How Cold War computational experts invested in diplomacy, world peace, and human agency created systems that threatened democratic values.

Beginning in the 1950s, international relations experts and United States government officials built novel computer systems designed to make foreign policy knowledge and practice more scientific. Human reason, they feared, might not be enough to guarantee the survival of American democracy in a nuclear-armed world. They didn’t seek to replace humans with machines; they hoped computers would sift information or provide interactive models that analysts could use to make better decisions. But as they struggled to deliver on their ambitious goals, and as the Defense Department became more involved in their projects after the Vietnam War, their commitments to advancing knowledge, policy agency, and peace gave way to very different computing systems, ones in which correlation replaces causality and prediction replaces understanding.

In People of the Machine, Joy Rohde reveals how even the best-intentioned attempts at fostering political engagement and human autonomy evolved into an anti-democratic nightmare. Her political and intellectual history shows how the subtle and corrosive effects of technological change set the template for today’s political and conceptual regimes. Doing so reveals not just the roots of contemporary inequality and disfranchisement but how thoroughly that antihumanism has been baked into our institutions and norms.