In 1995, Newt Gingrich closed the federal government's Office of Technology Assessment — the body tasked with evaluating the implications of federally-supported technology since 1972. That single decision handed Silicon Valley a blank cheque to reshape democracy without democratic scrutiny.
The closure came as tech companies began describing their mission in world-changing terms: transforming work, connecting humanity, saving the planet. It also came as the internet moved from research labs to living rooms, and as a new ideology — techno-libertarianism — fused the anti-democracy technocracy movement of the 1930s with the computopianism of the 1980s. The result was a generation of founders who stopped believing in the liberal nation-state and embraced a vision requiring no controls but a keyboard, a mouse and a stock exchange.
A year later, Bill Clinton signed the bipartisan Telecommunications Act, delivering an almost entirely unregulated internet. The deal was done. By 2000, Wired declared Americans "better educated, more tolerant and better connected because of – not in spite of – the convergence of the internet and public life." No such era arrived.
The People Machine and the Birth of Microtargeting
The story begins decades earlier. In 1958, a team of American researchers and ad men built a machine they claimed could predict and influence voting behaviour. Edward L Greenfield, head of a Madison Avenue advertising firm, proposed compiling hundreds of thousands of punch cards — election returns, public opinion surveys, census data — to build an "information bank" that could sort voters by type and opinion by issue. "There is nothing mysterious about this on the surface," Greenfield and MIT political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool wrote. But "once this information is inside the high speed storage facilities of the machine, it is a different world."
The next year, Greenfield, Pool and IBM's Alex Bernstein formed the Simulmatics Corporation. They believed they'd invented "the A-bomb of the social sciences." Their first client was the Democratic National Committee. In 1959, the DNC hired Simulmatics to run simulations on an artificial electorate and tell the party's nominee what to say, to whom, and when. Arthur Schlesinger wrote, "I shudder at the implication for public leadership of the notion … that a man shouldn't say something until it is cleared with the machine."
After John F Kennedy won the nomination, his campaign hired Simulmatics to run predictions on an IBM 704. When Kennedy won, the New York Herald Tribune called it "a big, bulky monster called a 'Simulmatics'" and Kennedy's "secret weapon." Simulmatics went bankrupt in 1970. The problem wasn't the computers or the model, but an insufficiency of data. Even so, the work raised alarm and inspired dystopian fiction, including Eugene Burdick's 1964 novel The 480, in which a barely disguised "Simulations Enterprises" meddles with a US presidential election.
Lewis Mumford warned in 1966 that under "automatic operation … man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man's role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of depersonalised, collective organisations." He wrote in The New Yorker the next year that technological determinism had to be abandoned "if we are to get an adequate grip on our mechanised culture before we lose both our consciousness of human purpose and our confidence in being able to control our own creations."
No one paused to get that grip. Data collection became crucial to industries that accumulated everything from credit card transactions to car rentals to library checkout records, making possible predictions Simulmatics had only dreamed of. By the 1980s, consultants working for Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign invented their own People Machine, a computerised political information system. A reporter described it as a massive chessboard on which the Reagan campaign could test scenarios. In 1980, it helped carry Reagan to victory.
The Internet and the Collapse of Common Ground
JCR Licklider, the man most appropriately credited with inventing the internet, wrote in 1965 that if books were converted into data readable by a computer, data could move from storage to any number of users much more easily. In 1963, he'd sent a memo to colleagues at the Advanced Research Projects Agency proposing "to develop a capability for integrated network operation," which became first Arpanet and eventually the internet.
In April 1968, Licklider and psychologist Robert W Taylor predicted that "in a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face." They also predicted "online interactive communities" that would change how people engaged with each other: "Life will be happier for the online individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity."
Pool wrote in the same issue that personalised newspapers would lead to hyperindividualism. "In the coming atomised society, the information the citizen gets will arise from his own specific concerns," he said, and when everyone could select his own fund of information, "the political problem of gathering an effective body of support behind a particular rational issue or candidate will become very different and very much more difficult."
Usenet, an online bulletin board, opened in 1980 on a dial-up network linking universities and research centres. It let users join newsgroups, reply, and use anonymous usernames. Jason Hannan of the University of Winnipeg wrote that "Together immateriality and anonymity were an invitation to test social limits and boundaries," and that "Liberated from the personal repercussions and consequences of life offline, some newsgroup users discovered a sordid pleasure in transgression for its own sake." Sometime in the 1980s, this became known as "trolling."
Viral hate also dates to the 1980s. George Dietz, an American neo-Nazi, said in 1983 that he'd been "working, for the past two weeks, until four to five o'clock in the morning, trying to learn 'computerese' so that Yours Truly may talk to that monster in ITS language and on ITS own terms." He then launched the first white supremacy bulletin board, Liberty Bell Network, on an Apple IIe personal computer. In 1984, more bulletin boards followed, including the Aryan Nations Liberty Net and White Aryan Resistance.
Carmen Hermosillo, known as "humdog", wrote in 1994 that when she went into cyberspace she thought it would be "a place like any other place" but "i was wrong when i thought that … it is a black hole; it absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as spectacle."
The Dotcom Boom and the Death of Democratic Control
In 1994, Bryant Gumbel asked on the Today show, "What is internet, anyway?" A year later, Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen, a 24-year-old coder from Wisconsin, launched Netscape Navigator and earned $58m on the first day its stock was publicly traded. Overnight, Andreessen became, as the New York Times reported, "the newest member of Silicon Valley's instant millionaires club." That sale set off the dotcom boom. A year later, Andreessen was on the cover of Time, barefoot and in blue jeans, sitting on a golden throne and laughing.
Across the second half of the 20th century, liberal democracy made possible the rise of the artificial state, but didn't make it inevitable. The digital revolution didn't have to play out the way it did in politics and government; it did so because liberal democracy failed to limit corporate power over politics and government and failed to heed decades of warnings about the dangers of an automated state.
Beginning in the 1980s, Silicon Valley fell under the spell of the libertarian Ayn Rand. Rand embraced radical individualism and argued for a very narrow role for the state. In 1959, she said, "I'm challenging the moral code of altruism, the precept that man must live for others," and added, "I say that man is entitled to his own happiness and that he must achieve it for himself." Some people in Silicon Valley named their children Ayn and Rand and their companies after characters from her books. Steve Jobs considered Atlas Shrugged his "guide in life."
Michael Hauben, a computer science student at Columbia University, drafted a Proposed Declaration of the Rights of Netizens in 1995. He described himself as part of "the fight to keep the net an uncommercialised public commons." His declaration called for "universal access at no or low cost, freedom of electronic expression to promote the exchange of knowledge without fear of reprisal," "universal and equal access to knowledge and information," and "protection of the public purpose from those who would use it for their private and money-making purposes."
Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, founded a company called The Digital Village in 1996, appointing himself chief fantasist, with the idea of building a web platform that would be an "online guide to Life, the Universe, and Everything." In 2001, Adams died of a heart attack and Hauben died at 29 after an accident. Their frameworks for free and equal access to an internet structured by public interest, not commercial interest, died with them.
By then, the techno-libertarians had already won. One of their earliest manifestos appeared online in 1996: John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. He wrote, "Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone," and added, "You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather … You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear … Cyberspace does not lie within your borders."
Why This Matters:
The warnings were there from the start. Mumford, Weizenbaum, Pool, Winner — all predicted that networked computers would concentrate power, atomise society, and replace democratic deliberation with algorithmic control. They were ignored because the digital revolution arrived wrapped in the language of liberation and progress, and because governments chose not to regulate. Gingrich's closure of the Office of Technology Assessment in 1995 wasn't an accident. It was an ideological decision to let the market decide the future of democracy. Clinton's Telecommunications Act a year later cemented that choice. The result is an information environment that fragments the electorate, rewards extremism, and hands unprecedented power to unaccountable corporations. The path from Simulmatics' People Machine to Cambridge Analytica runs through decades of democratic failure to assert sovereignty over the technologies reshaping public life. Europe now faces the same choice America made 30 years ago: regulate the platforms or surrender democratic control to the machine.