Presentations:
Janet Abbate, Virginia Tech: “Proto-feminism and Programming: Gender Politics in Computing Before the Civil Rights Era.”

Paul Edwards, University of Michigan: “Ideology and Irony in Technopolitics: Computers and Apartheid Revisited.”

Eden Medina, Indiana University: “Fighting the Status Quo: Marx’s Capital and the Cybernetics of Beer.”

Rebecca Slayton, Stanford University: “The Politics of Progress: Computerniks as Activists and Professionals in the Era of Vietnam.”

Discussion: Ronald Kline, Cornell University

Chair: Nathan Ensmenger, University of Pennsylvania

Session Description:
The field of computing came into its modern form through a period of dramatic social and political change around the world. This panel addresses recent historiographic calls for more attention to the mutual shaping of computing and politics, by examining how complex tensions in the social and political interests of research sponsors, computer designers, and users shaped the public representation of computing. How did early computer developers express their social and political values as these came into tension with the commitments of their institutions? What implications did these expressions hold for public representation of the political and social significance of computing? This panel examines these questions in diverse times and places, collectively exploring computing over five decades and four different nation-states, revealing cross-cutting themes. Taken together, the panel will show how computing, as science, technology, and work, has been represented alternately as a source of revolutionary change or as a means for keeping the status quo, while its practice has been far more ambiguous.

Janet Abbate takes up the politics of computing as a new and ambiguous field of work. She shows that American and British programming between the mid-1940’s and mid-1960’s both enabled and limited women who sought professional recognition and advancement. Women carved out a niche in a field that had not yet been explicitly gendered as male; yet the initial invisibility of programming within a broader system of male-dominated employment discouraged more public and radical advancement.

Paul Edwards demonstrates a similar contrast between the public representation of computing and its more hidden effects as a field of work and as a technology, but in the context of apartheid South Africa during the 1970’s and 1980’s. As he shows, the majority of anti-apartheid activists characterized computing as a tool for government oppression; yet ironically, black Africans were able to advance in the new field, and anti-apartheid activists were able to turn computing technology to their own uses.

Eden Medina also explores the role of computing in revolutionary politics, but in the context of Salvador Allende’s Chile from 1970 to 1973. She shows how the influential cybernetician Stafford Beer worked to align his science with Allende’s vision of democratic socialism and Marx’s critique of capital, as well as his attempts to persuade Allende and other computer workers of the revolutionary potential of technological systems grounded in cybernetic science.

Returning to the U.S. context, Rebecca Slayton will explore similar tensions between government uses of computers and the political commitments of computer developers. She examines a seeming paradox – that anti-war activists were deeply rooted in military-sponsored computing research – and shows how commitments to technological progress both helped resolve this paradox and shaped collective action at a time when computer workers were struggling to find a cohesive professional identity.

In short, this panel will demonstrate several themes which are under-explored in current historiography of computing: tensions between the political commitments of computer developers and state uses of their technology; contrasts between the public representations and local practices of computing; flexible alignments of computer “science” with political ideology; and finally contradictions between the revolutionary potential of a new technology and the established institutions nurtured its growth.