Susannah Glickman
Stony Brook University
The Politics of Exponential Growth: Defense, Technology and Industrial Policy
Abstract
Discussions of high-technology and its history in the US have often elided the role of the state. This elision is a product of the shifting politics, institutions and infrastructures around this industry but it does not reflect an honest accounting of the historic role of (often military-backed) industrial policy. Military Keynesianism has been a constant, even through the so-called neoliberal era (1975-2016). Various attempts to shift out of this political economy have routinely failed for historically specific reasons that will be examined in the talk. Neoliberal reforms in the 1980s and 1990s spawned a revolt in the tech and defense sectors. This revolt produced both center-left and right iterations of our present politics. This talk will examine this oft-neglected history, braiding together political histories, ideological shifts, political economy, and material infrastructure to give an account and appraisal of the current resurgence of interest in tech industrial policy. Likewise, it will suggest how this historically specific kind of interest in industrial policy is consistent with the present destruction of the state
About
Susannah Glickman is an assistant professor at Stony Brook University. Her research and teaching focus on the history and political economy of computation and information through the transformations in global American science that occurred at the end of the Cold War. She also writes about risk and uncertainty in other fields (for example, in the history of economics). Her current book project examines the infrastructures which make ever-improving semiconductors and quantum technologies possible historically, with particular attention to how ideology and other kinds of narratives get translated into policy and granular practices, and how reciprocally those material practices get translated back into ideology.
Glickman has a background in mathematics and anthropology and works between the fields of science and technology studies and history, mixing archival and oral history methods. She is broadly interested in how institutions deal with the category of the future and the origins of the category “tech.” Her work has been supported by the Science History Institute, the Mellon Foundation, IEEE, IBM, the Heyman Center for Humanities, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.