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T A B L E__T A L K

Whatever happened to customer service? Come to Table Talk's Digital Culture discussion area and talk about Internet Service Providers from hell.

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R E C E N T L Y

The 21st Challenge
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
Take the 21st Challenge: Rename software! Win prizes!
(12/05/97)

Let's get this straight
By Scott Rosenberg
Kiddie porn -- the enemy everyone can agree on
(12/04/97)

Interface this!
By Scott Rosenberg
A review of Steven Johnson's sharp critical manifesto, "Interface Culture."
(12/03/97)

Are we ready for the library of the future?
By Cate Corcoran
Librarians have become the public's last-resort help desk
(12/02/97)

Pornutopia lost
By Andrew Leonard
The X-rated Web is building a bold and bewildering new world of sleazy techno-tricks
(12/01/97)

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BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

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^{2 1 S T_ B O O K S --->}

___TECHNOCRACY IN AMERICA
__________A NEW BIOGRAPHY TRACES HOW NET VISIONARY
__________VANNEVAR BUSH ORCHESTRATED A
__________GRAND POSTWAR ALLIANCE OF SCIENTISTS,
__________INDUSTRY AND THE MILITARY.

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ENDLESS FRONTIER:

VANNEVAR BUSH, ENGINEER

OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY

BY G. PASCAL ZACHARY

THE FREE PRESS

518 PAGES

BY ANDREW LEONARD

Vannevar Bush was no fan of digital dreaming. The 20th century's premier technocrat was an analog man all the way: He liked getting his hands dirty with cranks and lathes and drills -- physical objects he could touch and see. As his biographer, G. Pascal Zachary, writes, "He persisted in believing that to really tame a thinking machine he had to have a wrench in his hand and see the gears turn." Invisible 1s and 0s disquieted Bush.

And there's your irony No. 1. Some 25 years after his death, Bush is now remembered primarily as a visionary -- "the sage of cyberspace" -- who foresaw the personal computer and invented hypertext. His 1945 essay "As We May Think" inspired countless digital-age luminaries and even, according to Zachary, "contained the germ for what would become the Internet."

Which leads us directly to irony No. 2. As Zachary, a technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal, painstakingly sets forth in "Endless Frontier," "As We May Think" was really no more than a footnote to the list of Bush's real achievements. Bush's true significance came not from his pie-in-the-sky predictions, but from his pivotal role in constructing America's military-industrial-academic complex. Working behind the scenes as an administrator doling out federal money during World War II, Bush transformed scientific research in the U.S. forever -- bringing the government, military and elite academic researchers into a closer embrace than ever before.

The picture of Bush that emerges from "Endless Frontier" is more than a little contradictory. He hated central authority, but reached his professional apogee wielding state power. He was a Yankee Republican who swore by the free market. But at the same time he did more than any other single person to ensure that the federal government got into the business of funding basic scientific research on a massive scale. He was deeply suspicious of mass democracy, seeing "populism and the widening participation of citizens in the machinery of government as a recipe for decline" and "favoring rule by the well-to-do and highly educated." But he also worshipped at the altar of the individual, and constantly worried that the rise of big business would swamp the little man, the inventor working at home in his garage.

Bush not only helped orchestrate the rise of the military-industrial-academic complex, he personally symbolized all of its interconnections. He co-founded Raytheon, one of the nation's largest defense contractors. He was a professor of electrical engineering and an administrator at MIT, which, mainly through his own efforts, became the largest academic recipient of federal science research funding. He was the president of the Carnegie Institute, a think tank that also benefited from government funding. And finally, as director of the Office of Scientific and Research Development during World War II, he personally supervised the development of the most awesome weapon of mass destruction yet produced -- the atomic bomb.

And he never looked back. In Zachary's eloquent words, "Bush expressed no guilt over the nature of his achievement: he had married science and the state, invention and destruction."

As a technocrat, most of Bush's battles were fought with reports and in committee rooms. Such is not the stuff of great glamour, and it makes stretches of Zachary's immensely detailed biography somewhat dry going. But for anyone striving to understand exactly how the computer industry emerged from government seed money and military weapons research requirements, "Endless Frontier" is a must read.

Before World War II, academic research in the hard sciences took place in an entirely separate continuum from military research. Funding came from private organizations such as the Carnegie Institute or the Rockefeller Foundation. World War II and Vannevar Bush changed all that. Using the personal backing of President Roosevelt and his own formidable personality (Bush, a civilian, had no problem yelling at generals and admirals, or in settling differences via all night Scotch-drinking sessions), Bush convinced military leaders that it was in their best interest to contract out weapons research to academics at MIT, Harvard, Berkeley and other elite educational institutions.

"Only the federal government had the money to pay the bill for world-class research, he believed," writes Zachary. "Ordinary citizens must understand that researchers deserved tax dollars even in times of peace."

The consequences of Bush's actions were dramatic. "Decisions were increasingly being made by experts whose authority lay beyond the reach of the electorate and was not limited by the rules and habits of civil servants or the military's chain of command," writes Zachary. "This growing reliance on essentially freelance 'brains' carried obvious benefits but also risks for professionals and the public ... Having enjoyed public funding, would scientists ever be content with the insecure standard of the past?"

Obviously not. Although Bush's influence on public affairs declined sharply after the death of Roosevelt, the pattern he set in motion remained in place -- funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into the research laboratories that built the information age. Which brings us to our last irony. Bush's visionary influence on the creation of the Internet, as judged by the impact of "As We May Think," may have been indirect and was certainly physically insubstantial. But his concrete work at bringing together universities, the federal government and the military paved the way for the establishment of institutions such as DARPA -- the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a military research organization that depends directly on the work of civilian scientists.