The Failed Promise of Computers

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.During the 1984 Super Bowl, an advertisement launched a technological revolution. If you were alive, you probably know the one. Directed by Ridley Scott, the minute-long spot showed men in gray uniforms, heads shaved, eyes blank, marching in unison toward a lifeless auditorium. A Big Brother figure speaks from a giant screen, droning on about “the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives.” All the while, a woman in red shorts and a white tank top is running to the auditorium. She looks like she’s just come from an aerobics class, but she has a sledgehammer, and authorities are in pursuit. Entering the room, she hurls the sledgehammer into Big Brother’s face. There’s a flash of light, and a wind blows over the stunned, awakened audience. A different voice—a comforting one—announces, “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”Although the ad did not show an actual Macintosh computer, it worked. Apple went on to sell 250,000 of its user-friendly, mouse-driven little machines in that year alone. The ad also asserted what was to be a defining idea of the emerging digital age: that personal computers, far from massive instruments of centralized control, were vessels of individual freedom. The coming of the internet, with its invitation to universally accessible knowledge and the free exchange of ideas, seemed to affirm the promise: Our machines wouldn’t enslave us; they would liberate us.The dystopia depicted in the ad came by way of George Orwell’s imagination, but the fears underlying it had deep American roots. As mass consumer culture expanded in the early 20th century, American artists, intellectuals, and critics worried over the problem of “conformity” and the loss of individualism that came with it. Most didn’t see the dark totalitarianism of 1984; instead, they saw a world of ready-made desires, a soulless existence brought to you by corporations, advertisers, media, and politicians. As The Atlantic’s review of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt put it in 1922, “the ‘standardized American’” was becoming “as much a national product as the Ford car”—a person like Babbitt himself, whose entire life and very personality were shaped by forces beyond him. Such criticism formed a fault line that ran from the cultural commentary of the ’20s to the outbursts of Beats, folkies, and academics in the ’50s.The earthquake, of course, would come in the counterculture of the 1960s. No longer would people need to be stuffed into “Little Boxes,” as the folk singer Malvina Reynolds worried early in the decade. The counterculture promised liberation from such confinement. Visiting San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district for The Atlantic in 1967, the novelist Mark Harris wondered whether he was seeing Babbitt’s descendants finally rebelling against conformity in ways that Babbitt himself could not. The counterculture’s sensibilities migrated into the mainstream, where popular culture and advertising absorbed its language of liberation and transgression, so that admen could pitch 7 Up using hippie iconography or Virginia Slims cigarettes by way of the women’s-liberation movement.Digital culture would prove especially receptive to these countercultural ideals. Northern California, after all, was the center of both the counterculture and the tech industry, and the cross-pollination between the two was considerable, as the historian Fred Turner has shown. By the 1990s, as the internet was becoming a mass medium, some of its first boosters (many of whom had roots in the counterculture) were presenting it as the realization of countercultural ideals. John Perry Barlow, a poet and sometimes Grateful Dead lyricist, wrote his 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in response to an early effort to regulate the internet. It reads like a Port Huron Statement for digital culture, describing a realm of individual freedom and free-flowing ideas that would break from existing forms of cultural and institutional authority. According to Barlow, a new “civilization of the Mind” was coming.In the dot-com and digital revolutions that followed, many of the people who sold the hardware, coded the software, and built the platforms were seen as iconoclasts themselves. Digital entrepreneurship became a form of transgression, not just in the casual dress and informal culture of the Silicon Valley office but also in what it promised to users. Tech visionaries pledged to create a world that would make possible precisely the kind of self-expression, open exchange, and communal connection that the counterculture had promised. It was no coincidence that by the late 1990s, Apple’s advertising—again with almost no reference to the machines themselves—simply pictured groundbreaking figures such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Bob Dylan, and John Lennon, alongside the slogan “Think Different.”In many ways, those promises were fulfilled. The internet did splinter 20th-century mass culture, and the effects have been every bit as revolutionary as promised. We don’t all watch the same networks anymore; we don’t see the same movies; we don’t get our news from the same places or read the same books (mostly, we just don’t read); we “do our own research.”Even as the conditions of mass culture and conformity that shaped the counterculture and the early dreams of the internet have faded, we continue to live in their shadow. In the fractured age of social media and the unknowable algorithm, our devices give us the feeling of freedom, even as they serve the interests of corporate forces that track our movements, catalog our interests, and profile our wants. The oppressive monoculture has been replaced by countless minicultures, each with their own devoted acolytes; we still inhabit little boxes, partially of our own making.The transgressive ethos, meanwhile, continues to thrive. Subversion is perhaps the dominant language of digital culture, spoken across the political spectrum by podcasters “just asking questions,” wellness gurus swilling at-home health hacks, manosphere kingpins lashing out against wokeness, and lefty influencers denouncing the billionaire class. Everyone, it seems, is hurling a sledgehammer at something.