Anthony J. Pennings, PhD

WRITINGS ON DIGITAL ECONOMICS, ENERGY STRATEGIES, AND GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS

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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HOW IT CAME TO RULE THE WORLD, 0.3

Posted on | March 6, 2010 | No Comments

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

0.3       While the focus here is primarily on the US and its role in developing data communications and computer technologies; IT has increasingly become global in its innovation, marketing, and production. The strength of the US “military-industrial complex,” the predominance of its currency and financial markets (as well as its capital markets that over funded its e-commerce capability and created the credit crisis of 2008), and the strategic role of its policy makers all contributed to the development of digital information technologies and a “disciplining” of the modern Internet. Consequently, these technologies are also involved in shaping modern American society, establishing new rules and protocols for daily life, and in the application and practice of power at the political level. Information and communications technologies have also been “permissive technologies” facilitating the movement of capital overseas, the management of off-shore production and research facilities, and the networks of global e-commerce and social media.

Category: how IT came to rule the world, uncategorized
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HOW IT CAME TO RULE THE WORLD, 0.2

Posted on | February 28, 2010 | No Comments

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

0.2       The answer to the question of how information technology (IT) emerged is a complex one. A number of forces can be seen to have infused and shaped its development. The thesis in this project is that modern information technology developed out of the trajectory of US statecraft and its involvement in several political economy regimes which emerged successively and sometimes concurrently in the post-World War II period up and through the turn of the second millennium.

A regime refers to a system of political economy, including the reigning governmental and military power but also the dominant modes of distributing capital and producing goods and services. A regime is a structural alignment between political institutions, corporate and market forces, and the dynamics of human agency – the energy and talent of people working creatively and in collaboration within these structures. Through relatively consecutive yet overlapping regimes, the system of computerization and telecommunications moved from military and space development, to commercialization, particularly for electronic finance, to the World Wide Web’s e-commerce and social media environment. As social media continues its phenomenal growth, it is on one hand a vehicles for personal empowerment and productivity; and on the other hand is part of an apparatus of surveillance and discipline.

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AnthonyAnthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global political economy. He can be reached at ap70@nyu.edu

Category: how IT came to rule the world
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HOW IT CAME TO RULE THE WORLD, 0.1

Posted on | February 27, 2010 | No Comments

Introduction

This post starts my mini-series on How IT Came to Rule the World ©

0.1       One of Marshall McLuhan’s most celebrated intellectual “probes” was his paraphrase of Winston Churchill’s infamous “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” Churchill was addressing Parliament some two years after a devastating air raid by the Nazis that destroyed the House of Commons.[i] McLuhan reworded Churchill’s concern in the 1960s with a more topical “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” Writing in a time when the electronic media was exploding in the American consciousness, McLuhan undertook a commitment to understand the role of media, particularly electronic media in modern society and his probe serves here as a point of departure for understanding the emergence of information technologies and simultaneously interrogating their impact as a force increasingly “ruling” the modern world, both in terms of cultural, economic, and political power; as well as the preponderance of protocols and procedures ordering our digitized world.

[i] “On the night of May 10, 1941, with one of the last bombs of the last serious raid, our House of Commons was destroyed by the violence of the enemy, and we have now to consider whether we should build it up again, and how, and when.” He continued with the above quote arguing for the Chamber’s restoration, citing its “form, convenience, and dignity.”

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AnthonyAnthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global political economy. He can be reached at ap70@nyu.edu

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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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