication are available—pamphleteering, soap-box oration, subversive soirées in cafés and pubs, word of mouth. These channels enmesh influential dissidents in a broad social network which makes them easy to identify and track down. *4 Neil Gross & Solon Simmons, “The Social and Political Views of American College and University Professors,” in N. Gross & S. Simmons, eds., Professors and Their Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). 79 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016882