Anthony J. Pennings, PhD

WRITINGS ON DIGITAL ECONOMICS, ENERGY STRATEGIES, AND GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS

How IT Came to Rule the World, 1.6

Posted on | April 2, 2010 | No Comments

This is the 11th post in the mini-series How IT Came to Rule the World

1.6 Further Cold War tensions in the 1960s sparked additional innovation in the microelectronics industry as the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) defense policy transformed California’s “Silicon Valley” into the center of the military’s miniaturization revolution. A combination of Congressional politics

Apollo Guidance Computer used the first integrated circuits

Apollo Guidance Computer

and industrial economics led to the shift of electronics research and production from the US East Coast to the West Coast. Minuteman missiles utilized transistors developed by Bell Labs and then commercialized by Western start-ups who created the small silicon-based computing “chips” for their guidance systems. Combined with NASA’s Gemini and Apollo projects, the first major markets were created for integrated circuits or ICs, a crucial innovation for computing. NASA’s Apollo Guidance Computer (APC) was the first computer to use the new innovation. ICs combined several transistors on a single silicon chip and required extensive oversight and support from the government to ensure the high levels of quality needed for manned space flights and guidance of intercontinental thermonuclear missiles.

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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications.

Category: how IT came to rule the world, space systems, the cold war
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How IT Came to Rule the World, 1.5: ARPA and NASA

Posted on | March 31, 2010 | No Comments

This is the tenth post in the mini-series How IT Came to Rule the World

After the USSR shocked the world in 1957 with its Sputnik satellite, the US took two major actions that would converge later in the modern Internet as well as a wide range of other technologies, including the microprocessor, the personal computer and eventually the smartphone.

First, it formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish a US lead in science and technology applicable to the military. ARPA drew first on the legacy of computer and data communications development at MIT and other locations. It contracted with a small company, Bolt, Beranak, and Neuman (BBN) to build the first packet-switching network called the ARPANET. ARPA also supported the Aloha System at the University of Hawaii that created a wireless packet broadcasting system that was used to connect computers among the different islands and then via satellites. Later ARPA seeded the formation of computer science departments and research institutes around the country that led to the development of the graphic user interface (GUI) and other technological innovations, including the Internet.

The other, more popularly known government action was the creation of the space program. The US and USSR, both of whom ravaged the Nazi’s V-2 rocket program at the end of World War II, engaged each other in a “space race” to control the German V-2 Rocket skies. Facing a new type of global warfare, President Eisenhower desperately wanted to establish the “high ground” and his New Look policy identified aerospace as the military’s highest priority. In 1958, he created the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) and within a week, Project Mercury was approved to place a human into orbit. In the early 1960s, newly elected President John F. Kennedy energized NASA by calling for a “man on the moon by the end of the decade” and the same set of speeches, he called for America’s leadership in international communications. One of the primary goals of the space program was to place communications satellites into space. Additionally, one of the most important by-products of the space race was the miniaturization of electronic circuitry into the technology that would integrate transistors into the microprocessor.

Together these actions would form the institutional foundation for the ARPANET, the precursor of the modern Internet. Reacting to the threat of the USSR’s space endeavors, the US would mobilize its technological and human resource capabilities for a new chapter of the Cold War. Later the “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) would help the ARPANET transform into the NSFNET to connect the “artificially intelligent” computers needed for the space defense system. It was the NSFNET that was privatized to create the commercial World Wide Web.

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AnthonybwAnthony J. Pennings, PhD is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea. Before joining SUNY, he taught at Hannam University in South Korea, St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas and Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. From 2002-2012 he was on the faculty of New York University. During the 1990s he was also a Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Category: how IT came to rule the world, space systems, the cold war
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How IT Came to Rule the World, 1.4: SAGE and Early Electronic Computing

Posted on | March 28, 2010 | No Comments

This is the ninth post in the mini-series How IT Came to Rule the World

The expansion of Communism and a set of US policies to contain it strengthened the regime of containment capitalism. Growing fears of nuclear war provided the motivation and rationalization for massive investments in US defense initiatives. The National Security Act of 1947 signed by President Truman on July 26, 1947. It provided the legislation for an era of permanent war mobilization, extensive investment in new arms, and the growth of highly funded covert and overt activities to keep Communism in check and under constant surveillance.

The revolution in China and the detonation of the hydrogen bomb by Russia strengthened the resolve of the US to maintain its military might and capitalize on advances made in jet propulsion, rocketry, radar, and computing. Billions of US government dollars subsidized the creation of a computer and data communications infrastructure by funding the development of a hemispheric defense system to protect North America from Russian bombers.

The SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) system conceived at MIT and built at IBM’s Poughkeepsie, New York facilities helped transform the computer from a bulky, slow, vacuum-tube switched numerical processor into a generalized, software-Defense Early Warning Linedriven, transistor-enabled, media-enhanced computer with an accompanying communications system able to send digital data over telephone lines. The IBM FSQ-7 computer combined data from remote radar sites into a rough, real-time representation of the horizon’s airspace. In cooperation with Canada, the US built a Defense Early Warning line (DEW) from Alaska through the Canadian Arctic down to Long Island, New York (Including an installation at Stewart Airport in Newburgh). Built primarily by the Bell System and combined with the IBM computers, the SAGE system was the precursor to the NORAD computer defense system that was built deep in Colorado’s Cheyenne Mountains.

But more importantly, SAGE was the foundation for the modern computer industry. It helped establish MIT’s expertise in computing, helped IBM’s transition to electronic computers, and allowed AT&T to set up long-distance data communications lines. It also helped create many new companies that would make important innovations. By the 1960s, IBM and the others, such as Burroughs and Honeywell, would establish electronic computing as a viable business and financial tool.

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AnthonybwAnthony J. Pennings, PhD is a professor at the State University of New York, South Korea offering degrees from Stony Brook University and the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). Previously, he taught at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas and was on the faculty of New York University from 2002-2012. His PhD from the University of Hawaii was supported by the East-West Center.

Category: how IT came to rule the world, space systems, the cold war
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HOW IT CAME TO RULE THE WORLD, 1.3

Posted on | March 26, 2010 | No Comments

This is the eighth post in the mini-series How IT Came to Rule the World

1.3 Three targets shaped the FDR-Truman strategy of containment and helped information technologies (IT) become a strategic financial, commercial and military factor.

The first mark was the financial speculation that helped precipitate the Great Depression. Roosevelt felt that unbridled financial activity not only resulted in the Great Crash of 1929 but retarded America’s economic and industrial growth in the 1930s and was complicit in the formation of fascist states in Europe and Asia.

The second target was the colonial trade blocs that excluded the US, particularly the British Empire. Roosevelt delayed entering the war to improve the US’s financial condition and build up its industrial base. Then at the Atlantic Conference in 1941, FDR forced England and its other Allies into agreeing to end imperialistic colonialism as a condition for the US entry into the war. While the Axis powers represented the most immediate threat, the British Empire presented long-term obstacles to US interests. While FDR did not want to replicate the colonialist strategies of the European powers, he recognized that an industrial society needed access to critical resources such as oil and scarce metals from around the world and set out to ensure American interests in the Middle East and other strategic locations were secured.

The third target was the spread and growing power of Communism which by 1950 had not only created the atomic bomb but had seduced the largest country in the world, China, into its ranks. The fear of Communism would be prime motivator for the mobilization of political and economic resources to enforce the strategy of containment and a rationalization for a continuance of the war economy that brought the US out of recession.

Containment would transform the telegraphic political economy, based on the telex and telephone into a computer-mediated world environment that linked banks and foreign exchange markets, connected global markets and production facilities, and integrated radar into the first computerized command and control system that would later become NORAD.

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AnthonybwAnthony J. Pennings, PhD is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea. Before joining SUNY, he taught at Hannam University in South Korea and from 2002-2012 was on the faculty of New York University. Previously, he taught at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, Marist College in New York, and Victoria University in New Zealand. He has also spent time as a Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Category: how IT came to rule the world, the cold war, uncategorized
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HOW IT CAME TO RULE THE WORLD, 1.2

Posted on | March 24, 2010 | No Comments

This is the seventh post in the mini-series How IT Came to Rule the World

Containment policy’s intellectual cornerstone was the state-centric and industrial-based Keynesian economics that had become the doctrine of economic management and development after the Great Depression. The New Deal had restructured the US policy environment and with the industrial stimulus of World War II, saved liberal capitalism in the United States. IBM for example had been clutched from the jaws of the Great Depression by the Social Security Act, which provided a major market for its new keypunch calculating machines.

The war was a horrid affair, but an economic blessing for the United States. Not only did it transfer the majority of the world’s gold and silver into US vaults at Fort Knox and West Point, but it also stimulated such innovations as radar and the general-purpose computer and provided a technical foundation for the new post-war economy. New systems of national production accounting such as Gross National Product (GNP) justified deficit spending for the war and extensive new post-war spending programs, including the US’s entry into a permanent war economy to contain the spread of communism helped shape unprecedented economic growth. Finally war mobilization had also led to the narrowing of the economy as the top 500 companies emerged through war contracts to dominate over 80% of the economy.

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AnthonybwAnthony J. Pennings, PhD is the Professor of Global Media at Hannam University in South Korea. Previously, he taught at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas and was on the faculty of New York University from 2002-2012. He also taught at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and was a Fellow at the East-West Center in Hawaii in the 1990s.

Category: how IT came to rule the world, telegraphic political economy, the cold war, uncategorized
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HOW IT CAME TO RULE THE WORLD, 1.0 and 1.1

Posted on | March 23, 2010 | No Comments

This is the sixth post in the mini-series How IT Came to Rule the World

1.0       Regime One: Containment Capitalism

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

– President Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 1961

1.1 Before the World War II was over, the Roosevelt administration began planning a new international regime with its key allies at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. This new organization of the US, its Allies, and soon the occupied Axis countries would continue and expand on the New Deal’s policy of financial containment, channel capital resources into nation-oriented activities, and stabilize the post-war trading environment. It faced and challenged two threats. Continuing in a vein that reached back to the Great Crash of 1929, it first sought to contain the unbridled finance capitalism that had failed so miserably and precipitated the Great Depression that ravaged the US and much of the world in the 1930s. To this end it initiated a new world order for currency stabilization and the formation of several related institutions, namely the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Second, having faced down fascist corporatism during World War II, it set its sights on international communism. Stalin’s USSR (which refuses to participate in the Bretton Woods negotiations) and later the People’s Republic of China presented an aggressive alternative to the Western system of capitalism and democratic elections. To these ends a massive mobilization of capital and technological means was initiated. Over the next few decades, tensions increased and investments in military electronics and space-based technologies led to the first electronic computers and major advances in telecommunications, including satellites for remote sensing and communications. Eventually these would radically transform the military as well as international finance, and then start to enter the immediacy of daily life of the global population.

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HOW IT CAME TO RULE THE WORLD, 0.5

Posted on | March 21, 2010 | No Comments

This is the fifth post in the mini-series How IT Came to Rule the World ©

Keynes was featured in this Time 1965 article

John M. Keynes

Four methodological concerns that shaped this project are worth noting. The first has to do with technology and its transformative relationship with society and institutions, in particular, the reciprocal effects between technology and power. The term “technostructuralist”, coined by Majid Tehranian, in his Technologies of Power (1989) is useful in that it referred to how information technology needed to be viewed within the context of institutions and power in general. Tehranian often compared this stance to a techno-neutralist position – the position that technologies are essentially neutral and their consequences are a result of human agency.

The second concern is the importance of using political economy to frame the general discussion. This includes classic issues like the price system, labor and corporations as well as the significance of peer production and gift economies. Economists like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Fredrick von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Jeffery Sachs are important as their ideas have been consequential in shaping the modern world. The political economy shapes technological development and with it political and commercial power.

The third is the relationship between information technologies and the production of meaning. Technologies are part of a set of practices that frame information and meaning and with it socio-legal structure. The spreadsheet, for example, combines the power of lists and tables with other calculative abilities that “in-form” meaning and organize sets of knowledge that run organizations and shape the way people live their lives.

Lastly, an inquiry into the state of democracy in the age of IT dominance is important. Can IT contribute to a social structure that allows and empowers people to participate in the conditions of their lives? Can the age of “Big Data” promote an era of participation and democracy and not an age of “Big Brother”?

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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD recently joined the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University in Austin TX, after ten years on the faculty of New York University.

Category: democratic political economies, how IT came to rule the world
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HOW IT CAME TO RULE THE WORLD, 0.4

Posted on | March 7, 2010 | No Comments

This is the fourth post in the mini-series on How IT Came to Rule the World ©

This project is organized to analyze and articulate three historical regimes that shaped the computer and telecommunications systems leading to the Internet and a proliferation of IT and digital media. Regimes are historically unique configurations of commercial, military, and political power that carve out particular paths of social organization and technological development. To help articulate their dynamics, I have named them: containment capitalism, digital monetarism and global e-commerce and security. At times intentionally and at times inadvertently, each of these regimes contributed significantly to the development of IT, the Internet, and its World Wide Web of e-commerce and social media.

Over time, these regimes shaped an informational and technological environment that was sequentially dedicated to: 1) a military real-time hemispheric radar defense system to protect against a nuclear attack; 2) an international regime of capital decontrols, electronic money and financial news flows, and 3) an electronic environment for social networking, surveillance,  and global business to business (B2B), business to government (B2G), business to consumer (B2C), and consumer to consumer (C2C) transactions. These three regimes at times overlapped, often conflicted, and frequently worked in conjunction with one another. However, the overall result was an unsteady yet unwavering trajectory towards a realization of computer codified information and calculative ability as well as the transformation of the telegraph and telephone system into a device for communicating digital information.

It was a path with no sure outcome, no clear sense of its heading, but one that was disciplined by political and economic forces into slowly emerging national, then global, webs of digitalistic communications.

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  • About Me

    Professor at State University of New York (SUNY) Korea since 2016. Moved to Austin, Texas in August 2012 to join the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University. Spent the previous decade on the faculty at New York University teaching and researching information systems, digital economics, and strategic communications.

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