Tag Archives: politics

Cybernetic Revolutionaries

Always on the lookout for good books dealing with the history of computing, I was pleased to see this week the announcement of Eden Medina’s new book, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011).  Not only does Eden happen to be a friend of mine, but her book is a welcome addition to the literature on the history of computing, which has generally been focused almost exclusively on the United States (with the occasional recognition of developments in Europe) and on technologies rather than users.  Medina’s “cybernetic revolutionaries” are a very different group from the “computer boys” that I focus on (although they share similar characteristics and agendas).  Medina’s subjects are the cyberneticians and government officials who imagined, in the context of Salvadore Allende’s socialist Chile, a far-seeing and -reaching computer system that would monitor and manage that nation’s entire economy.  Although the system, called Project Cybersyn, was never fully implemented, it represents in many ways the apotheosis of a particular vision of the electronic computer as the ultimate cybernetic system.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, cybernetics is possible the most important science that you have never heard of.   The word itself has larger disappeared from public discourse (at least in the United States) but its influence remains strong in a range of scientific disciplines from ecology to molecular biology to economics to psychology.

To give just a small sense of what Cybernetic Revolutionaries is trying to accomplish, take a look at a recent post on the MIT Press blog in which Medina draws a parallel between the socialist utopian vision of Project Cybersyn and the roughly contemporary television series Star Trek.  “Like ‘Star Trek,’ Medina argues, “Project Cybersyn brought together technology and politics to advance a utopian vision of a just society.”  It is clear that, for many computer revolutionaries, “computerization” was not just a technological project, but also ideological. For many American corporations in the 1950s and 1960s, for example, computerization was about centralization.  In Allende’s Chile, the ideological dimensions of computerization appear to have been much more complex.  More recently, computerization is associated with democratization, or liberalization, or the perpetuation of free-market ideology.   The clear and close relationship between technology and ideology is only beginning to be explored by historians.

The politics of programming languages

In Chapter 2 (“Tower of Babel”) I discuss the ways in which different programming languages (FORTRAN, COBOL, and ALGOL, among others) embodied different social, organizational, and professional agendas.  Some of this was a reflection of  particular problem domains — FORTRAN was obviously designed for scientific applications, and COBOL for business use.  But more significantly, many languages were intended to discipline what was seen as a unreliable and recalcitrant labor force.  As Fred Gruenberger of the RAND Corporation noted in a 1962 Symposium on Programming Languages, “You know, I’ve never seen a hot dog language come out yet in the last 14 years — beginning with Mrs. Hopper’s A-0 compiler … that didn’t have tied to it the claim in its brochure that this one will eliminate all programmers. The last one we got was just three days ago from General Electric (making the same claim for the G-WIZ compiler) that this one will eliminate programmers. Managers can now do their own programming; engineers can do their own programming, etc. As always, the claim seems to be made that programmers are not needed anymore.”

The notion that programming languages are “artifacts with politics” is a provocative one, and I explore the idea more in my chapter on the Cambrian explosion of programming languages. What follows is an excerpt discussing the gendered nature of many of the advertisements for programming languages that appeared in this period:

In its “Meet Susie Meyers” advertisements for its PL/1 programming language, the IBM Corporation asked its users an obviously rhetorical question: “Can a young girl with no previous programming experience find happiness handling both commercial and scientific applications, without resorting to an assembler language?” The answer, of course, was an enthusiastic “yes!” Although the advertisement promised a “brighter future for your programmers,'”(who would be free to “concentrate more on the job, less on the language”) it also implied a low-cost solution to the labor crisis in software. The subtext of appeals like this was non-too-subtle: If pretty little Susie Meyers, with her spunky miniskirt and utter lack of programming experience, could develop software effectively in PL/1, so could just about anyone.

The actual advertisement was a two-page, full-color extravaganza.