AHA Session 23
Friday, January 3, 2025: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Clinton Room (New York Hilton, Second Floor)
Chair:
Devin Kennedy, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Session Abstract
This panel brings together recent works in the history of technology that shed light on important features of 1980s US political history. Historians of technology have long argued that technological artifacts “have politics;” that social processes are encoded in choices about which things to build, where, for whom, and with whose interest or harms considered. (Winner, 1980). This panel argues that historical analysis of technology, its associated experts, and the discourses surrounding it are especially useful domains for addressing the recent history of the United States, in particular the 1980s. This was a decade of spectacular technological failure ( Chernobyl, the Challenger disaster, the computer-accelerated 1987 stock market crash) and also vast technological possibilities, including in the personal computer, the strategic defense initiative, and genetic engineering. Alongside these headline-grabbing failures and promised futures, technology was also becoming a more prosaic device of politics: a site for negotiating, articulating, and enacting often diverging political visions of the future and its risks. The papers in this panel reveal communities including scientists, politicians, and public welfare experts engaged in debates about the political meaning and consequences of technology, and in the process, forming new allegiances, strategies, and ideals about US society.
For many historians of the 1980s, technology lies at the heart of partisan politics: changes in media and communications fueled the rise of partisanship and sharpened, in Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer’s meta-narrative, divisive fault lines (2019). At the same time, technology itself was an object of politics, holding in particular the promise of robust economic development, a trend captured by scholars led by Lily Geismer (2022) and Magert O’Mara (2019).
This panel builds on such work and proposes to view technology not only as the product of broader political trends, but also as a machine for the production and execution of political visions. Jeannette Alden Estruth examines the governance of space, and the role of emerging private space businesses, working in tandem with the Reagan administration, in an effort to “enclose” the “galactic commons.” Devin Kennedy describes the internal conflicts among computer scientists as they responded to public and governmental anxiety about the social implications of computer technologies–especially when they failed. Marc Aidinoff offers an account of “name matching” software as it was embedded in discussions of welfare fraud and welfare reform. Gili Vidan provides a history of the emerging threat of “computer crime” as a category in the period, and how it reflected new understandings of digital technology and its users.
