The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer

Citation

Weller, T. (2005), "The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 61 No. 3, pp. 454-456. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410510598643

Jon Agar's most recent book demonstrates the emerging tendency in recent years towards “Informational History” – an overlap between the disciplines of Information Science and History which allows for some fascinating re‐evaluations. In this extremely dense work, Agar examines what he terms to be the “mechanization of government” since the early nineteenth century right though to present day government. He makes a convincing case as to how the development of information technologies and information processing are linked to the expansion of government capabilities and organization, specifically that of the Civil Service. Contrary to many standard Information Science or Historical arguments, Agar suggests that it was the Civil Service, cast as a universal purpose machine, who framed what a computer was, and what it could do. In proposing this idea, he irrevocably links the history of the state with the history of technology.

Chapter One looks at the different metaphors that have been used to describe government, and argues that by the late eighteenth century metaphors of the state as clockwork” began to be replaced by ideas of “liberal balance”, which were in‐turn replaced by the idea of the state as a “machine” by the nineteenth century. By examining the historiography of political thought in this way, it becomes clear that the ideas of Bentham, Bagehot, Mill, Carlyle among others, represented not only the society of the time they were writing, but also the technology. This is a subtle point and one that still has relevance today in an age where massive advances in the speed and scale of technology has led to much political writing of recent years describing government in terms of a Nanny‐state, of Big Brother watching (the metaphor for the State in the twenty‐first century is perhaps more that of a sinister overseer type who is too interested in citizens, rather than that of a detached machine).

Chapter Two focuses on the reform of the civil service in the nineteenth century. It examines how the influential Trevelyan‐Northcote Report of 1854 made a distinction between “intellectual” and “mechanical” labour, and therefore consciously attempted to make the civil service more objective and mechanical so as to strengthen its independence from any political allegiance to the Government of the day. Agar argues that this was done to a great extent as a reaction against the distrust which had developed against an ineffective civil service and bureaucracy. By using the ideology of an impartial, efficient, machine‐like civil service, it was more likely to encourage trust in the state's objectivity and rationality.

The rise of statisticians as a professional movement, and the increased use of statistics in government policy, both by pressure groups to call for reform, and then by government to justify and manage the reforms undertaken, is discussed in the third chapter. Here, the issue of personal privacy is also considered for the first time, an ideal which is still very prevalent today.

By middle of the First World War, most statisticians and government bodies were still disjointed and localised – in both their implementation and use of statistics – only one register authority was a Whitehall department rather than a local body, and that was the Unemployment Register controlled by the Ministry of Labour. Chapter four discusses how there were movements towards ‘total knowledge’, an ideal which was shaped by the context of the military, political, and imperial crises of the early twentieth century. Agar considers three schemes which advocated centralized registers of knowledge, and why each of them failed.

By the late nineteenth century effective government was being threatened because it did not have up‐to‐date information on an ever‐increasing and demanding population. The next chapter argues that the same factors that made knowledge of the population essential also overwhelmed the existing methods through which such knowledge could be gained; a classic case of information overload. As a consequence to this issue the punch card was developed, first in the US, and then introduced into the British market during the early twentieth‐century, particularly as the First World War increased the pressure and necessity to be able to collect and organise lots of information effectively.

The role of warfare in the development of the central state is an historically well accepted idea, and chapter six follows this line of thought by examining the impact of the Second World War upon the mechanization of the state. Just as the developments of the punch card and information technologies during the Great War were a response to the crises and needs of that context, the scientific achievements and surveillance operations of 1939‐1945 were a direct response to an informational crisis of the 1930s and an immediate international political crisis. This theory is similar to Beniger's “crisis of control”, and reiterates the importance of not making teleological assumptions about the path of history or the developments in information technologies.

Chapter seven continues this argument by looking at the Cold War period in which the themes of fear and distrust of government, both national and international, once again came to the fore. These concerns manifested themselves through contemporary literature and popular culture; ideas of computers taking over the world, of military power being so automated that man was powerless. These fears also represent social and political anxieties about such new “all powerful technology as, Agar argues, mechanisation, and often computerization, follow patterns of distrust, and of crises in control.

Chapter eight focuses on the increasing computerisation of government work and particularly the growth of Treasury organisation and methods, and then in the following chapter, Agar asks why privacy, and in particular a perceived threat from government computers, suddenly became an issue in Britain in the late 1960s. Agar suggests that there was a shift from apprehension of threats to collective groups, to threats to the individual, and that it was in this context that the privacy and data protection debates of the 1970s and 1980s occurred. He proposes that instead of the traditional idea that concerns over privacy happened because of government growth and mechanization, instead, that computerization should be described as occurring because of the changing nature of public trust, in the same way that the civil service was ‘mechanized’ to install confidence in its rational and efficient abilities.

Chapter ten brings things up‐to‐date, tracking the last three decades of the twentieth century. Here, Agar notes that two key things happened. One, that computers began to be used in radically new ways (i.e. in networks), and became smaller and more powerful, and therefore accessible by more people. Two, that government has increasingly contracted out expertise in this area, meaning that more and more information systems have been developed and maintained by private companies and not by the government itself. This has meant that a certain amount of private sector involvement in government, and the government has become more and more dependent on the expertise of these companies. Government's involvement with computers has been much more along the lines of attempts to utilise this information technology to revitalise citizens, to bring politics closer to the people, and allow voters more direct access to their MPs. This emphasis is an attempt to regain voters trust in government, which if Agar's argument is accepted, and as he points out himself, is rather ironic when it was a shift in attitudes to technocracy in the 1960s that formed part of the collapse of trust in the first place.

What is particularly interesting about Agar's approach is that is combines fundamental elements of Information Science (what is information, how is it organised and managed, how does technology aid or impede this development, etc.), and an Historical approach to the use and impact of this information and development of technologies. Although Agar describes the former issues as falling under the umbrella of the history of technology and science (which they undoubtedly also do), there is clear overlap with the discipline of Information Science which should not be ignored. This new trend of “Informational History” can only serve to enhance both disciplines.