By Jill Lepore Ms. Lepore is a historian at Harvard and a

By Jill Lepore
Ms. Lepore is a historian at Harvard and a staff writer at The
New Yorker.
• Sept. 14, 2018
Every government is a machine, and every machine has its
tinkerers — and its jams.
From the start, machines have driven American democracy and,
just as often, crippled
it. The printing press, the telegraph, the radio, the television,
the mainframe, cable TV,
the internet: Each had wild-eyed boosters who promised that a
machine could hold the
republic together, or make it more efficient, or repair the
damage caused by the last
machine. Each time, this assertion would be both right and
terribly wrong. But lately,
it’s mainly wrong, chiefly because the rules that prevail on the
internet were devised by
people who fundamentally don’t believe in government.
The Constitution itself was understood by its framers as a
machine, a precisely
constructed instrument whose measures — its separation of
powers, its checks and
balances — were mechanical devices, as intricate as the gears of
a clock, designed to
thwart tyrants, mobs and demagogues, and to prevent the
forming of factions. Once
those factions began to appear, it became clear that other

machines would be needed to
establish stable parties. “The engine is the press,” Thomas
Jefferson, an inveterate
inventor, wrote in 1799.
The United States was founded as a political experiment; it
seemed natural that it
should advance and grow through technological experiment.
Different technologies have
offered different fixes. Equality was the promise of the penny
press, newspapers so
cheap that anyone could afford them. The New York Sun was
first published in 1833. “It
shines for all” was its common-man motto. Union was the
promise of the telegraph.
“The greatest revolution of modern times, and indeed of all
time, for the amelioration of
society, has been effected by the magnetic telegraph,” The Sun
announced, proclaiming
“the annihilation of space.”
The New York Sun Building.Credit...Bettmann Archive, via
Getty Images
Image
A 19th-century single-needle magnetic telegraph
device.Credit...Sspl/Getty Images

Time was being annihilated too. As The New York Herald
pointed out, the telegraph
appeared to make it possible for “the whole nation” to have “the
same idea at the same
moment.” Frederick Douglass was convinced that the great
machines of the age were
ushering in an era of worldwide political revolution. “Thanks to
steam navigation and
electric wires,” he wrote, “a revolution cannot be confined to
the place or the people
where it may commence but flashes with lightning speed from
heart to heart.” Henry
David Thoreau raised an eyebrow: “We are in great haste to
construct a magnetic
telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be,
have nothing important
to communicate.”
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Thoreau was as alone in his skepticism as he was in his cabin.
“Doubt has been
entertained by many patriotic minds how far the rapid, full and
thorough
intercommunication of thought and intelligence, so necessary to
the people living under
a common representative republic, could be expected to take
place throughout such
immense bounds,” a House member said in 1845, but “that
doubt can no longer exist.”
Less than 20 years later, a nation tied together by 50,000 miles

of wire, 1,400 stations
and 10,000 telegraph operators fell into civil war.
Image
Herbert Hoover, as secretary of commerce in the 1920s,
anticipated that radio would
radically transform the nature of political
communication.Credit...Topical Press
Agency/Getty Images
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Even that savage war didn’t diminish Americans’ faith that
technology could solve the
problem of political division. In the 1920s, Herbert Hoover, as
secretary of commerce,
rightly anticipated that radio, the nation’s next great mechanical
experiment, would
make it possible for political candidates and officeholders to
speak to voters without the
bother and expense of traveling to meet them. NBC began radio
broadcasting in 1926,
CBS in 1928. By the end of the decade, nearly every household
would have a wireless.
Hoover promised that radio would make Americans “literally
one people.”

That radio fulfilled this promise for as long as it did is the
result of decisions made by
Mr. Hoover, a Republican who believed that the government
had a role to play in
overseeing the airwaves by issuing licenses for frequencies to
broadcasting companies
and regulating their use. “The ether is a public medium,” he
insisted, “and its use must
be for the public benefit.” He pressed for passage of the Radio
Act of 1927, one of the
most consequential and underappreciated acts of Progressive
reform — insisting that
programmers had to answer to the public interest. That
commitment was extended to
television in 1949 when the Federal Communications
Commission, the successor to the
Federal Radio Commission, established the Fairness Doctrine, a
standard for television
news that required a “reasonably balanced presentation” of
different political views.
Radio, though, was also a tool of tyrants. Joseph Goebbels,
Hitler’s minister of
propaganda, had a device installed in his office that allowed
him to pre-empt national
programming. He also hoped to sow division in the United
States, partly through a
shortwave radio system, the ministry’s “long-range propaganda
artillery.” It spread lies
about a “Communist Jewish conspiracy” that sounded like news
reports, which
the newspapers at the time referred to as “fake news.”

Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Nazi Germany,
depicted silencing a
singer during a radio broadcast, circa 1936-
1940.Credit...Universal History
Archive/Getty Images
In 1938, Orson Welles tried to raise the alarm about fake news
with his notorious radio
broadcast of “War of the Worlds.” Fifteen minutes into the
program, listeners began to
call the station in terror, believing that the earth was really
being invaded by Martians. A
station supervisor asked Welles to halt the broadcast; Welles
refused. Dorothy
Thompson was grateful to him, writing in her column in The
New York Herald-Tribune
that Welles had “made a greater contribution to an
understanding of Hitlerism,
Mussolinism, Stalinism, anti-Semitism, and all the other
terrorism of our times, more
than will all the words about them that have been written.”
In 1938, Orson Welles broke into a radio broadcast to deliver a
fake news report based
on the science-fiction novel "The War of the Worlds."
Credit...Associated Press
After the war, computers that had been built by the military
split the electorate into so
many atoms. Univac, one of the first commercial computers,
was completed in 1951 for
the Census Bureau, to count and sort its data. The next year,

CBS used the Univac on
election night. “A Univac is a fabulous electronic machine,
which we have borrowed to
help us predict this election from the basis of early returns as
they come in,” Charles
Collingwood told his audience as the evening’s coverage began.
Walter Cronkite read the
early, East Coast returns; Edward R. Murrow provided the
commentary. Around 9:30
p.m., when the Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, was ahead in
the popular vote and the
Democrat, Adlai E. Stevenson, was winning the electoral vote,
Cronkite said, “And now
to find out perhaps what this all means, at least in the electronic
age, let’s turn to that
electronic miracle, the electronic brain, Univac.”
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But when the camera turned to Collingwood, he could get no
answer from Univac.
Murrow ventured that perhaps the computer was cautious. At
10:30 p.m., Cronkite
turned again to Collingwood. Univac was having “a little bit of
trouble,” Collingwood
said. Murrow called the election for Eisenhower. Fifteen
minutes later, Univac made the
same call. Cronkite smiled and said, “I might note that Univac
is running a few moments

behind Ed Murrow.” The next day, Murrow, speaking on CBS
Radio, celebrated the
triumph of man over machine: “We are in a measure released
from the petty tyranny of
those who assert that they can tell us what we think, what we
believe, what we will do,
what we hope and what we fear, without consulting us — all of
us.”
In 1952, CBS News announced that along with Walter Cronkite,
at right, a “giant brain”
Univac computer would be used to report on the presidential
election.Credit...Keystone-
France/Gamma-Keystone, via Getty Images
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That release proved short-lived. By 1959, a team of Democratic
strategists was
developing a secret plan known as Project Macroscope. They
wanted to build a machine
that could predict voter responses to any conceivable issue or
candidate, a Univac for
politics. Newton Minow, an Adlai Stevenson campaign adviser
who would soon become
chairman of the F.C.C., wrote to the historian Arthur
Schlesinger Jr., “My own opinion
is that such a thing (a) cannot work, (b) is immoral, (c) should
be declared illegal.”
Project Macroscope went ahead anyway. We live, each minute

of every day, within its
clockwork, and under its giant, all-seeing eye.
All of this history was forgotten or ignored by the people who
wrote the rules of the
internet and who peer out upon the world from their offices in
Silicon Valley and boast
of their disdain for the past. But the building of a new
machinery of communications
began even before the opening of the internet. In the 1980s,
conservatives campaigned
to end the Fairness Doctrine in favor of a public-interest-based
rule for broadcasters, a
market-based rule: If people liked it, broadcasters could
broadcast it.
In 1987, President Ronald Reagan finally succeeded in
repealing the Fairness Doctrine
— and he also vetoed a congressional effort to block the repeal.
The repeal, which
relieved licensed broadcasters of a public-interest obligation to
represent opposing
points of view, made possible a new kind of partisan talk radio.
In 1987, there were some
240 talk radio stations in the country; by 1992, there were 900.
Partisan cable television
followed, as the repeal led also to the rise of MSNBC and Fox
News in 1996.
disruption-media-
=rank&rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2F opinion&versio

The Reagan administration in 1987 repealed the Fairness
Doctrine, which had required
radio and TV broadcasters to present differing points of
view.Credit...Scott
Applewhite/Associated Press
The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine gave rise to the likes of
Rush Limbaugh, shown here
with a marionette of President Bill Clinton in
1993.Credit...Kimberly Butler/The LIFE
Images Collection, via Getty Images
Meanwhile, a new generation of knowledge-worker-not-auto-
worker Democrats
abandoned the working class for the microchip. Known in the
1980s as Atari Democrats,
they were soon reinvented as the New Democrats. “Thanks to
the near-miraculous
capabilities of microelectronics, we are vanquishing scarcity,” a
New Democrat
manifesto announced in 1995, damning “those who cannot and
will not participate in
the knowledge economy” as “losers.” The New Democrats’
technological utopianism
blinded them to the consequences of abandoning public-interest-
minded Progressive-
era regulation, at a time when a co-founder of Wired, Louis
Rossetto, a libertarian and
former anarchist, was celebrating the arrival of a freewheeling
New Media. In the
magazine’s inaugural issue in 1993, Mr. Rossetto predicted that

the internet would bring
about “social changes so profound their only parallel is
probably the discovery of fire.”
The internet would create a new world order, except it wouldn’t
be an order; it would be
an open market, free of all government interference, a frontier ,
a Wild West — lawless
and unaccountable.
Wired began publishing the same year that the Newt Gingrich-
affiliated Progress and
Freedom Foundation was founded. Its key thinker was the
irrepressible George Gilder,
who in the 1970s had achieved celebrity as an anti-feminist and
in the 1980s as a
supply-sider. At a 1994 Progress and Freedom Foundation
meeting in Aspen, Colo., Mr.
Gilder, along with the futurists Alvin Toffler, Esther Dyson and
George Keyworth, wrote
a “Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” which called for
“removing barriers to
competition and massively deregulating the fast-growing
telecommunications and
computing industries.”
President Bill Clinton with a V-chip on the day he signed the
Telecommunications
Reform Act in 1996.Credit...Paul J. Richards/Agence France-
Presse — Getty Images
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The cyber Magna Carta served as the blueprint for the
Telecommunications Act. The
libertarians’ objective, which went much further than the repeal
of the Fairness
Doctrine, was to ensure that the internet would lie beyond the
realm of government
control. On Feb. 8, 1996, President Bill Clinton, New Democrat,
signed the bill in the
reading room of the Library of Congress, on paper, and then,
electronically, with a
digital pen, the first piece of legislation signed in cyberspace.
The act deregulated the
communications industry, lifting virtually all of its New Deal
antimonopoly provisions,
allowing for the subsequent consolidation of media companies
and largely prohibiting
regulation of the internet. Still, that the United States
government would even presume
disruption-media-
=rank&rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion&versio
to legislate the internet — even if only to promise not to
regulate it — alarmed the
libertarians.
On the day Mr. Clinton signed the bill, John Perry Barlow, a
bearded mystic who had
written lyrics for the Grateful Dead and had helped found the

Electronic Frontier
Foundation, an ex-hippie who had become the darling of the
Davos set, wrote a
Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “Governments
of the industrial world,
you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the
new home of mind,” Mr.
Barlow wrote, in a statement that he posted on the web, where it
became one of the very
first posts to spread, as was said, like a virus. “On behalf of the
future, I ask you of the
past to leave us alone,” he said. “Governments derive their just
powers from the consent
of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours.
We did not invite you. You
do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does
not lie within your
borders.”
John Perry Barlow, the Electronic Freedom Foundation co-
founder, issued a
“Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in response to
the
Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996.Credit...Lindsay
Brice/Getty Images
In the spring of 2000, an article in Wired announced that the
internet had already
healed a divided America: “We are, as a nation, better educated,
more tolerant, and

more connected because of — not in spite of — the convergence
of the internet and
public life. Partisanship, religion, geography, race, gender, and
other traditional political
divisions are giving way to a new standard — wiredness — as
an organizing principle for
political and social attitudes.” Of all the dizzying technological
boosterism in American
history, from the penny press to the telegraph to the radio, no
pronouncement was
battier. In the years since, partisan divisions have become fully
automated functions,
those wires so many fetters.
The machine is no longer precisely constructed, its every action
no longer measured.
The machine is fix upon fix, hack after hack, its safety
mechanisms sawed off. It has no
brake, no fail-safe, no checks, no balances. It clatters. It
thunders. It crushes the
Constitution in its gears. The smell of smoke wafts out of the
engine room. The machine
is on fire.
Meta-ethics and Relativism
We'll follow our usual pattern for 10 point board here. Offer a
substantive initial post by the end of Wednesday and two replies
by the end of the day Friday for full credit. Of course more
engagement in discussion is welcome, and watch for my
occasional contributions aimed at clarifying the material in the
chapter. Again, 200-300 words is a good length for a post, but
I'm more interested in informed engagement with the material.

Here are a few review questions from the reading to get us
started.
1. Explain the difference between meta-ethics, normative ethics,
and applied ethics. Try to identify some issues and questions
belonging to each.
2. What does it mean to say that ethics is normative?
3. What could it mean to say that there are ethical truths?
4. Explain the difference between ethical realism, relativism,
and subjectivism.
5. Explain DCT and the problem arbitrariness presents for it.
What better alternative meta-ethical view is open to religious
believers?
6. Explain what Moral Relativism says.
7. How does arbitrariness present a problem for Moral
Relativism?
8. Why does Moral Relativism fail to support the idea of
tolerance and respect for diverse people and opinions?
9. Explain the problem of moral change or progress for Moral
Relativism.
10. Explain the moral reformers’ dilemma as an argument
against Moral Relativism.
11. What difficulty does subjectivism face in explaining
apparent moral reasoning?
12. Explain the argument for ethical realism offered by this
chapter as a whole.
For further thought:
Lots of people think that morality is subjective, a mere matter
of opinion or relative to your own point of view or that of your
culture. People often seem to take views like these simply on
the grounds that some of our moral opinions differ. But people's
opinions also differ about whether dinosaurs existed, whether
humans are causing climate change and whether the earth is flat.
Certainly there are facts of the matter about these things. Even
if we aren't quite sure what the facts are or just how to justify
our own opinion, nobody would say that whether or not the
earth is flat is merely a matter of opinion or relative to your

belief. So why the special carve out for moral opinions? Why
are so many so reluctant to allow for the possibility that some
moral opinions might be more reasonable than others and that
some of us hold opinions that aren't very reasonable? Well,
that's a question to ponder. The substance of our chapter this
week focuses on a few meta-ethical opinions, that morality is
somehow relative features centrally among them. Philosophers
since Socrates have been practically unanimous in arguing that
moral relativism is a pretty awful view about the nature of
morality.
The central concern about moral relativism is that it allows for
anything at all to be morally right. According to moral
relativism, if Nazi Germany deems it right to commit genocide
against Jewish people, then that is what is right relative to Nazi
Germany and there is nothing more to say about the morality of
genocide that what is right relative to various groups. Once this
consequence is pointed out it looks to be a pretty clear reductio
ad adsurdum of moral relativism. My suspicion is that most fans
of moral relativism simply haven't carefully considered the
logical consequences of this view.
During the first few weeks of this course we will be working on
philosophical methods and some basic ethical theory. However,
I do want to get us thinking about some IT issues as well. So, I
will be assigning a few IT related pieces for discussion during
these opening weeks. We will start with Jill Lepore's article
The Hacking of America
You may or may not like what Lepore has to say. But before
offering your opinions on her article, be sure you have a clear
understanding of her thesis, the conclusion she is arguing for,
and how she argues for it. Again, our evaluation of the
argument should be based on whether the premises are true and
whether they support the conclusion.

By Jill Lepore Ms. Lepore is a historian at Harvard and a

By Jill Lepore Ms. Lepore is a historian at Harvard and a

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