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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
Marxists24; 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.

24 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).

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