The Birth of the Network

Origins of Modern Nudge-age Progressivism

The Birth of the Network

The 1940s and 1950s were, by all accounts, very conservative decades. The idea of technical progress had not receded, but two world wars, and the Holocaust, caused engineers and government leaders to be a little humbler about what technological progress can accomplish. The Holocaust and the wholesale destruction of cities in Japan and Germany by nuclear weapons and firebombing dampened progressive rhetoric.

Information also played a role in placing the progressive dream on hold for twenty years or so. While the great surveillance states were just materializing, memories of the German Stasi, neighbors informing on neighbors, and families destroyed through informing, were fresh in the minds of many.

Wholesale information gathering was seen as an element of governmental control over populations—one of the biggest arguments against the Soviet Union, for instance, was its desire to control entire populations using information gathering and propaganda. Most people, at least in Western cultures, still held to a strong individualism. People should be left alone to live their lives.

Beyond the creepiness of information gathering and population control was also the sheer volume of information. Increasing the number of human computers was not practical after a point, and no-one really knew all the right questions to ask all the time.

There were movements on the horizon, however, that would change all of this.

Economic and Military Competition

In the 1930s, the United States was in the grip of the Great Depression:

…it must have felt as though America, caught in the clutches of the Great Depression, could not or would not keep her half of the social contract. There were more people out of work in the United States, both actually and proportionately, than in any other nation on earth. Thirteen million unemployed represented a quarter of the workforce in an age when, in most families, only the men held jobs.[1]

In contrast, over the course of the first two five-year plans, starting in 1932 and ending in 1937, Russia’s industrial economy tripled in size.[2] The third five-year plan, starting in 1928, was cut short in 1941 by the Russia’s entry into the Second World War.

Walter Duranty, widely respected in American circles, reported the Russian situation in glowing terms. The taking of the grain output of millions, leaving them to starve—the Holodomor—was hidden from American eyes. The massive amounts of gold discovered in artic snows, used to pay for the construction of new factories and cities, was hidden away as well.

The entire change in the life of the average Russian was reported in the most fantastic of terms.

Books about Russia—even the five-year plans—were best sellers in the United States. Readers of the English translation of a children’s version of the 1928 five-year plan were challenged with the greatness of Russian Communism:

No one can read the last chapter without being moved by the great social vision which presumably animates and lends significance to the program of construction. Millions of boys and girls growing to manhood and womanhood in the Soviet Union have no doubt already caught the vision and are ordering their lives by it. Here undoubtedly lies the power of that strange new society which is rising on the ruins of imperial Russia.

. . . .

The American teacher will be forced to put to himself the question: Can we not in some way harness the school to the task of building a better, a more just, a more beautiful societv? Can we not broaden the sentiment of patriotism to embrace the struggles which men must ever wage with ignorance, disease, poverty, ugliness, injustice? This means that we shall have to turn our attention increasingly from the mechanics of school procedure to the fundamental problems of American life and culture.[3]

In the midst of American depression and Russian wonder came Stalin’s invitation to migrate to Russia—to participate in this new way of building a country where the worker was respected. It is not hard to see, then, why hundreds of thousands of Americans left the United States, migrating to Russia in the 1930s.[4]

Russia was building military might as well as industrial. It seemed, from the perspective of anyone living in the United States, that Russia would soon overtake, and excel beyond, American might.

While America and the Soviet Union were allies in the Second World War, the rivalry began again in peace, creating a new cold war. Imagine being a politician just after the Second World War. America had just come out of a debilitating depression while Russia seemed to be building industrial and military might at breakneck speed. Within recent memory tens of thousands of American citizens voluntarily moved to Russia. Communism and Socialism were sweeping America.

And progressivism no longer held the public’s imagination. Nuclear and fire bombs had taken the shine off the very worldview needed to prevent the red threat from consuming the world.

Is it any wonder politicians and military leaders took the threat of being left behind seriously? Finding itself with a serious competitor, took the competition seriously.[5]

To win this competition, America needed something new—not just the computer, but networks of computers.

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[1] Tim Tzouliadis, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia, First Edition (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008), 2.

[2] Lynn Hunt et al., The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures, A Concise History, Volume II: Since 1340, Second Edition (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006), 832–832.

[3] Ilʹ I͡Akovlevichi͡a Marshak, New Russia’s Primer; the Story of the Five-Year Plan, trans. George S. Counts and Nucia P. Lodge (Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin company, 1931).

[4] Tzouliadis, The Forsaken.

[5] An interesting aspect, often mis-told, of this competition is that Communist infiltration of American government. A well-researched counter to the common narrative can be found in: M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (Forum Books, 2007).