Today the words “engineer” and “inventor” are generally considered loosely interchangeable. Engineers and inventors frequently start their careers studying at universities and might expect to be handed substantial responsibilities as managers at large corporations. More ambitious engineers might dream of becoming an entrepreneur by marketing his or her inventions, and many engineers have become very prominent in business.

However, prior to the late industrial revolution, an engineer had none of those connotations. Engineering was a military discipline. According to Merritt Row Smith’s essay Becoming Engineers in Early Industrial America, “at that time West Point was the only institution of formal engineering in America”, turning out “not just officers of the line, but ‘soldier technologists’ who could master the level as well as the sword”. Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary confirmed that narrow military understanding of the role of an engineer:

ENGINEER, n. In the military art, a person skilled in mathematics and mechanics, who forms plans of works for offense or defense, and marks out the ground for fortifications. Engineers are also employed in delineating plans and superintending the construction of other public works, as aqueducts and canals.

In other words, engineers were not deeply involved in economic decisions or management. They were facilitators of broader plans set forth by industrial capitalists. The occupation was thought of as more prestigious than that of a foreman or craftsmen, and carried more weight with corporate managers. However, unlike bonafide professionals, engineers were paid hourly wages, a fact that testified to the relatively subservient status an engineer might expect.

Today, one becomes an engineer after years of university instruction. But in the past, the discipline was far less exclusive. Lacking formal structure, one became an engineer by choice, not by training. According to Smith, “It brought a degree of respect from merchants, bankers, and other more highly placed members of the business world… Being an engineer meant being a gentleman, and gentility counted for much in class recognitions of 19th century America”. She continued, when they “identified themselves as engineers they thought and acted as if doing so were a matter of personal choice”, a mark of aspirational gentility, free from the formal constraints of the structured discipline which the Electrical and Information Ages would ultimately demand.

By the 1930s, when government investment fueled optimism that industrial electrification would lead the United States out of the Depression, engineers found themselves thrust into various social and political dialogs associated with the relationship between government and commerce. By the 1930s, engineers and their discipline seemed to have cultivated a kind of free agency. No longer were they the servants of politicians and businessmen; they were now equal partners. These three distinct realms, engineering, commerce, and politics seemed to share a symbiotic relationship, not lost on the futurists and pundits of the day. As historian Carroll Pursell recalled:

As the formula had it, scientific research discovered laws of nature that were then converted into technologies that were consumed by the nation’s citizens. An early and defining statement of the formula was adopted as the official motto of the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Worlds Fair: ‘Science Finds- Industry Applies- Man Conforms’”

This motto defined a previously unobserved dynamic between the three disciplines. Science, and the engineers who make it useful, are positioned as the instigators of social and political change. Conversely, humanity, the ‘conforming man’, is positioned as a pawn in the hands of science and industry. The integration of the three realms, and the transformation of the engineer, would continue deep into the Information Age. The 2006 census used a far more holistic definition of an engineer, which had by then shed its military connotation and emphasized ties with economic and social needs:

Engineers apply the principles of science and mathematics to develop economical solutions to technical problems. Their work is the link between perceived social needs and commercial applications.

The census bureau definition completely eliminated the necessary condition of civil servitude that Noah Webster’s dictionary seemed to imply. Instead, it positioned the engineer at the nexus of “private” corporate capital and “public” social needs. The census continues to list 18 different kinds of engineers, including elaborate definitions with references to trade associations for each, and counts that over 1.4 million professional engineers work in the United States. The story of how engineering transformed from an aspirational title of social class and military ability to a carefully disciplined occupation fully integrated with politics and industry is one told in close tandem with the Electrical and Information Revolutions.

Morgan was not alone in his regular aversion to fiscal adventurism; there was little access to corporate capital for creative inventors and entrepreneurs, and their relevance to the vitality of the broader economy, today taken for granted, was written off as trivial. As Journalist Historian Spencer E. Ante would recall:

In the nineteenth century, entrepreneurs virtually disappeared from classic economic and political thought thanks to the lack of financial support for their undertakings and awareness of their importance to the economy.

Inventors and entrepreneurs are terms that we today understand as nearly synonymous. But in the 19th century, inventors and engineers were rarely entrusted with corporate capital or managerial control of the companies they worked for. Conversely, entrepreneurs were not expected to have deep engineering knowledge or experience. The convergence of these disciplines would be a narrative perpetuated both in the Electrical Revolution and the Information Age.

By the second half of the 19th century, some engineers were starting to escape their corporate confines, gaining a degree of financial and creative independence. George Westinghouse, for example, got his start patenting and licensing his seminal inventrion, air brakes for trains, rather than working on the payroll of a locomotive company. Yet no engineers had yet ascended to America’s managerial elite, which was then dominated almost exclusively by a class of well pedigreed industrial factory owners. Bankers, and other gatekeepers of corporate capital, were generally too conservative to invest in engineers, fostering a dependence on large corporations to drive innovation. When Edison obtained the collaboration and financial support of J.P. Morgan in the financing of his Electric Light Company, in the words of Jill Jonnes, he forged “a new kind of relationship, however prickly and difficult, between corporate capital and scientific creativity”.

Edison would do so by making his endeavors literally impossible to ignore. He deliberately placed his first network of electric lights in the financial district of downtown Manhattan, no easy task since it would require him to dig eight miles of trenches to lay his wire under the pavement of the bustling New York streets. Not only did this make Edison’s work the source of perpetual tabloid fodder, it also allowed him to take various law firms, banks, newspapers and other established institutions of note, as customers. With his corporate infrastructure literally embedded in the foundations of America’s elite institutions, Edison would have an unprecedented source of corporate sponsorship for his electrical adventures.

Edison was not the only engineer to recognize that in order to fully realize the dreams of national utilization of electric power, a new partnership with corporate gatekeepers would have to be forged. This is evidenced by the fact that he and the two other major electrical entrepreneurs of the time, George Westinghouse and Charles Coffin, were headquartered in America’s financial epicenters where they could easily court the favor and financial support of America’s banking elite; New York, Pittsburgh, and Boston, respectively.

By 1900, these firms and their banking partners had a first hand awareness of the benefits of electricity that convinced the financial community that electrification would become a vastly profitable enterprise. Associated electrical industries “absorbed more capital than any other type of industry and rivaled railroad investment of the late 19th century in its relative share of the gross national product”.

Engineers did not immediately win the hearts of all bankers with their mastery of electricity. Some early skeptics of electricity saw electric light as a limited “service,” rather than a potentially transformative force that would fundamentally change the United States economy. It was easy, for example, to mistake Edison’s Electric Light Company as merely a competitor to candlestick makers and gas light utilities. From that perspective, the hype around the incredible versatility of electricity could have sounded hollow, since the vast constellation of electric appliances that would revolutionize American life had yet to emerge. However, entrepreneurs were able to break this stigma by billing electricity as a ‘commodity’ with multiple uses. As noted, by 1900, there were hundreds of working prototypes of electrical equipment that promised to change nearly every aspect of American industry and life. By then, doubters would be laughed at; “businessmen understood electricity as a ‘commodity’ which “might be useful in almost any branch of commerce”.

Because of electrification, for the first time, engineers would not be second-class citizens on the technical fringes of the economic revolution, as had largely been the case in other major infrastructure projects in the early Industrial Revolution. Instead, they would play a key role managing the investment decisions of financiers. Large electric conglomerates, like Westinghouse and GE, would be run in large part by engineers with deeply rooted technical backgrounds. With the rationalization of corporate infrastructure through expensive and complex technical equipment, engineers became increasingly important in management. “As electrification assisted oligopolistic concentration, it became a keystone of an ideology of progress, uniting engineering and commerce”.

As such, Edison and Westinghouse began paying their engineers salaries, and the field formalized its community through journals and professional organizations. MIT became the first institution to offer training in engineering outside of West Point, opening an Electrical Engineering Department. According to David Nye:

By 1900 this group, which was largely male, had professional organizations, journals, and positions of social power and responsibility. They knew the most about electricity and expressed few doubts about it or other new technologies, which they regarded as tools of social progress.

One of the virtues of the new engineering community, I think, is that as it adopted a formal structure, it did not become more selective or elite, as other professions had. In part, this was because of the vast potential which electrification offered perspective engineers. Although conglomerates like Westinghouse held most of the patents to build generators and transmission systems, “once a home was wired, anyone might build a device that could be plugged into the system”. This resulted in a vibrant community of engineers, who tinkered with electrical apparatus and designed then marketed improved variations on washing machines, electric ranges, toasters, and so on to be sold regionally like other crafts.

But the formation of a formal engineering profession did serve a purpose; it furthered the role of its members as equals to bankers and managers of America’s corporate apparatus. The life of Samuel Insull was perhaps purest expression of that trend. Insull, a protégé of Edison’s, would go on to create a truly massive electric utility conglomerate by raising money from the public, marketing stocks and bonds to small individual investors. By 1921, over one million individuals had invested with Insull companies, making it the first corporate security widely owned by Americans; by 1938 over five million American’s would own them. Richard Munsun recalls:

Although originally designed to obtain political support from customers who became shareholders and bondholders, the public relations effort also represented a major innovation in corporate finance and weakened the stranglehold of New York bankers.

Even by today’s standards, Sam Insull was an aggressive marketer. He would often sponsor middle school programs to teach students about the benefits of electric light and other appliances. Although he hoped that the children would return home to pontificate on the benefits electrification to their parents, he was also aware that kids would, in his words, “be the customers, the investors, the voters, and the lawmakers of the future”. He would often say “Mr. Edison thought me all that I know about electricity, but I owe to one of Mr. Barnum’s men all that I know about publicity”, referring to the famous circus.

The original intent of “customer owned” stocks, it seems, was not to distribute profits and losses among investors or to raise capital (which is how we typically think about stocks and bonds in the context of personal investing today). Instead, the hope was that by linking the well being of ordinary Americans directly to the success of the company, Insull would come to garner increased political support, since his success in business would necessarily coincide with their success as investors. This was especially important, considering the political nature of electric utilities noted in Part One.

It seems incredible that the creation of widely owned commercial securities started as a political ploy. But regardless of its intent, “customer ownership” of corporate securities did more than serve Insull’s political interests; it would effectively position him as the first of a now familiar “managerial class running giant corporations that were owned by thousands of investors”, less accountable to the notoriously ruthless and micromanaging Wall Street bankers who had governed most facets of American industry.

By the dawn of the Information Age, corporate capital was still relatively difficult for an entrepreneur to obtain. Despite the fact that late electrical industrialists like Edison, Westinghouse, and Insull had eroded dependence on banks in the day-to-day management of their companies, it would still be considered highly irregular for institutional capital to be expended on an uncertain venture. As one pundit recalled:

Young, unproven companies were still the stepchildren of capital markets, overlooked and neglected. That left entrepreneurs with the same old minuscule set of options: raising money from friends, family, or rich individuals.

Venture capital, the formal technology incubators that would ultimately rise to fill this void, had yet to be invented. When small, innovative companies wanted to finance research and development while still growing their customer base and revenues, they were often forced to merge with one another or with larger companies.

In the post WWII period, the capital desert was especially parched. At a time when the proverbial “Organizational Man” promised to rationalize business through risk aversion and dependable returns, there was little corporate tolerance for disruptive innovations which might deviate from management’s long-term plans.

For much of the 21st century, IBM had been considered the corporate embodiment of the Organizational Man. In 1957, for example, IBM engineer Ken Olson presented management with a prototype computer using transistors, rather than vacuumed tubes. Transistors and vacuum tubes are semiconductors, the fundamental building blocks of all computers, which preserve and transmit binary signals. Transistors were cheaper, faster, and more reliable than traditional vacuum tubes, and would ultimately prove capable of abiding by Moore’s law, becoming exponentially cheaper and smaller over time. This realization would be a key element of the Information Age. But, Ante recounted:

Olsen developed the computer, unequivocally demonstrating the superiority of transistors. For his accomplishment, he expected businessmen to shower him with praise. But that was hardly the response of the organizational men running corporate America.

Olsen’s invention was ignored and written off as a vain academic project with little relevance to IBM’s broader plans. Like AT&T, IBM operated using sacrosanct multi-year plans that did not account for the invention of the transistor, who’s existence instantly rendered virtually all IBM devices obsolete. Realizing the potential of his invention, Olsen began secretly looking to finance the production of his product. Naturally, his first instinct was to market his company to another large multinational, General Dynamics. Lacking business experience, he was immediately turned down. Fortunately, General Dynamics directed Olsen to a company called ARD, then America’s first and only venture capital company. Within a month of a new presentation, ARD would offer Olsen 100,000 dollars in financing and name the new company DEC, the Digital Equipment Company.

DEC would transform the computer industry, successfully competing with IBM for decades. However, its more enduring contribution came from its collaboration with ARD, which would create a new class of engineer entrepreneurs who, through the support of venture financing, would remain the CEOs of the companies they founded, despite a lack of business experience. Other companies to follow this model include Microsoft with Bill Gates, Apple with Steve Jobs, Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, Google with Larry Paige and Sergey Brin, as well as countless other venture backed corporations.

Another parallel between the Electrical Revolution and the Information Age is the financial innovation that took place to accommodate them. Just as Sam Insull had popularized wide ownership of his electrical company’s equity and bonds, the rise of venture capital precipitated a large increase in stock ownership by households. The Dallas Federal Reserve cites a symbiotic relationship between Information Age technology and publicly traded markets.

According to the Fed, low cost IT democratized investing by making it cheaper and easier to invest:

Changes have stemmed from better information technology that has cut the costs of investing... Partly as a result, the share of U.S. households owning stock has risen from less than 25 percent in the early 1960s to about 50 percent by the late 1990s.

At the same time, new financial technology gave venture capitalists the ability to sell ownership in their companies before they fully mature, creating riskier but more rewarding investment opportunities for individual investors:

Investors’ access to capital markets has increased, and this democratization of America’s capital markets helped fuel the economic boom of the 1990s, the longest economic expansion on record… (new financial technologies) made it easier and less costly for firms to arrange IPOs through investment banks, venture capital investing saw boosted returns and volumes in the 1980s and 1990s.

In other words, just as Edison forged a new kind of relationship between corporate capital and inventor-entrepreneurs, venture capitalists created the financial machinery through which they would secure their assent into the most elite realms of the financial establishment. By the mid 1990s, Initial Public Offerings by companies selling their own stock for the first time became “the most prevalent form of security issues by firms wanting to raise capital in the United States”, as opposed to taking on new debt from bankers who sometimes demand managerial control. This helped contribute to the ascendancy of todays ruling corporate class of owners and managers, who frequently include inventors and entrepreneurs within their ranks.

Science, not rule of thumb. Harmony, not discord. Cooperation, not individualism. Maximum output, in place of restricted output. The development of each man to his greatest efficiency and prosperity.

Read narrowly, the slogan might refer only to managerial styles, but it would soon be interpreted more holistically, and applied to numerous social disciplines. Taylorism, as his beliefs came to be called, would ultimately gain influence far beyond its targeted audience of wealthy industrialists. It became almost philosophical worldview, far more potent than its context in the comparatively limited role of managerial self-help would suggest. As noted in Chapter One, forms of scientific management could be applied outside of the industrial factory. Political adherents of Taylorism, like the technocrats, attempted to apply scientific rigor to bureaucratic governance. Technocracy, as Neil Postman would note, differentiated itself from mainstream political thought by emphasizing a rigorous philosophical framework:

These include the beliefs that the primary, if not the only goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technological calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity, that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.

In other words, the betterment of the human condition was not determined by philosophical considerations or by the leadership of great men. Instead, only efficiency and productivity could hope to result in greater prosperity and freedom for the society. Mastery of the laws of nature would lead to cultural advancement, rather than mastery of the laws of humanity. To progressive engineers of the time, Scientific Management was the missing link that would finally make engineers relevant to the social and political well being of the nation, a social echelon shared primarily by doctors and lawyers.

Although the Taylorist mode of thought was advanced by engineering and crafted for industrial capitalists, it had a surprisingly evangelical streak. In the conclusion of Scientific Management, Taylor extolled the incredible benefits mankind would attain in the event that his principals were widely adopted:

The larger profit would come to the whole world in general… This means increase in prosperity and diminution in poverty, not only for their men but for the whole community around them…. Is it not the duty of those who are acquainted with these facts to exert themselves to make the whole community realize this importance?

William Akin has framed the Taylor’s aversion to lost productivity as quasi-religious: “Taylor possessed a moralistic view towards waste and inefficiency, viewing the idleness of a productive plant as the social equivalent of the protestant attitude toward individual waste.” As George S. Morison, then the president of the American Society for Civil Engineers put it, “We are the priest’s of material development,” a designation which presumably implied a moral responsibility to society, despite the fact that engineers remained economically accountable to bankers and industrialists.

As previously noted, engineers had often speculated on the humanitarian benefits of their work. Remember how Tesla claimed that his first thought upon conceiving the induction motor was how it would “free men from drudgery”. However before the advent of Taylorism, engineers did not possess an ideology in the way that capitalists or politicians did.

By the early 1930s, the technocratic movement had morphed into a niche culture. Yet rather than recognizing their roots in commercial Taylorism, many technocratic commentators and journals of note were condescending and even combative towards the movement’s well established political and capitalist origins. The Columbia professor Walter B. Pitkin’s book, A Short Introduction to the History of Human Stupidity (574 pages), which was widely quoted in periodicals like Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and The Technocrat, was relentless in it’s invective:

If America wants a five-year plan that will put her ahead five centuries, let her close the White House and kick every banker and broker and manufacturer out of every pontifical conference... while a few thousand genuine scientists who are not Yes-Men for corporations ascertain which unexploited inventions and discoveries might be quickly turned to account.

A small contingent of faculty at Columbia University’s Engineering Department began to assemble the foundation of a formal movement with a unified cause and strategy. Soon, many technocrats came to share a derision of the “price system” of capitalism, believing that automation of the Industrial Revolution was bound to put tens of millions of Americans permanently out of work, a theory which they felt was validated by the Great Depression. Despite the abundance that mechanized processes promised, the reasoning went, under a market capitalist system the masses of newly unemployed would be unable to share in them, an intuitively appalling paradox. Though the details have been largely forgotten today, from 1932 to 1933, periodicals wrote more features exploring the technocratic movement then they did FDRs administration.

Columbia professor Howard Scott, one of the fathers of Technocratic Economics and its most prominent voice, traced the inequities of the late Industrial Revolution to the abundance of electricity. Because electricity was, in his opinion, the basic unit of all industrial output, he proposed that “energy certificates” replace normal currency and that the total amount of energy in production be equally divided into rations to be distributed to people and spent like cash.

Scott, like many of his coworkers, was influenced by the generally transgressive bohemian outlook centered embodied in his home neighborhood in Manhattan’s West Village. Like the bohemians, the technocrats shared derision towards the dominant “leisure class” who were the primary managers of American industry at the time, further discussed in Chapter Three. The technocrats resented the cultural lag of the capitalists, which they felt was inconsistent with the commitment to productivity and workmanship that industry required to best serve the public good.

While the technocrats were taken seriously by academics and politicians in the early 1930s, they rapidly lost credibility after their opponents highlighted instances of intellectual dishonesty in many of their primary documents. One oft cited economic survey that attempted to measure the increase in industrial productivity and technological unemployment across America in the Industrial Revolution was found to contain grossly exaggerated conclusions. This document was the primary source for so many of the technocrats claims that the movement was permanently stigmatized, and its proponents lost nearly all their influence in political and economic matters.

The dawn of technocracy was celebrated as the path to prosperity in Utopian visions of the future like Chicago’s Century of Progress World’s Fair, which seemed to finally give credence to the literary fantasies of the late 19th century such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. But by the mid to late forties, the popular image of technocratic progressivism was tempered by darker images like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984.

By the late 1930s, as previously noted, it was clear that electrification was not going to create a resurgence of the Jeffersonian country citizen as hoped and, in fact, rural populations were only further depleted by the increase of farm productivity. The continuous ascendency of big agribusiness, as depicted in The Grapes of Wrath, was salt in the wounds of betrayed agrarians. Urban communities were no less offended by the apparent hard-heartedness of industrial Taylorisum, as evidenced by Charlie Chaplin’s deeply cynical 1939 Modern Times and other darkly Dickensian depictions of late industrial suppression of the individual.

However, the good intentions of the engineers whose ideology educated technocracy were not lost on all social commentators. The novelist Eleanor Buckle captured the growing skepticism of technocracy by comparing over zealous electrical engineers to military generals, fighting not for the sake of the people they protect, but for the love of their craft:

You now know everything there is to know about your specialty… But unless you concern yourself with why, and especially with for what, your construction exists, you’re like a general with a passion for military tactics and an abysmal ignorance of the nature of the human beings who fight the wars, but yearn for peace and freedom.

This was perhaps an unwitting tribute to the military heritage of engineers, but it was also an assault on the very notion of technocratic progressivism; that every advance in technology must necessarily result in the betterment of humanity. Compared to the seemingly inevitable collision between humanity and technology which Huxley and Orwell predicted would result from technological change, Buckle’s criticism was optimistic. Technology, like war, was a tool that despite the excesses of the Industrial Revolution and the age of electricity, could be used in moderation to the benefit of humanity.

While the economic and philosophical experimentation of FDR’s Great Depression may have created a sympathetic audience for the ambitious aims of the academic technocratic movement, the post-war environment of the late forties and fifties was far less tolerant. The grey flannel suited Organizational Men who came to characterize the economic and social conservatism of the time were unwilling to risk political stability and security for the unproven technocratic ideals. In addition, the alarmist message of economic Armageddon due to mechanization lost its potency without the fresh specter of potentially perpetual depression.

But the technocrat’s anti-progressive message, that advancing technology would not necessarily spell human betterment, was not entirely lost to the post-war decades, as William Akin explained:

The technocrats made a believable case for a kind of technological utopia, but their asking price was too high. The idea of political democracy still represented a stronger ideal than technological elitism. In the end, critics believed that the socially desirable goals that technology made possible could be achieved without the sacrifice of existing institutions and values and without incurring the apocalypse that technocracy predicted.

Yet some would argue that, although formally vanquished, the technocrats had planted the seeds of revolution and were silently accumulating power without attracting political or academic attention. In 1941, for example, James Burnham published a popularly read sequel to Scientific Management, Managerial Revolution. In it, he noted that government administration and corporate regulation were increasingly placed in the hands of technical experts and that corporations were increasingly lead not by their owners, but by managerial experts.

The American economic and political structure easily withstood the deeply subversive fantasies academic technocrats such as Howard Scott proposed. Yet some technocratic engineers willing to operate within the establishment boundaries of the Industrial Revolution were slowly growing in power and influence. Burnham believed that the seeds of technocracy had been planted within the industrial establishment, and that the movement was secretly thriving, despite its public fall. Yet another way to interpret this coup is that the establishment hijacked useful and profitable parts of the technocracy, like a carefully cultivated trust in managerial capitalism and experts over democratically elected politicians. Meanwhile, the establishment discarded the more important idealistic foundations of the movement, such as the redistribution of wealth and income technocrats felt was necessary to prevent automation from creating mass unemployment and poverty.

This is the philosophical environment in which the Information Age came into being. Computing, an industry dominated by IBM for the bulk of the 20th century, was widely associated with faceless corporate and government entities. The late fifties saw an increase in government sponsored venture financing by entities like the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a result of Cold War tensions. This helped spur some innovation in the sixties and seventies, but the computer continued to denote inscrutable, faceless organizations in the public imagination. The optimistic connotations of technocracy linguistically succumbed to unflattering associations with bureaucracy in general. As Neil Postman cynically explained:

Naturally, bureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of it’s seeming intelligence and impartiality, a computer has an almost magical tendency to direct attention away from the people in charge of bureaucratic functions and towards itself, as if the computer were the true source of authority.

Academic engineers had alienated themselves from mainstream economic thought through the technocrat movement. Some felt resentment of their practicing peers, of whom they accused of preserving the industrial establishment with Orwellian efficiency. But by the dawn of the Information Revolution, modern engineers seemed to have achieved their predecessors’ ambitions. No longer were engineers facilitators working on behalf of the pioneers of the industrial order. Like medicine or law, engineering had become a profession, with all of the social and economic benefits that came with it.

Dormant for several decades, countercultural ideologies not far removed from those of the early technocrat’s bohemian tendency became popular in the engineering community. In fact, many social commentators associate the personal computing revolution, and especially the rise of the Internet with the social upheaval of American culture in the 1960s.

Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog series, and later, Wired Magazine (which is widely considered the most important journal of note in the Information Age), epitomized this association. The cultural historian Fred Turner would cast Brand, “a countercultural entrepreneur, but in a deeply technocratic mold” (recognizing the original meaning of the word). Brand was instrumental in casting the computer in a light that the counterculture movement could connect to. Of the Whole Earth Catalog, Walter Isaacson recalls:

The underlying premise was that a love of the earth and a love of technology could coexist, that hippies should make common cause with engineers, and that the future should be a festival where A.C. outlets would be provided.

These were the beginnings of “hacker” culture, a term that in many ways resembles the pre-industrial definition of an engineer. As previously noted, early engineers donned that title as a mark of technical skill and social distinction, despite the lack of a formal engineering establishment. Hackers also voluntarily chose that designation to denote not just their skill at programming computers, but a set of loosely agreed upon social and professional goals. Richard Stallman, a forefather of the hacker movement, articulated those goals this way:

The hacker ethic refers to the feelings of right and wrong, to the ethical ideas this community of people had, that knowledge should be shared with other people who can benefit from it, and that important resources should be utilized rather than wasted.

This notion has a particular resemblance to the early Taylorist notion that engineers and entrepreneurs should have a moral obligation to prevent waste on behalf of society. However where early engineers hoped to elevate their status to equal that of prestigious members of the establishment, hackers distanced themselves from mainstream professional recognition. Reflecting in a 1995 Time magazine article, Stewart Brand recalled:

Hippie communalism and libertarian politics formed the roots of the modern cyber revolution… In the 1960s and early '70s, the first generation of hackers emerged in university computer-science departments. “Hackers” embraced computers and set about transforming them into tools of liberation. "The Hacker Ethic," articulated by (Steven) Levy, offered a distinctly countercultural set of tenets. Among them: ‘Access to computers should be unlimited and total, All information should be free, Mistrust authority, Promote decentralization.

These tenets would not have been unfamiliar to technocrats, who felt that electrical power should be “decentralized” away from industrialists and given to the masses. We might even imagine that technocrats would have been sympathetic to the vaguely communal undertones of Whole Earth Catalog as an alternative to the ‘price system’. Steward Brand, like the technocrats, felt that society needed to adapt to new technology to become more inclusive. But unlike the technocrats, who enjoyed formal structure and publicity that the Columbia Engineers brought them, hackers by definition lacked such centralized academic support. As Stephen Levy noted, “The precepts of this revolutionary hacker ethic were not so much debated and discussed as silently agreed upon. No manifestos were issued. No missionaries tried to gather converts.”

Of course, in the early 1970s, the Internet was still decades away from its invention and the personal computer was a distant fantasy. Mainframe computers were only beginning to reach even medium sized companies and universities. Even in an environment in which computing structurally lent itself to elitism by virtues of its scarcity, hackers were developing a populist “ethic” and a clear set of goals as set out in Steven Levy’s book. This ethic is arguably at the root of much of the consumer hardware and software that emerged after the 1980s, and especially the Internet. The net might be considered the ultimate articulation of hacker values in that it invites its users to contribute to it and is arguably intolerant of organizational hierarchy.

Lee Felsenstein, the designer of the first personal computer, the Osborn 1 in 1981, was deeply embedded in various stains of the countercultural movement in the 1960s. By the late 1970s, Felsenstein adapted his growing technological skills to serve his carefully honed countercultural ideals.

The Free Speech Movement was about bringing down the barriers to people-to-people communications and thus allowing the formation of connections and communities that were not handed down by powerful institutions. It laid the ground for a true revolt against the corporations and governments that were dominating our lives.

Steve Jobs briefly lived in a community called the Apple Commune before naming his company after it. Apple sold the first computer that used a point and click “Graphical User Interface”, that was announced by the previously mentioned “1984” advertisement, a deeply countercultural critique that Jobs was involved in commissioning. Like the Technocrats who despised the leisure class of the industrial order, Jobs and much of his generation of personal computer engineers felt a similar aversion to the type of inbred complacently that blue-chip corporate computing companies like IBM or Xerox seemed to entertain. He was influenced by the Whole Earth Catalog, and even as jobs tried to balance the reality of his own growing corporate influence, Stewart Brand would endorse him as “the nexus of counterculture and technology."

Liberals often credit the personal computer and the Internet to big government and the military industrial complex, which arguably financed their invention. Meanwhile, conservatives claim the internet as a victory of free enterprise, since the dynamism of today’s web has a distinctly lassie fair quality. The countercultural narrative advanced by Issacson, Brand, and Markoff lend credence to neither camp, instead pinning the rise of the personal computer and the creation of a Internet community on the LSD fueled social currents of the 1960s.

As John Markoff noted, the epicenter of the West Coast military industrial boom happened to be near heart of a constituency more comfortable at Burning Man Concerts than walking the halls of buttoned up firms like Lockheed Martin or Hewlett Packard. Markoff argues that this cultural dissonance is responsible for the realization that computers had applications beyond managing large corporations or calculating missile trajectories:

What separated the isolated experiments with small computers from the full-blown birth of personal computing was the West Coast realization that computing was a new medium, like books, records, movies, radios, and television. The personal computer had the ability to encompass all of the media that had come before it and had the additional benefit of appearing at a time and place where all the old rules were being questioned.

While engineers in the West may have been culturally predisposed to understand the incredible potential of computer technology, computer firms on the East Coast had seemingly adopted the careerist mentality of corporate America from a previous era. Some speculate that these cultural influences may have impaired the vision and foresight of technologists on the East Coast and stimulated it in the West. In Tracy Kidder’s famous chronicle of the late 1980s New England computer industry, Ivy League credentialed engineers jockey for administrative power, hoping to attain managerial status. In other words, many engineers began to look and act like mainstream establishment professionals, creating the impression that their industry had matured from its innovative but chaotic early roots.

Perhaps this contributed to a deep cynicism that began to emerge in the 1980s which framed the Information Age as merely an echo of the old industrial order. Alvin Toffler, for example, complained that the new white-collar jobs it brought were no more engaging and no less intellectually subjugating than blue-collar factory jobs of the industrial revolution. This factory style of work was transferred into the office, each person doing a tiny part of a repetitive task, without any sense of its relationship to the whole, without any pride or skill or craft, without any opportunity for discretion or creativity.

It was not until the late 1980s that personal computing, led by Apple, began to demonstrate how computers might ultimately counter the ominous HAL 2000 stigma that had been attributed to them. In part this was because the Graphical User Interface made the use of the computer relatively intuitive, and in part it was because computers were finally cheap enough for millions of individuals to purchase. But if counter cultural undercurrents were built into the Macintosh and its imitators, the fact was by and large lost to the general public. It was not until the rise of the Internet that the roots of the personal computer industry became a part of public dialogue.

David Porter captured many of these in his 1997 compilation of essays, Internet Culture. Among other things, he discussed analogies between various political venues of history to Internet forms. One potent comparison was that of an Internet chat room to a coffeehouse. Here, there is little risk of offending bystanders with antiestablishment options. Here, participants are invited and even obliged to form new ideas and opinions with the advice, rather than the scrutiny of bystanders.

Porter’s work, however, did not detail how the Internet would help foment political change. In 1997, arguably as now, it was too early to observe such effects in a rigorous way. Instead, Porter observed that many of the venues (coffee houses, public squares) and tools (the essay, the printing press) that had historically served as catalysts of political unrest and revolution had direct analogs in cyberspace.

In the following decade, the degree to which these tools have been used in a revolutionary capacity is unclear. It seems as though the most pure expressions of the “Hacker Ethic” in a political context have been through the actions of subversive acts of “Hacktivists” like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. Indecently, both Snowden and Assange have records on chat rooms that visibly evidence how Internet culture imparted upon them aspects of the hacker ethic, which include, as previously mentioned, “All information should be free”, “Mistrust authority”, and “Promote decentralization”, a message deeply represented by their lives’ work.

The Hacker Ethic and the residual countercultural spirit that informed the rise of personal computing does not seem to have penetrated mainstream political thought in a substantive way. Just as the Technocrats failed to articulate a comprehensive mission and antagonized establishment forces, the Hacker culture that informed the political ideology of many computer engineers has proven to lack potency outside of the profession. Although it is too early to know for sure, it seems that Hacker culture is doomed to suffer the same fate as the Technocrats; some beneficial aspects of their ethic will be subsumed by commercial and political forces while their ideological core will be forgotten.

From the very beginning, electrical interests were saddled with complicated political considerations. Thomas Edison’s Electric Light Company was forced to pay off Tammany Hall hacks who threatened to stall his very first network in the heart of the financial district, and Edison regularly wined and dined Tammany leadership in order to secure his construction. Subsequent lighting and electric companies won contracts through similar acts of patronage, often integrating no-show political appointees in ostensible roles as plant managers.

As technologies advanced and electric lighting began to permeate the homes of millions of Americans, electric companies began to realize the commercial genius of electricity. Electric light was easy to market since it’s only real competition was comparatively expensive, dangerously flaming, and often noxious gas lamps. However, unlike gas, once a home was wired, it could not receive service from a competing generator; electrical concerns owned the generator, the wires, and in some cases even the lamps. As David Nye noted:

The advantage in marketing electricity, in comparison to other products, was that the wires permanently linked the consumer to the producer. To sell electricity one did not have to go out into the market and compete with other brands. All electricity was invisibly the same, and within any given market area had a ‘natural monopoly’.

As communities began to realize the excesses of businesses with such deeply embedded advantages, they began to employ an economic entity that had been formalized years earlier; the municipal utility. By the time electric light companies were consolidated into utilities after the turn of the 20th century, many electric traction car companies had already attained that status.

The New York City subway system was the first major example of a municipal utility in the United States. Because private industry could not finance the construction of underground trains, the city government agreed to pay for construction and allow private ownership in exchange for limited managerial control, which was most frequently used to ensure reasonable fares. One problem which emerged early with quasi-public utilities was that they were simultaneously considered “too big to fail” and often lacked the ability to operate profitably on their own. When their “private” owners were unable to manage them, the municipal government was usually compelled to step in, purchase the utility’s assets, and continue service, often at great financial loss. While today such a flagrantly one-sided deal might not meet such a positive response, the proposal passed referendum and was widely supported. Proponents of the deal developed a potent argument for utilities, which contextualized them as the 19th century version of the great public works projects of the early industrial revolution:

The city’s businessmen worked out a theory of municipal ownership that did not appeal to any brand of socialism, but rather to history. The state had once built the Erie Canal, and it provided other essential public services… It did so not in order to compete with private business, but rather to improve business conditions and to raise property values, which in turn enlarged the tax base.

The corporate form of the utility was widely used across the United States to build and manage electric streetcar and subway service. But the auspicious beginnings of the utility would quickly deteriorate; many of them were chronically unprofitable and would have to be taken into receivership by municipalities after several years of service. Further, utilities created opportunities for white collar maleficence which would ultimately necessity drastic legislative action:

The Thompson-Houston firm and Henry Villard, the railroad organizer interested in selling arc lamp equipment, agreed to fix prices and split the business of supplying power to city streetcars. Their maneuvers prompted Congress to pass the Sherman Antitrust Act and stifle such arrangements.

Despite the questionable performance of early utilities, by the era of home electrification, the seeds had been planted. Utilities would nevertheless continue to play an important role in facilitating partnerships between corporate capital and government power.

There was a reason that the United States was so welcoming to the utilities despite their early shortcomings. Other Western nations were also electrifying and did not see the proliferation of publicly funded, privately owned utilities. Unlike the United States, counties like Holland, Denmark, and France were prone to consolidate large industrial projects under federal control as public works projects. The American federal government did not have the inclination or resources to fund and organize those types of projects, especially given the powerful advocacy groups American utilities established that ensured opposition to private ownership would be made politically untenable (discussed in Part Three).

Instead, corporations like Interurban and General Electric contracted with country municipalities to form local utilities without centralized federal control. This system had inherent flaws that disrupted partial concerns within the American industry. Expensive electrical appliances were often compatible only with the specifications maintained by the utilities that installed them; a family could move across the street and find that their toaster was useless.

Further, the arrangement did not encourage growth. Most American utilities would fully electrify urban areas then slowly increase billings by encouraging existing customers to buy more energy-consuming appliances. Ideally, a successful utility would invest in acquiring new customers by expanding it’s service area. Instead, they were generally confined to the municipalities within their jurisdiction and generally showed little interest in expanding their range, which required the construction of expensive lines and generators.

Thus, by the early 1930s, while other developed countries’ had federalized electrical systems servicing the vast majority of rural farms, the United States lagged far behind, with only one in nine farms electrified.

Although utilities were generally averse to building new electrical networks beyond their customer base, the industry was prone to consolidation far beyond that which other industries experienced in the late 19th century. In order to maximize the economics of power generators, large networks servicing distant consumers were needed to balance nighttime and daytime loads. For example, a generator which powered only streetlights would remain idle through most of the day, while a generator that serviced only street cars might have excess capacity in the nighttime. In the 1880s, some streetcar companies created America’s early power intensive amusement parks at the end of their routes to try and profit off their otherwise idling generators.

Sam Insull initially made his fortune by realizing this inefficacy and working to correct it. For example, by purchasing an electric light utility in one town and a streetcar utility in another, he could close the generators in one and use the other day and night, cutting overhead and creating enormous returns for his Chicago conglomerate. In addition, he successfully lobbied for state governments to take regulatory control of his infrastructure from towns and municipalities. Where the regulatory decisions of local municipalities were by and large governed by democratic referenda involving contentious political lobbying for and against utilities, state agencies were staffed by tenured appointees who would predictably render a uniform regulatory policy. The arrangement greatly benefited utilities, but was also a product of the political concerns of the era:

This mixture of private ownership and public supervision satisfied the trust busting mood of the time, serving both as a form of progressive reform in which the private sector was formally controlled by the public, and as a kind of technocratic bureaucracy, in which decision making… was lodged in the hands of experts.

After the Standard Oil breakup in 1911, Insull and his concerns became increasingly aware of their vulnerability to antitrust law. General Electric was also successfully prosecuted for antitrust violations in 1911, but was somewhat counter-intuitively subject to a punitive consent decree which compelled it to merge with the competitors it had been convicted of setting prices with. Although the power companies had evaded the full brunt of antitrust litigation and political suspicion of large corporations in general, they were vigilant through the 1920s in ensuring amicable government relations.

The subsequent public relations effort by utilities was so massive that it managed to permeate America’s popular imagination. In Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit, for example, a customer complains about the service of the town streetcar company. In response, George Babbitt lectures him on the virtues of the company and the onerous tribulations it faced:

But of course, it won’t do to just keep knocking the Traction Company and not realize the difficulties they’re operating under, like those cranks that want municipal ownership. The way these workmen hold up the company for high wages is simply a crime, and of course the burden falls on you and me that have to pay a seven cent fare!

General Electric would pioneer the corporate public relations industry through the efforts of the legendary ad man David Barton, who is credited with the creation of the notion of a “corporate consciousness”. Recognizing that large corporations like General Electric were affecting the daily experiences of regular people across the entire country, Barton believed that companies were coming to resemble governments. An inevitable consequence of this, he believed, was that corporations would be held accountable for the public’s well being. Rather than fight this perception, Barton advised GE embrace it, resulting in flamboyant ads like “The Suffrage and the Switch”, discussed in Part One.

Leveraging the credibility and goodwill created by their “corporate consciousness”, companies began to grow into ever larger and more powerful entities. Although electrical utilities may have been prone to consolidation for systemic reasons, electrical equipment manufacturers had also consolidated. By 1900, “General Electric and Westinghouse had swallowed all the other competitors to become a duopoly controlling the market for electrical generating equipment, transformers, meters, motors, and lighting apparatus." By 1925, Barton predicted an impending clash between private ambition and public ideology, and proposed a merging of the two. As he observed in a marketing convention:

The one danger… is that your growth will outrun public appreciation of the necessity for that growth’. A Business as immense as GE… could not remain a ‘purely private’ business if it expected to endure and grow. It had to become an institution, with its leaders serving as trustees.

As previously noted, Sam Insull was even more aggressive, marketing securities like stocks and bonds to millions of Americans so that they became economically linked: “If the light shines, you know your money is safe”, as many of his security’s sales pitches read. Further, he would supply elementary schools with pro-utility reading materials with names like “The Ohm Queen”, hoping that his efforts would eventually result in political support from both the parents of the children and the children themselves once they grew into politicians and voters.

Whatever goodwill Insull and the associated electrical industries had accumulated by 1930 was quickly eroded after the stock market crash of 1929. Many utilities were unable to honor debt obligations and most plummeted in stock value; Insull’s concerns, which were aggressively leveraged, were severely effected, erasing the investments of 600,000 stock investors and 500,000 bondholders in 1932. Insull’s middle class investors were pioneers in a new age of personal finance, yet they were often left penniless. As one federal official recalled:

They were just the average run of the mill people-clerks and schoolteachers there in Chicago, small shopkeepers in Illinois, farmers from Wisconsin- and what they brought in of course, was worth nothing.

The Insull debacle was highly publicized and pounced on by progressives as evidence of the need for what would eventually become FDR’s New Deal. Governor Roosevelt on the campaign trail seized upon the tragedy as an example of the corrosive influence of industrial robber barons on the American public. He described electric utilities as “a kind of private empire within a nation… Challenging in their power the very government itself." Once elected, much of FDR’s agenda revolved around the reform of electric utilities, including financial regulation like the establishment of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Electrification and disappointment in electrical companies, predicated many New Deal programs. As one historian noted:

Though Insull and his crash are today largely forgotten, we are still subject to its regulatory aftermath- measures that were adopted in direct response to Insull’s real or alleged doings. This legislation, a substantial part of the New Deal regulatory agenda, includes the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

The popular derision of Insull’s electric utility conglomerate ensured caustic relations between government and private industry that only exasperated Franklin Roosevelt’s conception of a New Deal, which many titans of industry believed was an overt attempt to pit business and government interests against one another. The unique economic qualities of electrical services, that lent themselves to massive consolidation and the creation of natural monopolies, created a potent demonstration of how free enterprise could seemingly subvert the power of government and create public hazards. In the end, Insull’s campaign to promote wide ownership of his securities backfired; by making the economic link between private industry and the general population tangible, he invited popular support for government incursion into larger spheres of private concerns, not vice versa.

Like the electrical industry, the corporations responsible for shepherding the Information Revolution spurred a controversial debate about the nature of government in its relationship to the corporation. Many of these battles were fought along the same lines as the ones that had taken place nearly a century earlier. For example, brash new mega companies like Microsoft in the 1990s spurred a deep paranoia about the potentially corrosive nature of big business resulting in one of the most prominent antitrust cases in American history. The Information Age also spurred a deep contemplation of the nature of utilities, reflected in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Finally, the consolidation of the information industry companies, like software companies and data telecoms bears a remarkable semblance to the consolidation between electrical component manufacturers and electric utilities.

The Microsoft Antitrust case, for example, began before anyone could credibly claim that the personal computer and the Internet would fundamentally transform American society. It was predicated on claims that Microsoft was unfairly preventing startup software vendors, specifically Netscape, from competing through potentially illegal agreements, complaints first filed with the Federal Trade Commission in 1994. The case was unusual in that Microsoft was accused of restraining trade by giving away a product (Internet Explorer) for free; as former federal appeals court Judge Stephen Bryer had stated in an influential antitrust case in 1984, “The Congress that enacted the Sherman Antitrust Act saw it as a way of protecting consumers against prices that were too high, not too low." But had the Information Revolution changed things?

As noted, it was not until May of 1995 that Bill Gates began to recognize the advantage of the World Wide Web over the far more ambiguous “information superhighway”, a term that includes any long distance high-speed network, when he distributed the now famous internal memorandum, “The Internet Tidal Way”. Despite the cases perceived prematurity, the FTC was eager for a test case that would determine if the Information Revolution had already changed the nature of antitrust. Their willingness to litigate might indicate a heightened awareness of corporate control in the Information Age. Ken Auletta posed the question like this:

In the Information Age, is the notion of a monopoly rendered antique because classic monopoly characteristics, rising prices, control of finite resources, distribution barriers to entry, availability of capital, and choke-holds on innovations, are not as apparent, even if the allegations of coercive tactics are familiar?... New technologies inevitably invite new questions about government’s proper role, and the Microsoft trial promised to be the nation’s laboratory for choosing between old law and new.

It did not help Microsoft’s case that the company’s culture was fueled by a form of corporate supremacy stemming from its intensely competitive founder. Bill Gates was often considered arrogant in his corporate poise, publicly ranting against federal prosecutors and professing a complete incomprehension of how Microsoft could possibly break the law. “You’re saying that Microsoft shouldn’t compete hard!”, he once explained in disgust when asked if his company should consider public opinion in its marketing decisions.

Gates would come to resemble early utility executives in his public stance against regulation. He would often rail against the political forces interfering with Microsoft, which he felt was fulfilling a sacrosanct destiny to bring America into the Information Age. But an impartial trustee for a quasi-public institution in the tradition of Barton’s GE, he was not. His caustic public statements read almost like the words of a modern day Babbit, always on the defensive without any attempt to display empathy towards his detractors. For example, in one press conference, he sneered:

How ironic that in the United States, where freedom and innovation are core values, these regulators are trying to punish an American company that has worked hard and successfully to deliver on those values.

Unlike the twenties, however, the 1990s did not see an increase in popular opposition to new large corporations. In fact, public opinion generally accepted Microsoft as a positive force in the American economy and Bill Gates as its able captain. Mark Penn, the pollster credited with advising Bill Clinton through his impeachment hearings, was retained by Microsoft and confirmed general public support. His advice: the best defense is a good offense: “Talk constantly about the plot by competitors to induce the government to sue Microsoft... Don’t bow to the press ayatollahs. Don’t show weakness.”

Unfortunately for Gates, the case was not to be decided on the merits of public opinion. Instead, the noted trial lawyer David Boise would successfully redirect attention towards academic literature arguing the existence of a “Network Effect”, that Microsoft could hold its customers captive, effectively conferring upon it illegal monopoly status. Although the argument had never been used before, and the conservative Judge Thomas Jackson was skeptical of antitrust innovation, the reasoning was successful, and Microsoft was ultimately required to make several concessions in a resulting consent decree.

The result of the Microsoft Trial represented a major coup d'état for the notion that, like the Electrical Revolution, the Information Age would require a fundamental shift in the political and legal stance of government in regards to corporate regulation. So overwhelming was the sense of change that even court appointed mediator Richard Posner, who had written books on the need for judicial restraint in the administration of antitrust law, proposed a state appointed technical committee to oversee Microsoft’s software design.

But the legal tides of the changing corporate climate were not confined to the judiciary. By the early 1990s, it became clear to many technicians that the potent combination of rapidly advancing personal computing and telecommunication technologies would herald a new age in the American economy. In part, this was due to the deregulation in long distance telecommunications which had taken place in the late 1980s and allowed a network of small carriers to install a massive network of high bandwidth fiber optic cables across the country, competing with the dominant AT&T. But Congress was also affected by the same “Network Effect” pathology that was influencing the Microsoft case.

Proponents of the Network Effect framework would argue that networked companies in the Information Age enjoyed protection from market forces exceeding even the industrial economies of scale and natural monopolies of the 20th century. Because every new customer of a digital networked service, like e-mail or web browsers, cost almost nothing to the provider, and the quality of their product increased as it grew more popular, as in the telephone industry, observers worried that established companies would achieve a permanent state of extra-market industry control. As one pundit argued:

Once the Internet reached critical mass, it could rely on the network effects phenomenon to keep it- and its most successful applications such as e-mail and web- from fragmenting into mutually unintelligible systems... In that respect, the development of the Internet, e-mail, and the Web is somewhat like the development of spoken language... As words change meaning and whole new words come into use, individuals adjust their own linguistic practices to ensure that they are understood by others.

The fear was that popular services on the Information Superhighway would inevitably create insurmountably high barriers to entry for potential competitors. Like language, a corporate protocol might attain a degree of power and influence that would be nearly impossible to reverse. This notion was vividly illustrated by Microsoft’s anti-trust woes.

Among the first to recognize this trend was Vice President Al Gore. Gore is credited with popularizing the term “Information Superhighway” to describe this new network, first at the National Press Club, and then in numerous public events and statements. Technically, the Information Superhighway was indistinct from the legacy telephone network which was regulated under the framework established in the Telecommunication Act of 1936. In other words, the signals carrying telephone conversations are sent through the same wires as the signals carrying digital network information such as the Internet.

Al Gore’s enthusiastic embrace of the Superhighway language was calculated to emphasize that telecommunications companies would soon bear the burden of disseminating high-speed information to the masses. This would require a massive infrastructure initiative that Gore felt the century old, highly regulated, and historically complacent telephone utilities were ill equipped to take on. Though he never specifically voiced his frustration with legacy carriers, some of his comments implied an awareness of their short sightedness; in a candid forward of a 1994 online text book, he chided, “as a House member in the early 1980s I called for creation of a national network of "Information Superhighways," the only people interested were the manufacturers of optical fiber.”

Although telecommunication regulation is generally considered an arcane subject, beyond the scope of regular public interest, Al Gore was determined to sound the alarm on the importance of reform in the mid 1990s. Prefacing a speech on the need for reform, he lectured the audience on how smarter telecom regulation could have prevented the Titanic disaster by clearing radio channels. Despite this dramatic illustration of the importance of government in telecommunications, his proposed Telecommunications Act of 1996 had a decidedly deregulatory bent. Gore would often discuss how in the Information Age, commerce enhances democratic values:

In the last few years, we have witnessed the democratization and commercialization of the Internet. Today, the network connects not only the top research laboratories and universities but also small colleges, businesses, libraries, and schools throughout the world. The growth of commercial networks has enabled much broader access to the government-subsidized portions of the Internet.

In order to encourage the construction of “on ramps” to the Superhighway, the Telecom Act’s intended effect was to eliminate “many of the cross market barriers that had prohibited large corporations in one communications industry (such as the telephone industry) from providing services in another related industry (like cable or broadcasting).” The act correspondingly claimed a lower legal standard to determine a telecommunication company’s status as a monopoly including a provision for retroactive post facto prosecution of monopolies in certain situations. The idea, it seemed, was to break down both the market protections telecoms had enjoyed in recognition of the specter of the Network Effect, as well as to allow cross-market investment (like an Internet company merging with a cable provider) in order to facilitate of the natural convergence of these industries.

The resulting legislation has generally been considered to be an inscrutable and directionless labyrinth of byzantine regulation understood only by the companies it was meant to control. As Justice Antonin Scalia put it, “It would be a gross understatement that the 1996 Act is not a model of clarity. It is in many respects a model of ambiguity or indeed even self contradiction.” Other industry observers argue the act resulted in an unmitigated calamity of corporate consolidation that dangerously empowered companies like telecom conglomerates and media distributors. As a leading Cassandra of that view, Ben Haig Bagdikian, who keeps track of media consolidation in continuously updated editions of his book, The New Media Monopoly observed, “In 1983 there were 50 dominant media corporations”, he recalled, “today there are five. These five corporations decide what most citizens will, or will not, learn”.

Just as the dawn of the Electrical Revolution heralded the creation of the modern utility, the dawn of the Information Age necessitated a rethinking of the relationship between government and corporations. Telecommunications have long been quasi-utilities in that FCC regulations protect them from competition. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 effectively cemented that status, allowing companies like AOL and Time Warner, and now Time Warner and Comcast to merge into enormous Information Age media conglomerates with enormous influence on government. Unlike the electrical utilities, which often trace their roots to municipal ownership and were clothed with nationalist popular support, telecom utilities are often massive national concerns burdened by increasing public scrutiny. 

Even before access to electricity became common, Americans intuitively understood that electricity was not like other technologies. This is reflected in the innovative new regulations and legislation the government forged to manage the nation’s electrical interests.  For example, Part Three of this chapter discusses the legal innovations that were created to accommodate uninhibited access to street cars. Later regulation sanctioned the new electrical institutions like utilities. Finally, the New Deal Era electrification regime cemented a clear precedent that being wired was, in fact, a right that citizens could expect their government to help provide.

In the recent policy analysis, Rethinking Rights and Regulations, editor Lorrie Faith Cranor reflects upon the role of institutions in adapting to unfamiliar technologies:

The first, and perhaps most difficult, challenge to developing policy responses to a new technology is the construction of a conceptual framework to guide it’s development. Unfortunately, there is no recipe for framework development. Rather, a new understanding emerges in fits and starts (or misstarts), building on insights drawn from eclectic sources.

As noted, electricity was originally regulated along the lines of public works projects of the past, like the Erie Canal; a government investment in otherwise private enterprises could be justified for its ability “to improve business conditions and to raise property values, which in turn enlarged the tax base.” Perhaps it is this foundational framework that helped empower early utilities with monopolies and guaranteed rates of return, leading to a disappointing rate of electrical service through the late 1930s, nearly half a century after the Columbian Exposition promised the imminent elimination of human suffering through the technology.

In 2006, Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens was subject to a firestorm of jeering political pundits and popular backlash when he described the Internet as “a series of tubes” while articulating his opposition to regulating the it. While this characterization was probably ill advised, it represented an attempt to contextualize a new technology with an old framework. When, as Part Three will discuss, John Perry Barlow described the Internet as an independent republic in 1996, also while articulating his opposition to regulation, he was widely praised for his allusion, which was rapidly distributed through the nascent Web. Clearly, the public is intuitively conscious of the implications of these frameworks. As the Internet becomes even more prominent in the everyday lives of more Americans, selecting the correct framework will be essential to ensure that the Information Age does not tear apart society in the way the Electrical Age did.

Of course, not all new technologies instantly become perceived as potential “rights”. This section will discuss the process by which access to electricity came to resemble a right that government could be expected to protect, then compares it to the progress made by internet service since the beginning of the Information Age. The chapter is divided into three parts, each focusing on a type of stratification that unequal access to technologies threaten to create. Left unchecked, they could divide the American community into two separate nations. In the 1930s, this stratification became too great to ignore, as evidenced by the REA and other programs. Hopefully, technological stratification instigated by the Information Age does not create the same type of societal dissonance. But many futurists believe that just such a future is imminent unless we take a proactive approach to averting such a fate.

Ultimately, any debate about the role of technology in society will focus on Technological Determinism; does technology drive social progress, or vice versa? Typically we take the former for granted. As Cranor noted:

There is strong tendency, especially in the popular press, to think and write of new technologies as exogenous forces shaping society. The reality is that the interplay between society and technology is a complex improvisational dance in which each partner responds dynamically to the moves (or anticipated moves) of the other.

The history of electrification confirms this notion. Electricity did not transform America alone. It was not until government actors found the correct ‘framework’ for regulation that the true transformative power of electricity’s full potential could be captured. Milder examples of societal checks on technology exist within the history of information; could the transistor have been marketed if the organizational mentality of the 50s had not subsided? Could fiber optic networks have emerged if deregulatory fervor had not ended AT&T’s monopoly on the long distance market in the early 1980s? In other words, dose society even have the power to direct the consequences of new technologies for the greater good, or does the influence of technology autonomously shape society, blind to the needs and desires of the individuals within it?

This chapter will examine, with the benefit of hindsight, the negative aspects of electrification on American society in the early 20th century and meditate on potential analogies of the past two decades, as well as consider possible analogies that might emerge in the near future.