Barbrook, Richard: Imaginary Futures

The Human Machine

In The Human Machine, Richard Barbrook describes the importance of military funding to the initial development of computer technologies. During the World War II, Alan Turing and his team at Bletchely Park developed Colossus: a computer built specifically to decode encrypted messages transmitted through German military networks. Going back further, Babbage's Difference Engine was funded by the English government as it “promised to produce more accurate navigation tables” for the British Navy. [41]

Barbrook describes how, in the United States, the military became the dominant patrons of IBM during the Cold War: "When the survival of the nation was at stake, technological excellence wasn't constrained by financial limitations." [40] The rapid developments in computer technologies were applied as a mass-control interface, enabling the US military to “plan the destruction of Russian cities, organise the invasion of 'unfriendly' countries, […] and pay the wages of its troops and manage its supply chain.” [41] In the U.S, the computer was also seen as an important political tool to analyse the rapidly increasing quantities of data from sources such as the U.S census. With the use of computers, the statistics could be processed much quicker, and be presented in a more comprehensible manner to the policy-makers.

Barbook's central argument in this chapter is that the computer was initially developed as a governmental tool to control a political agenda. The computers of the 1950s did not have a domestic function – they were sinister objects capable of plotting missile trajectories and simulating crisis situations. To relate this to our current seminar series on interfaces: The computer could be understood as being a tool to manage 'political conditions' – it was the interface between the military and nuclear warfare, or between the politicians and managing the economy.