Angus Burgin on the Rise of the Internet

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Angus Burgin on the Rise of the Internet

Podcast: New Books Network – I Heart 90s History
Episode Date: May 11, 2026
Host: New Books (Ben Waterhouse & Lee Vincel)
Guest: Angus Burgin, Associate Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University
Producer: Joe Fort

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the intellectual and cultural history of the Internet's rise during the 1990s. Through a rich, personal, and scholarly conversation with historian Angus Burgin, the hosts explore how optimism, technological change, and political visions intersected in this influential decade. Using examples from popular culture, policymaking, and personal experience, the discussion centers on how narratives of optimism and technological possibility shaped American society, and why those narratives eventually faltered.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal Memories and Why the 90s Matter (02:33–09:37)

• Angus’s Perspective: Angus connects his scholarly pursuits to his own formative years, viewing historical investigation as partly a means to understand his life and times. The arrival of the Internet marked a personal as well as a societal turning point around 1998–1999.
  • Quote: "I write history in part just to understand myself, my life, the world… I was a child of the 90s." (16:57)
• The hosts reflect on how email became a social novelty in the late '90s, shifting rapidly from pen-pal fun to an everyday utility.
  • Quote (Angus): "Now we go to our email, and there's kind of... either a sense of hope or more often dread... but right, there's a lot of our basic everyday transactions." (11:23)

[Key Segment: Nostalgia & Email] (09:37–13:07)

• Discussion turns to the ways early Internet use (Prodigy, AOL, chain emails, etc.) was experienced as playful, hopeful, and even romantic—a far cry from today's utilitarian or overwhelming perception.

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2. From Techno-Optimism to Scholarly Critique (16:13–24:33)

• Reflecting broader historical movements, Burgin explains how historians tend to avoid “presentism” but often can’t resist exploring how recent trends affect long-term trajectories.
• The 1990s, usually characterized as either ironic and dark or naively optimistic, are shown to contain both: an early decade of cynicism and alienation, and a late decade marked by utopian visions empowered by new technologies.

[Key Segment: Contrasting the Early and Late 90s] (20:34–24:33)

• Quote (Angus): "The late 90s stand as this kind of strange outlier… there was a really high degree of optimism. And so to me, that's worth trying to understand…" (22:52)

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3. Al Gore, Politics, and the “Invention of the Internet” (05:43–13:07, 29:37–37:13)

• Anchoring the episode is a detailed look at Al Gore’s oft-misquoted claim about “creating the Internet” during a 1999 CNN interview.
  • The hosts play and analyze the clip, unpacking the roots of the rumor as well as the political consequences for Gore’s presidential campaign.
  • Quote (Gore, 07:00): "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet…"
• Burgin clarifies the historical nuance: Gore played a central role in shaping policy and funding for Internet infrastructure, notably the 1991 “Gore bill.” However, the rhetorical misstep opened him to relentless Republican attacks and mocked him as a “wonky technocrat.”
  • Quote (Angus): "If he could go back to it, he would say using the phrase creating the Internet was unwise... Gore had a very plausible claim that as a policy maker, he probably was the most important person..." (33:39)

[Key Segment: The Fall of Techno-Optimism in Politics] (36:09–42:37)

• After the gaffe, Gore avoided tech rhetoric, undermining the “Third Way” politics that had energized Democrats. The relentless satire (e.g., SNL “lockbox” sketch) cemented his “wooden” persona.

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4. Culture, Irony, and Utopian Visions vs. Reality (24:33–29:37, 44:24–55:16)

• Burgin addresses the intersection of cyberpunk fiction, postmodern theory, and technological optimism. Early 90s Internet utopianism drew from both countercultural and mainstream hopes for new forms of community and collective action.
  • Quote (Angus): “They're trying to think about, well, how can we leverage technology to actually construct an affirmative world where... we nonetheless can build a revolutionary politics in virtual worlds.” (24:33)
• The idea of “distributed intelligence” (central to Gore’s vision) is linked to both individual empowerment and communal uplift, showing bipartisan aspirations. However, bipartisan consensus began to unravel as the 2000s revealed the limits of technology to fulfill such hopes.

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5. Fragmentation & Filter Bubbles: The Unintended Consequences (51:06–57:17)

• The hosts analyze the unintended outcomes of Internet and media fragmentation. While the expectation was for an “interactive, rational public sphere,” the reality became one of polarized echo chambers and filter bubbles.
  • Quote (Angus): "What people were assuming... was going to be this much more interactive, robust, sophisticated citizen that would emerge... actually turned into... a world where people were just reading what activated the pleasure centers in their brain and reinforced whatever their existing worldview already was." (53:45)
• Still, producer Joe Fort presses for a more nuanced view, suggesting online communities (Reddit, Instagram, etc.) still offer meaningful, sophisticated exchange and we may yet see positive outcomes.
  • Quote (Joe): "My experience on these sites is rich, right? ... I see a lot of people contributing to a conversation that is ultimately cultivating a very sophisticated audience for culture, for content..." (55:16)

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6. Optimism vs. Pessimism—The Role of Historical Critique (57:17–61:10)

• Burgin and the hosts challenge the simple narrative arc of technological optimism followed by inevitable disappointment.
  • Quote (Angus): "Maybe there is a better Internet out there that we can create if we can re-access our memory of this potential and think about ways... to help it actually come about." (57:17)
• They caution that constant pessimism about technology can breed a sense of powerlessness, preventing new forms of collective action and hope.

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7. Republican Techno-Futurism: Newt Gingrich’s Vision (61:53–68:01)

• Less commonly discussed is Newt Gingrich’s role as a Republican techno-futurist. Gingrich’s early career was marked by wild speculative visions, collaboration with futurists, and even support for government investment in technological infrastructure (including the early Internet).
  • Quote (Angus): "Gingrich was generally an outlier among Republicans... but not when it came to questions of technology investment." (65:57)
• Though his positions later clashed with mainstream social conservatism, Gingrich’s embrace of technology shows a bipartisan moment of consensus (with caveats).

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8. When Did the Optimism End? (68:01–70:35)

• Burgin suggests the decline in Internet optimism happened unevenly throughout the 2000s, especially as social science research began documenting the technology’s unintended social costs.
  • Quote (Angus): “As soon as the social scientists start studying, they start finding things that don't align with their vision.” (68:18)
• The narrative pleasure of puncturing optimism is acknowledged, but Burgin advocates for a more critical-yet-hopeful approach.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I write history in part just to understand myself, my life, the world... I was a child of the 90s.”
  — Angus Burgin (16:57)

• “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”
  — Al Gore, CNN interview (07:00)

• “If he could go back to it, he would say using the phrase ‘creating the Internet’ was unwise.”
  — Angus Burgin on Al Gore (33:39)

• “What people were assuming... was going to be this much more interactive, robust, sophisticated citizen... actually turned into a world where people were just reading what activated the pleasure centers in their brain.”
  — Angus Burgin (53:45)

• “Maybe there is a better Internet out there that we can create if we can re-access our memory of this potential.”
  — Angus Burgin (57:17)

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Suggested Listening Guide—Key Timestamps

• Early Internet memories & Email’s evolution: 08:25–13:07
• Historians & the 90s, Presentism: 16:13–20:34
• Al Gore and “creating the Internet” explained: 29:37–36:09
• Literary theory, postmodernism, utopian cyberculture: 24:33–27:35
• Media fragmentation, filter bubbles: 51:06–55:16
• Nuanced views and optimism revisited: 57:17–61:10
• Gingrich’s techno-futurism & bipartisan consensus: 61:53–68:01

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Tone & Style

The conversation is lively, thoughtful, and often playful, blending academic skepticism with personal storytelling and cultural references. The language is accessible and witty, peppered with nostalgia, frank criticism, and open-ended hope.

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Takeaways

• The 1990s were not only a period of irony and skepticism but also a moment of profound technological and political optimism, much of it centered on the Internet.
• Political leaders like Al Gore and Newt Gingrich played unexpected roles in championing Internet development.
• The narrative arc from utopian hope to disillusionment is nuanced—failures should not obscure the real benefits and future potential of digital technologies.
• Effective history requires holding both the dreams and the disappointments together, and using both as tools for imagining better futures.

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(Episode content starts at 02:21. Ads and non-content sections omitted.)

Transcript

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[Angus Bergen]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Hello listeners, and welcome to episode two of the I Heart 90s History podcast, where we explore how historians study the 1990s. I'm Ben Waterhouse from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

[Lee Vincel]

And I'm Lee Vincel from Virginia Tech. For this episode, we're talking to Angus Bergen, who is associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, where he works on intellectual and political history of the United states in the 20th century.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Now, Lee and I have known Angus for a long time. In my case, that goes all the way back to the very first day of graduate school. Angus is well Known to many historians for his work on conservative economic thought and his first book in particular, the Great Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression. He is somewhat less well known for having a very small role in the 1990 version of the movie Lord of the Flies when he was 10 years old. But that's the kind of information you pick up when you go to graduate school with somebody.

[Lee Vincel]

But the real reason we are excited to talk to Angus for this podcast is because of the work he's doing now, an intellectual history of the Internet and how people were thinking about that technology as it was emerging at the time. We thought he'd be the perfect person to build on. Our conversation last time with David Kirsch about the dot com bubble of the 1990s and get us thinking about how the Internet came to take over modern life. Our producer, Joe Fort, was also in the virtual room. Joe, what stood out to you about our conversation with Angus?

[Joe Fort]

Well, something we're trying to do with this podcast is to place things like feelings and memory and nostalgia alongside our exploration of the way in which scholars are beginning to study the 1990s. And in that regard, I think Angus was really fun. Guest the scholarship was very interesting, but also there were great moments where, for example, he was able to place popular culture very easily in proximity with his work. And also I liked hearing about some of the personal motivations behind the direction his research may take. He said something along the lines of, I study history because I want to learn more about myself. And that really, I think, dovetailed well with our whole memory and feelings thing. But he also had this great depth of knowledge and the research he's done on Al Gore and Newt Gingrich and the way those guys, the sort of polarity those guys held and the overlap they created from different sides of the aisle when it came to policy in the area of technology development. So all of that was really interesting. It was a great conversation.

[Lee Vincel]

No, I agree on both of those points. I think Angus is particularly clear about how he kind of relates personally to historical research in a way that I think a lot of historians just are more muddled about. But also he's doing this great work that challenges kind of received messages and memories of the 1990s in ways that future guests are going to do in big ways, too, about the Clinton administration. Ben, what do you think?

[Ben Waterhouse]

Yeah, I think, well, this is a great point and maybe one of the most profound ways that Angus encouraged us to challenge our own memories and use the historian's toolkit to unpack what was really happening was actually the very first thing that we did when we sat down to record this conversation with Angus, which was to watch together a short clip of an interview that aired on CNN in 1999 with then Vice President Al Gore, who was running for president. And Gore talked with Wolf Blitzer about the role that Gore had played as a policymaker supporting the development of advanced communication technologies. And of course, to Al Gore's chagrin and to kind of much of historical memory, Gore is often misquoted in this interview as having said that he invented the Internet.

[Lee Vincel]

We're gonna play a little video for you here, Angus.

[Unidentified Speaker]

Now, why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley, a friend of yours, a former colleague in the Senate? What do you have to bring to this that he doesn't necessarily bring to this process? Well, I will be. I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. It'll be comprehensive and sweeping, and I hope that it'll be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be, but it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system. During a quarter century of public service, including most of it long before I came into my current job, I have worked to try to improve the quality of life in our country and in our world. And what I've seen during that experience is an emerging future that's very exciting, about which I'm very optimistic.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Oh, the optimism of 1999. So, Angus, welcome. Great to have you. That was Al gore, March of 1999, getting ready to run for the Democratic nomination for president. So, first, to start off and to welcome you here, what were you doing in March of 1999? You weren't running for president. What was your life like?

[Angus Bergen]

I was finishing my freshman year at college. I was an undergrad at Harvard, and that was a big year for the Internet. It was kind of an experience for me in high school. I'd sent a few emails back and forth or whatever, but the Internet was not a major component of my high school life. I went to a boarding school, and the big technological innovation while I was there was the implementation of a voicemail system where everybody could leave voicemails for one another. That was the world we were inhabiting. And I showed up at college in the fall of 1998, and that was the year that suddenly everybody in college was communicating over email. So for me, that was part of the transition to college. It felt organic because it was also a moment of change in my own life. But it was also very much paralleled the experience of many other people around the country at precisely the same time. So when Gore made that comment, the Internet was. Let alone the dot com boom and everything else, the Internet was a very big deal. And a big deal not just in a notional way as it had been for people earlier in the 1990s, but was becoming a tangible part of many Americans everyday lives.

[Lee Vincel]

Can you say a bit more about. You said you might have sent some emails in the 90s. Do you remember the first time that you started using the Internet?

[Angus Bergen]

I was just thinking about this. My. Well, my first interaction online were through Prodigy. I still remember my dad came home with a little yellow Prodigy box. And the big debate back then was whether you got Prodigy or you got CompuServe or you got America Online. And I had different friends on different services or whatever. And I have only the vaguest memories of Prodigy. I didn't use it very much, but I remember dialing up. You know, you had to wait while your modem made all those weird noises or whatever, and then you eventually got online. I would go on various forums. I think my username was Sudafed for some reason. I don't know, I don't have any recollection. Oh, interesting.

[Ben Waterhouse]

That says a lot.

[Angus Bergen]

And you know, we just have this intersection, like random interactions with people in these. I don't even remember what the chat rooms were about. It wasn't like a big thing that I spent a lot of time doing. But that, that was my first experience of online interactions before I went to high school. I think I probably was around seventh or eighth grade then. And then when I went. Went to high school, you know, I remember I got an email address and that was back in the air when people would be. I mean, I guess grandparents still do this a little bit, but people are forwarding each other, you know, like jokes over chain email like that. I mean, it really wasn't. It wasn't transactional in the way it is now. Now we go to our Internet, we go to our email, and there's kind of. I mean, it's either a sense of hope or maybe more often dread of the different things that are going to be coming your way. But right. There's a lot of our basic everyday transactions, at least as academics happen still through email.

[Ben Waterhouse]

And you can see pushback.

[Angus Bergen]

There wasn't the sense that people were going to be regularly checking their email or whatever. It was just a novelty that you used for amusement or, you know, whatever. It was really when I showed up in College in 98, that suddenly it was just a basic part of how you were transacting your day to day life.

[Ben Waterhouse]

I get a big kick out of the fact that today's college students and high school students, this has been going on for a while, have almost transcended email in which the email itself is the old fashioned fogey way of corresponding.

[Angus Bergen]

As now an old fashioned fogey myself, it's frustrating that you can't email people of that generation and feel confident that they're actually going to read and reply to it. And so it actually, it seems like it's taken on this new role over the last 10 to 15 years where it is still the place where certain kinds of transactions sort of need to unfold, but it no longer is so reliable as it was for that 10 or 15 year period after 1998 that people were definitely checking and responding to their emails. And so we've kind of been lost where now a lot of this stuff is being offloaded, whether to text messages if you have that kind of relationship with somebody, or to slack if you're in a certain kind of workplace or whatever. And email's sort of caught in this nether region, which I think is part of the reason why it no longer feels fun to check your email in the way that it did. Where did you go?

[Ben Waterhouse]

I mean that's. Yo. What do you remarkable people would ever think it was fun?

[Lee Vincel]

Yeah,

[Angus Bergen]

I watched a year or two ago with my kids. You've got mail. Right. I think that moment in time with this romance was being transacted over email and there was this sense of real hope that you were going to get this deeply personal message. That really is not the way that most people think of email now.

[Joe Fort]

Right. But that is the way I thought of it at first. Right. I remember when email first came that both for me, both email and fax sort of like inhabited this kind of pen pal space. And so it was like this fun thing to do. Like I was just out of college. And so I, I want to say with regard to the date March 9, 1999, that is, I remember it very clearly because that's my 30th birthday. March 9th is my birthday. Right. And I remember the day. I remember where I Woke up, what job I had to do. I was, I was photographing this band for like their promotional stuff and they were just friends of mine. I was doing a favor. And I was then dating this woman who had become my first wife. And I remember she had a computer that her brother gave her, right? It was a desktop computer. I didn't have one at home really yet, but I used the email at work and when I first was like sort of getting to know her, talking to her, right, it was over email. It was this kind of like exchange of love letter emails. And my friends from college, we had just been recently separated, right, because you know, your, your friends at college are your family. And then all of a sudden everybody goes off after graduation. And we kept in touch, email and fax. I, this one friend, we would fax each other's writing back and forth

[Angus Bergen]

like

[Joe Fort]

we were workshopping or something. And yeah, it was, it was. So it's interesting to think about how it's now gone, right? Like that's the rise and that's the, hey, look at this fun new thing. And now is it, is it going away? I mean, you're right. Everything you say about like email's place in business and personal communication. So yeah, this is, we're tying a bow on it.

[Angus Bergen]

Yeah, it also helps us. The other thing about, you know, showing up at College in 1998 is they had this high speed fiber optic network. And so suddenly everything seemed much faster than it had before. But it was an era I think we forget now. Now everything is so fast. Where in a lot of cases the vision for the technology was outrunning the actual capacity of the machines we were using to access it. That certainly was the case for me in college. We had this high speed broadband network. But I remember I had this Dell laptop. It was fantastically expensive, but it would overheat. And so when I was working on papers or writing emails or whatever, every hour and a half or so I had to put it in the mini fridge in my room, cool down so I could then use it again. But there was, and that is, you know, I'm reading this stuff from the 90s now and there's this sense of this. People are writing about virtual reality and cyberspace and all their imaginations are running wild. And you have to remind yourself that that still was imaginary in ways that now feel more natural to us today.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Well, let's get into that a little bit. So Angus, just for the benefit of our listeners, I'm going to say a little bit more about you you and I actually go way back to the first day of graduate School in 2003. So, as you said, you were in College 98, and you end up in grad school in precisely the same institution and establish yourself as an intellectual historian. And your big dissertation and first book was on the intellectual history of kind of conservative economic thinking, which meant you spend a lot of time in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. And so how does a nice historian like you end up in a decade like the 90s?

[Angus Bergen]

Oh, well, that's a great question. And I guess a couple of reasons. So one might be personal and one might be historical. The personal reason is, I think historians. There's this idea that historians have that presentism is a bad thing, and that's born of good reasons. I mean, there are lots of ways, and I'm conscious of this. I started working on the material that's gone into this book in 2020, and even then, when I was trying to write these little presentist nods, they look archaic today because the whole landscape has changed. I mean, when I was writing in 2021, 2022, it was all the metaverse was everything. Now, Mark Zuckerberg may be running faster from the metaverse visions that he. So I think there are good reasons why historians are suspicious of the idea of speaking too much to the present. But I mean, we just have to admit that whatever the historical vogue is at the moment, the thing that lots of historians are clustering around is really heavily media by what we're living through. I mean, I was. One big reason that I got a job coming out of graduate school is it was right after the financial crisis, and suddenly. Me too, baby. The history of economics, not historically a sexy subject, was suddenly something that a lot of people were interested in. And why was that? It was because I think in large part because that was so palpable in people's everyday lives. So I guess the historical or the historical reason would be. I just felt from the vantage point of the early 2000s, technology has become so endemic to our politics, to our world of ideas, everything else. But I didn't always feel like historians were necessarily covering that territory as extensively or as well as I thought they could have. And there are a lot of nerdy reasons that we could go into about why that's the case. And I certainly don't want to claim that lots of great historians have written lots of books on subjects that are related, but there are things that have happened in the profession, I think, that have led a lot of people away from covering some of the territories that I was interested in. So I just thought there were big topics that were inherently of interest to me that seemed really important to understanding the world we're living in right now that deserve to be written about. That's reason number one. Reason number two is just on a personal level. And again, I think in some deep way, this is probably true of most historians, too. But I write history in part just to understand myself, my life, the world. I. And I was a child of the 90s, so I turned 10 years old in 1990, turned 20 in 2000. That's the formative years for almost anyone. And so the world that I entered into was the world of the 1990s, and that historians tend not to write as much about things until they're about 25 years away. So we're now reaching the point where it's maybe vaguely respectable for us to take the mantle of answering some of these questions from journalists. And so it seemed like a good excuse to begin to figure out some questions that have been sitting with me for a while.

[Ben Waterhouse]

So, I mean, let me push a little bit to say more about that. What do you think, in broad strokes, the historian has to add here? Is it a question of things that people misremember or younger people who didn't live through it have kind of received the wrong message from culture or journalism? Or what do historians have to add, and what do we get wrong about the 90s?

[Angus Bergen]

Yeah. Okay. Well, I'd say a few things. So, first of all, the 90s are a difficult era to understand because they're so different. I mean, if you read the. The book that John Ganz just wrote on the early 1990s, it's this dark period. You have Pat Buchanan, you have David Duke, you have all of the xenophobic anxieties about the rise of Japan and the economic collapse of the United States as it was perceived at the time. You have anxieties about economic inequality. At the same time, probably related to that, you have alternative music, Nirvana, the emerging culture of irony. I think I was joking with you guys when you invited me onto this about. I mean, that was the era. And I remember going to the market to buy my first can of. Okay. Soda. Like, marketers are trying to appropriate alternative culture, which just only further accentuated people's cynicism about the world they were living in.

[Ben Waterhouse]

It's the reality bites kind of vibe.

[Angus Bergen]

Yeah. So there's all that, but then there's also. And this is. This is really what I'm. I'm Trying to get at most in some of the things that I'm writing about. But then you have the second half of the 90s. What was your response, Ben, to that bit that you played from Al Gore? You said, wow, the optimism of the era. And to me, this is actually, this is a big historical problem that's worth sorting through is that historians tend to look at the period since the 1970s through this very dark lens. They call it the neoliberal era. It's the kind of rollback of state supports people, the long downturn society, everyone's income inequality. Your work is talking a lot about this, but people are more and more on their own, and that leads to the rise of contingent labor, the collapse of social insurance systems, et cetera, et cetera. All these stories that historians tend to tell in pretty dark terms. And if you look at the 70s, certainly that feels like it's the case. There are a lot of great histories, the 70s, to talk about that. The 80s may be a little less so. I mean, you have the sort of yuppies, you have all the economic enthusiasms of that era, but there is this real sense that this is this deep economic inequality and it's very messy and there are all these deep social pathologies. So it's not really an era of optimism.

[Ben Waterhouse]

It's like urban rot and crime, et cetera.

[Angus Bergen]

And then certainly from 2000 forward, especially 2005, 2008 forward, the great majority of discourse has been bleak about the trajectory of society. So the late 90s stand as this kind of strange outlier when across all these different spheres of social discourse, there was a really high degree of optimism. And so to me, that's worth trying to understand, both just because it's just interesting. But also now, amidst all the bleakness of our own discourse in the2020s, looking back to figure out, well, why did people think that the world was becoming a better place at that moment in time? Is there anything that we can recapture from that that's useful for us to remind ourselves that not everything needs to be as bad as it feels, feels like to many people looking at the world around us today.

[Quince Brand Spokesperson]

That's interesting.

[Lee Vincel]

So, Angus, you're writing this intellectual history of the Internet, and so we're going to talk a bit more about. We're going to dive into that a bit more in a second and talk about that kind of later 90s optimism thing that you just spelled out, which I think is great. And I think you're right that this is not kind of how people are telling the story. When they look at the 70s, the present, there is this moment, this kind of flowering moment of hope and optimism. You talked about that kind of turn to irony and the Gen X thing in the early 90s and reality bites and all that. Is that coming into, does that come into your story in some way? I mean, do you talk about that when you think about your story? Does the irony and the. The darker moment come in?

[Angus Bergen]

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, there are different points where it certainly ruptures the story. So I mean, one obvious point is if you think about science fiction, right, I mean, the great science fiction of the early Internet, or envisioning the early Internet from William Gibson's Neuromancer, Neil Svenson's Snow Crash, I mean, it's very much. It's a sort of fusion, right? This is the nature of cyberpunk aesthetics. It's this fusion of some of the futurism of that era, along with some of the alternative sensibilities, some of the jaded reactions to the corporate world of that era, everything else. So yes, that tends to be the subset of Internet enthusiasm literature that also folds in the anti corporate alternative ethos of the era surrounding it most powerfully. In the other place, getting a little deeper in the theoretical weeds, I guess where it comes into play is in thinking about how ideas of the Internet were playing out in the world of literary theory, literary criticism, philosophy, so on. So to me, there was this deep problem which was really tied in with the age of irony for postmodern philosophy in the 1980s, especially postmodern philosophy on the left. And that is that if you were anti foundationalist, if you thought in the end there was sort of no fundamental point at which you could whether find fixity in a text or have any sense of objective truth or any biological anchor for personal identity. I mean, all the different ways in which postmodern politics were playing out in the 1980s, how could you actually create an affirmative revolutionary politics? Right? So this is the tension you see in the 80s between whether on the one hand, say, Marxists, of which there were dwindling numbers of sort of hardline Marxist political economists in that period, and on the other hand, left scholars in the academy who had trouble creating a real affirmative revolutionary politics to go along with their political sensibilities on these shifting grounds of postmodern philosophy. So to me, when you start to dive into some of the cyber cultures lit from the early 90s in these communities, they're trying to think about, well, how can we leverage technology to actually construct an affirmative world where, yes, identity is not biologically given, but we nonetheless can build a revolutionary politics in virtual worlds. I mean, these kinds of questions were really live for people then in ways that we're trying to overcome some of the the conceptual problems that were underlying the Age of irony, but using the utopian tools of new technologies. So that's also just a curious moment for me when you had left critics in the academy embracing these new technologies as possible vehicles for a new politics.

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[Lee Vincel]

Well, maybe we can loop back to that in various ways a little bit later. The other question I wanted to ask you about the positivity thing is kind of how now that you've been working on the 90s, you see the Internet fitting into that positivity and that kind of expansion, that optimism and the expansionary vision. I mean, we heard it in Gore's thing a little bit, right? Here's all these positive things that are happening. The Internet is one of these positive things and it's bringing this. So I mean, how do you see that in a broader way? How does the Internet fit into that kind of sense of optimism during that period.

[Angus Bergen]

Yeah, well, Gore is a perfect example. And to me, and maybe I can say a little bit here about why I think that little clip that you played from Gore is actually pretty important in understanding the transition from the 90s to the 2000s. I mean, Gore was this relentlessly optimistic figure. We now associate him in large part with his environmental advocacy. And that was an important yield Earth in the balance back in, I think, 92. So that was an important part of his identity all along. He was really big on the Love Canal hearings in Congress. So all through his career, environmental stewardship was important to him. But just as or more important to him was this identity which he was referencing in that clip as a kind of architect of the future, somebody who thought the future was going to be a better place and a better place if we were, especially if we were strategic about ways in which we could leverage government to make technology improve everyone's lives. This was central to his vision. And you see this in 92 when he's running with Bill Clinton. He's saying, and this is, to me maybe one of the emblematic statements of the 1990s is that distributed intelligence is the principle essentially of everything that works in the world. This is why democracy is better than communism, according to Gore, or sorry, democracy is better than authoritarianism. This is why capitalism is better than communism. And this is why computing fits right into that network. As soon as you start networking different computers together, when you start envisioning where the future centered on fiber optic, as he talked about, at these fiber optically connected computing centers, would look like you had an opportunity to bring that distributed intelligence metaphor into the way that we all were interacting with one another. Right. And so this is really interesting. This was just going to be a better world. It was. They were all going to be mutually reinforcing. This distributed information world that computer networking would bring would itself improve the function of democracy. This is something that is no longer intuitive in the 90s, right? That if we have better information, if we can make people interact more dynamically with one another, we can break out of this doom loop of just sitting and staring at a tv, the sort of centralized system that we'd had before for our media participants, of course we'd have a better democratic politics.

[Joe Fort]

Right.

[Angus Bergen]

And that that would actually then, I mean, especially in Gore said, if the government can invest in laying these cables and sort of provide the seed capital to get all this going, that would make capitalism work better too. We'd have this broad based prosperity. This is part of why Gore was so big on education, and education is a route into building these knowledge workers of this next generation that would themselves again improve America's economic standing, make capitalism better. They would be better, more engaged citizens and everything else. So there'd be these feedback loops that would make naturally make the world a better place. That was central to Gore's whole political vision from the 1980s forward, especially from 96 to 1999. And then suddenly when he makes this little kind of gaffe on TV and the Republican infrastructure picked up on it as a sign of weakness and just relentlessly excoriated him. I mean, we all, you guys probably remember Lamar Alexander. Remember those Lamar exclamation point signs people

[Ben Waterhouse]

holding up at his political Tennessee senator, Right.

[Angus Bergen]

Well, I mean, this really got grim. I mean, Lamar Alexander was saying he made a mock comment about how he'd invented plaid because he, remember he had those plaid shirts he was always wearing. Trent Lott said he had invented the paperclip. Dick army said he'd invented the interstate highway system. I mean, they all were just mocking Al Gore, right? Relentlessly.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Well, Angus, can you actually fill us in on the reality of it? Like, what did he mean and how much truth is there to it?

[Angus Bergen]

So Begore was legitimately in the 1980s, participating very actively in these congressional hearings about fiber optic cable at a time when, as he later recalled, basically nobody was interested in fiber optic cable except for the manufacturers of fiber optic cable. And this is not coincidental. Gore, along with Newt Gingrich, this wasn't just a left wing thing. It was left wing, right. He was part of this group called the Congressional Clearinghouse for the Future, which was intended to bring together congresspeople to actually think about the long range future and not just the short term problems that they thought that Congress tended to, to focus on. And so Gore was branding himself as a politician in part around this idea that he was looking further than everyone else. And this did actually bear fruit in 1991, what became known in a popular sense as the Gore bill, funded, I think it was around $600 million going to the laying of high speed fiber optic cable between these university research centers that helped to provide the backbone that ultimately did enable the development of the Mosaic web browser and so on. So Gore had a very plausible claim that as a policy maker, he probably was the most important person in developing some of the funding and policy infrastructure underlying the web as people knew it in the late 1990s. And some of the key figures in early Internet history back that up. I mean, Vint Cerf came out and defended Gore when he was under attack in this period and so on. Now, obviously, if he could go back to it, he would say using the phrase creating the Internet was unwise, especially because it was the central, as you know. Well, Ben, central Republican talking point is that Democrats were trying to claim that government did things that they thought the private sector did. So it was all too easy, as he immediately did, for George W. Bush to come back and say, I don't think the government creates anything. What creates everything? All of you are the people who create things.

[Unidentified Speaker]

Right.

[Angus Bergen]

We're going out there every day, going to work, building the new world that we inhabit. And isn't Gore just this emblematic government bureaucrat claiming that he created the Internet? And isn't that silly when you look around at all the corporations that have been doing that work, and entrepreneurs, especially small businesses, et cetera?

[Ben Waterhouse]

Yeah.

[Angus Bergen]

So he created this opportunity, rhetorical opportunity, which the Republicans embraced. And the striking thing to me is when you look at Gore's speeches after that in the presidential campaign, he essentially stops talking about technology.

[Lee Vincel]

Right.

[Angus Bergen]

I mean, rhetoric just falls away. And you realize if you spend as I, for better or for worse, have a lot of time reading Gore's speeches over the course of the 1990s, that's like the magic key to everything else. Right. That was what allowed him to draw all these connections to me. It's actually, we can talk more about this if it's interesting, but it's kind of the secret sauce for third way politics in the 90s, generally. I think as that fell away, there's a reason why Third World politics have never been as successful ever since. But regardless of whether or not you buy into that, as soon as Gore couldn't talk about technology as this magic elixir that would allow us to invest in education, improve economic growth, therefore have a little bit more to skim off the top for further redistribution, largely oriented back towards education, et cetera. And what was he going to talk about that was going to convince people that he was going to be the architect of a better future? Not so clear. So I think, given how close that presidential campaign turned out to be, I actually think that undercutting the central component of Gore's whole public Persona at that point was a really important moment.

[Ben Waterhouse]

I have taught this period to undergraduates, and I show. I try not to show too much Saturday Night Live, but I do a lot of it. And there was a skit that I think was pretty well known, and I think, Angus, you probably know what I'M talking about when they skewer the debate between Bush and Gore over, Gore comes across as wooden and boring, and all he's talking about is protecting Social Security by directing Lock Box. Lock box.

[Angus Bergen]

Right, Lockbox. Yeah, yeah.

[Ben Waterhouse]

But it's hysterical because Will Ferrell plays George W. Bush also as a complete buffoon, and he just, you know, his response to hard questions is pass. Right. But in a way, it's even more damning for Gore to be the cause. He's portrayed as this wonky technocrat nerd

[Angus Bergen]

and saying the word lockbox. Right. Ben. I mean, it's also so obviously when you're writing about this stuff, for him, the early 90s phrase that's everywhere is information superhighway, Right. Which itself is a pretty wooden, wonky phrase. But he was using it all the time in his speeches. And then by the late 90s, it's the. Some of you might remember the little box that the girl in Tennessee has where she can access all the world's information, Right. It's his story that he tells about somebody who can go home and suddenly kind of all the libraries of the world are accessible just in this little portal. And how that's going to transform urban versus rural geographies, educational capacities, everything else. He had these little catchphrases that he liked to return to. His response to this controversy about saying that he created the Internet was he gave a speech about, I think it was a week or 10 days later, where he said, sorry if I was a little bit tired when I was doing that because I was up the night before busy creating the camcorder. Right. And the joke kind of. But it gives you a sense of Gore as this sort of wooden Persona who was trying to adapt himself to this media environment, but it wasn't totally comfortable for him.

[Joe Fort]

Well, I mean, watching that clip, it's clear to me what he means. Right. Just as I remember it being clear to me what he meant back then, even though I didn't know the details then. Right. But he seems to be saying to me, and he seemed then to be saying, you know, I had my role and I did it well, right. He didn't say I invented the Internet. He didn't even say I created the Internet. He said he supported the mechanisms that led to the creation of the Internet. And I still see now a lot

[Angus Bergen]

of his defenders were saying exactly that.

[Lee Vincel]

Joe.

[Angus Bergen]

As they remember, as soon as in politics, as soon as you're saying, well, you got to parse the freezing, and then, you know, you're in Trouble, Right.

[Ben Waterhouse]

It depends on what the definition of is is. Right.

[Joe Fort]

That election was the political thing in which I was most deeply invested at that point in my life. Right. And it was like everything you're saying about this, the shared cognition, and like, I saw that side representing at least a nod in that direction, if nothing else. Right. The Democrats were never far left enough for me, but certainly I saw the specter of George W. Bush as this horrible thing.

[Commercial Announcer]

Right.

[Joe Fort]

And I remember, like, to riff off the notion of the positivity after Bush's election, this Onion headline sticks in my head that, like, our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over. Right. That's like the. The Onion putting a punctuation on the end of the 90s positivity.

[Angus Bergen]

That's beautiful.

[Joe Fort]

But I also see people like Gore who want to paint a picture of this sort of collective, cooperative, uplifting thing to contribute to, lost out big time to the guy. And they said this all the time during the 2000 election that you'd rather have a beer with. Right. And I don't know the degree to which I wanted, even then, to have a beer. Even though he owned a major league baseball team. He didn't want to have a beer with you.

[Angus Bergen]

He was in recovery.

[Joe Fort]

Right. But with George Bush. But, like, I can see the direct line, and this is oversimplification, but that's sort of my role in this is. You can see the direct line, like, away from people who think like Gore to people who think like Donald Trump. Right. And, like, so I look at it and I see this. I see the end of the 90s positivity as whatever. I mean, it was also dark then, too, and it's always dark, and it always seems like you're in the darkest time. It certainly seems like that now. But, yeah, I do look back and see positivity, see sunny, see, like on the precipice of something, see optimism. But I feel like that was the moment we decided to not go that way.

[Lee Vincel]

We lost it somehow.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Well, and the kicker is this is a year before 9, 11, which is really a downer, right?

[Lee Vincel]

That's it.

[Joe Fort]

Yeah.

[Ben Waterhouse]

But these are fascinating questions of the contingencies of history, right? Like, how much do these subsequent events change the way we interpret what came before? But this idea that we kind of abandoned optimism or whatever before this cavalcade of catastrophe started.

[Angus Bergen]

Well, and that is. This is something that I've been thinking a lot about, and I think it's a complicated story. There's not one moment or one period when the optimism of the late 90s drifts away, and different topics, it drifts away at different speeds. But I would hesitate while I think that you can look at that Gore clip as a moment of contingency. Well, maybe if he hadn't done that and he maintained the rhetoric of his earlier campaign, then we would have had a Gore presidency and certain things would have gone differently. But I think when we look at the history of technology in the late 90s, it's just unquestionable that a lot of what people assumed the Internet was going to do wasn't what came to pass. And we can look at it and say, there's some policy reasons why. I mean, this is one of the really interesting questions to me is how do these. How do these narratives about what the Internet's going to do lead people to make policy decisions that then shape its subsequent trajectory? So there are real moments of contingency in what can feel inevitable afterward? But that said, nearly everything that these optimists in the late 90s were seeing about the effects of the Internet proved by around 2010 not really to be the case. And so that's a big part of the story, is all of the ways in which technology was helping to undergird this optimism. In the late 90s, as those stories about the future of technology fell apart, it became much harder for people to be optimistic. And I think one reason for that is if you can't rely on technology to solve all these problems, then you have to rely on policy. And in an era of policy sclerosis. And so it's very hard for people to be optimistic about a future where we need a functioning policy apparatus to solve all these issues for us, when every day of the year, we see many examples of how that's not happening.

[Lee Vincel]

I actually wanted to loop back to this. Angus, this is great. I was thinking, so when you're talking about this distributed cognition thing Gore was into, right. One of the things that made me think about is John Perry Barlow's famous Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. So John Perry Barlow is famously this Grateful Dead lyricist libertarian guy. He gets involved in the Electronic Frontier foundation and is one of the co founders of that. He writes this Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. And the first line, I teach this thing a lot, and I've also got to beat up on it philosophically a lot about what it thought about technology. But the first line is, governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel. I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind capital M. Yeah, right. And it also, and it loops back to that point. We will create a civilization of the mind in cyberspace. Capital M again. And it, you know, you can kind of get into it like the Grateful Dead philosophy and stuff. There's some nice stuff written about, like doing acid and huge bong rips and like them believing in like telepathy and stuff. Like there, there was actually kind of beliefs in their circles that like you could trade thoughts and that the Internet was going to be a big technology where basically it's the distributed cognition thing in part, that our minds are going to come together, right. And then we're all going to get smarter. We're all going to be able to think through these hard problems. We're not going to need the state to do it. Right. I mean, other than maybe in a gore way of kind of bringing it. And then obviously, I mean, that just didn't factor how humans actually use information technologies and media and, you know, and, you know, confirmation bias and all these things that we now are very aware of what actually happens with individuals and subcultures with. When they're on the information machine. Right. But there was this real faith at that moment that this thing was going to bring us together in ways that just didn't hold up. And I was wondering if you kind of have seen that in other places as you've done this study.

[Angus Bergen]

Oh, all over. Well, so there are two dimensions and people have covered this tension well, but there are two dimensions of that core quote in the way that you were parsing it right there. On the one hand, there's this kind of individualist story as anti statist. The idea that cyberspace is immune in powerful ways to any sort of state control and will enable Barlow was central to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And this idea that this is a new frontier that will recapture these old individualist frontier virtues that people in the age of big corporations and everything else worried had been lost. Right. So on the one hand there's that, and on the other hand there's this communalist vision that goes back to people like Teilhard de Chardin and all the way through people in the 80s and 90s who were writing about the global brain. The idea that the analogy that people have always drawn with communications technologies, whether it's a telegraph or the telephone, all the way through to computing, but to neurons, Right. That these are ways to connect people together like neurons in the brain, and that will enable us to transcend all of our divisions and become some sort of greater organism. Right. And in an era in The. And again, we talked about some of the pessimism of the early 90s in an era where people are really concerned about fragmented individualism, right?

[Lee Vincel]

Oh, yeah, Like Bowling Alone. Yeah.

[Angus Bergen]

And Putnam actually talks about the Internet and Bowling Alone. But yeah, the idea that people are becoming too atomized and that we've lost the fabric of our community, it was really enchanting, this notion that we had something that was going to braid us all together organically and make us act as one. And it seems naive now, but it makes a lot of sense. Right. If you have these kinds of, again, as you say, distributed cognition, it does have a. Bring a certain kind of analogy to the way that the human brain works. But the other aspect of Barlow that you pulled out at the beginning there really important to him. I mean, he was a Wyoming rancher, really active in Republican politics. He served as Dick Cheney's campaign manager for part of Wyoming during his own campaigns in the 1980s. So Barlow had this deep identity associated with Republican right wing individualistic politics. So in a sense, I think the magic of what you're pulling out in your own analysis of that quote, is this way that you could do both together all at once. You could talk about the individualism of everyone, but then talk about some sense of greater spiritual community and through the magic of technology, it all kind of made sense.

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[Ben Waterhouse]

What's fascinating to me, something that you just mentioned, Angus, about the sort of interplay of the Internet and a culture that was perceiving atomization, is that the other trend that happens in the 80s and 90s in mass media is media fragmentation. It's the rise of cable television and the rise of multiple, multiple news sources and all things like that which are contributing, I think, in some ways to Putnam's view of everybody going their own way. The lack of a kind of common sense, common community where we all sit down and watch Walter Cronkite and we all get our news from the same source. And all of this is fragmenting before the Internet is really widespread. And the implication that the Internet is going to be a counterbalance to that is fascinating because in fact it accelerates it, and then it just makes everybody their own news source. And by the time you get to web 2.0 in the early 21st century, everybody's now a contributor such that the media ecosystem is just fragmented and atomized beyond all recognition.

[Angus Bergen]

Yeah, I mean, for this, it's actually going back to that initial riff from Al Gore. It's useful to remember that Al Gore wrote his 1969 Harvard undergraduate thesis for the Department of Government about the image of the president on tv. Right. And one of his central critiques there is the idea that TV is this unidirectional medium, and so the presidency is going to become a kind of constant performance for the nation. And that ties in with a lot of critiques of television from mid century forward. The idea that it's a unidirectional medium that maybe is conducive because of that, to certain kinds of propaganda. It's conducive to blandness, centralized information rather than distributed cognition, et cetera, et cetera. So you can see right there that there was this idea that if you had distributed systems and people could in a sense talk back to what they. Or interact with whatever media they were consuming, that actually you'd end up with a much more sophisticated consumer. Right. People would have access to a much broader range of information. They'd be able to interact with one another and create and something like a sort of rational public sphere.

[Lee Vincel]

Right.

[Angus Bergen]

Something like the media of the late 18th century. And they talk about, well, it's very interactive in a way that wasn't the case in the mid 20th century. Well, maybe the Internet would create this interactive medium where we'd all become more so sophisticated, more rational together. Now the world.

[Ben Waterhouse]

You get Twitter. So it all worked.

[Lee Vincel]

Yeah, yeah.

[Angus Bergen]

The world you're talking about, Ben, is. And this is a really important realization. That's not really what happened. Right? What, what happened? And this is not only the Internet. You have the repeal of the fairness doctrine in 1987, followed by the rise of Rush Limbaugh and right wing radio, followed then by the rise of different cable news networks with a different partisan perspective, followed then by the rise of the Drudge Report on the right and the Huffington Post on the left. And then you start having political scientists studying all of this in the early 2000s, and they say, well, wait a minute, right wing political blogs are mostly citing other right wing political blogs, and left wing political blogs are mostly citing other left wing political blogs. And then of course, they can see, I mean, you referenced Twitter, they can see this all playing out in a much more sophisticated day to day level for every single individual as social media comes of age over the course of that decade. And then suddenly we have, and we've had this now for almost 20 years, this anxious discourse about filter bubbles and everything else. And so what people were assuming, again, for reasons I think when you read the early literature, makes complete sense. We're assuming it's going to be this much more interactive, robust, sophisticated citizen that would emerge from two ways media environments actually turned into a kind of, well, you could say bifurcated or multipolar world where people were just reading what they, what activated the pleasure centers in their brain and reinforced whatever their existing worldview already was.

[Joe Fort]

I don't want to complicate for a second the notion that the, the, the optimistic view of the Internet did not manifest. Right. Like, and, because first of all, I don't think we're there yet. Like, maybe it still is manifesting. Right. And it's just like messy. But my experience of like the gram and Reddit. You know, I know there's darkness and toxicity and there's feedback loops and there's these like closed bubbles created by whatever the mystery of algorithms is. But my experience on these sites is rich, right? And like I see a lot of people contributing to a conversation that is ultimately cultivating a very sophisticated audience for culture, for content, for, and you know, there's a bunch of crap, but we're also doing something that's never really been done on this scale. Right? You read a lot of history of the public sphere. That media started out as social media and it was more distributed and we moved in the industrial era toward a centralized inside out model. But, but I think we're returning that scale and a magnitude and a sophistication and just the history of it all just compounded that I feel like it has a chance to go somewhere and the co optation of all that could be good for the sake of control and sales could potentially be the old ways just like hanging on.

[Angus Bergen]

Joe, I'm glad you say that because that's actually, that is part of what I'm trying to do here is it is the discourse about the social effects of the Internet for the last 15 years has been so unremittingly bleak that it becomes very easy for us to forget, first of all, all of the positive ways it's transformed our lives. And I mean we experienced that daily. It's become so normalized in many cases that you no longer reflect on those. You only reflect on the broader downsides and social pathologies and everything else. And then second of all, you capture, I think in media studies now, if anything, there's this kind of romance of online interactions before the rise of the World Wide Web. So when you talk about Reddit, that's the most sort of reminiscent of the older BBS interactions and so forth, which is a text based medium, is based on a certain kind of social interaction and so on. And a lot of historians look back to that era and it's easy when you're reading that material to see why people were so optimistic about what the future was going to look like, because it did look in many ways like this kind of idealized public sphere. So yeah, I think one of the real questions for us is how do we not just end up in this sort of technophobic sort of reactionary pose that the world was better back when we were young? And how do I tell this story about all the hope people invested in the Internet and all the ways they went awry without just arriving at the conclusion that everybody who's critiquing it now is right, but actually using it at the same time to remind us that maybe, maybe there is a better Internet out there that we can create if we can re. Access our memory of this potential and think about ways we can not just assume that it's gonna happen of its own accord, but leverage policy to help it actually come about. So it looks a little bit more like what we thought it could be.

[Lee Vincel]

Yeah, Joe, I'm glad you said that, really. And I guess it takes me back. I mean, you kind of just said it, but I wanted to give a chance to say more maybe. Is that the way you put it to me once when we were talking about this stuff, is that there's a kind of narrative thing you can do where there's these 90s idealists around this technology and then there's like the aughts and the teens and everything goes as shit. And there's all these critics among, you know, and I'm one of them, right? And like there's all these folks kind of writing about how the technology didn't do that thing, right. But then if you just leave it there, I mean, that might be a problem, right? Is that you have these idealists and then you have the later critics who have more, you know, they have more experience and knowledge, and then it reinforces

[Angus Bergen]

this pessimism that just needs to. In action, right? I mean, I'm struck. I'm on this circuit of people trying to think about what they call post neoliberalism looks like, right? If they live in. In the neoliberal order, what does the post neoliberal order look like? And it's this underlying question that all the people on this circuit, for the most part dislike. Neoliberalism is a kind of term of opprobrium, right? It's a criticism. You dislike the neoliberal world. But it's very hard for anyone to articulate what this better post neoliberal world is actually going to look like. And so, in a sense, that the kind of pessimism that you're talking about, Lee, that I think emerges from this discourse only furthers that sense that we're trapped in these broader structural forces that we can't actually think our way out of. And so actually recapturing some capacity for optimism maybe does give us a way to look forward in ways that a lot of the sort of central tropes of left critical discourse right now.

[Lee Vincel]

Yeah, well, I thought that Al Gore talked a lot like Mr. Rogers. So that's. Maybe we need more of that in our lives.

[Joe Fort]

When you said that we, Lee and I were screening that clip just to make sure, like, sound could convey during the screen share in this platform. We're using Riverside, and that's what Lee said. He's like, he's so like Mr. Rogers. And I thought, so like Mr. Rogers,

[Angus Bergen]

man, it was wild.

[Joe Fort]

If only we could have had Mr. Rogers for president.

[Angus Bergen]

I dressed up as Mr. Rogers for Halloween, I think, in around 1991 or something like that. I still remember putting him out of my little cardigan.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Every so often, someone will dredge up the clip of Fred Rogers making his pitch for public broadcasting to the senate in like 1970 or something.

[Angus Bergen]

Makes me cry.

[Joe Fort]

It makes all the liberals feel real

[Ben Waterhouse]

good about government and themselves.

[Lee Vincel]

Well, thank you, Ben. That's the one thing I wanted to kind of. One final thing, Angus, I kind of wanted to give you a chance to talk about is you mentioned Gingrich earlier, but we haven't really talked about, like. So we talked about Gore and the kind of Democratic vision of this stuff. We talked about Barlow as a kind of libertarian, right wing, but kind of outsider perspective on a lot of this stuff.

[Angus Bergen]

What is that?

[Lee Vincel]

I mean, where does this, what's the GOP's, you know, kind of like mainstream GOP's take on this stuff.

[Angus Bergen]

And yeah, even though he was speaker of the House, I'm not sure you could ever really position Gingrich as the mainstream. I mean, that's maybe one of the first things I would say. So Gingrich is a fascinating figure because people are writing more about Gingrich now, historically, as. I think this is a great time to start this podcast because more and more people are writing about the 90s historically, and Gingrich is so obviously an important figure. But the way they almost always write about Gingrich is as this partisan warrior. Right. And so is that Julian Zelizer. Yeah, Zelizer. Or Nicole Hemmer's very recent book on Part Partisans. And it's a lot of what drives that political historian's interest in Gingrich is the rise of a new style of partisan politics, this brawling style that came to define the era of Fox News and everything else, which Gingrich was clearly a progenitor of. But I think that story leads us to forget that Gingrich's whole early political identity was really built around him as a kind of Republican futurist, as a Republican who was stepping out of present day fiscal politics and everything else and actually trying to envision What a dramatically different future might look like and what the role of, say, somebody in Congress would be in helping to bring it about. I mean, he wrote with his wife and science fiction author this book in the mid-1980s window of opportunity, which is just absolutely crazy. I recommend it to anyone who's listening to this to just dip in some of the pages there to get this wild vision of what the future looks like. He has a line in there about how we could have satellites with mirrors in space to redirect the rays of the sun to light up our highways and our whole world at night so that we would solve the danger of criminals lurking in darkness. Amazing futurist vision that brings in crime anxieties along with.

[Ben Waterhouse]

So we're talking space lasers.

[Angus Bergen]

It's the urge moment from the 80s. But gigwich. So he started out as this historian at West Georgia College, but he was not a very successful historian. Wasn't all that interested in writing history after he wrote his dissertation, but was very interested in futurism. And so he got very involved with Alvin Toffler and what he saw as anticipatory democracy. It relates to some of the things we were talking about earlier. The idea that we'd have to actually, new technologies would enable us to bring constituents more into the daily act of governing. And so the. We had the dual problem of both figuring out technologically how to do that while at the same time getting them to think long term, not just about their short term needs. And so he had these crazy visions of new ways of bringing constituents together and then having futurists come and lecture to them about the future and sort of commissions and then they would vote, right? So they would get a vision of what the future would look like and could think responsibly about it, and then would actually dynamically respond to problems in new ways. So Gingrich was very involved in all that kind of stuff. And then by the time you get to the 80s, he starts advocating for tax subsidies for people to buy computers. He's huge on space investment. So whether it's the Strategic Defense Initiative or he had something he called the Second Millennium Project that he wrote to lots of people saying that he wanted the government to invest, you know, potentially, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars in some grand technological project that would bring together the free world behind a positive vision for the future. Isaac Asimov actually wrote him back when he, when he sent out that call for ideas and said, well, this is wonderful, but will you please stop, you know, engaging in partisan hackery on the Floors of the contrast, if you want to try to bring us all together using it.

[Ben Waterhouse]

And Angus, did you say he called up the Second Millennium Project?

[Angus Bergen]

The Second Millennium Project, yeah.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Could he not count?

[Angus Bergen]

Sorry?

[Ben Waterhouse]

Could he not count?

[Angus Bergen]

Yeah, good point. Thank you.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Let's just ask him. Maybe he's listening. Clarify for us.

[Angus Bergen]

Yeah. So, and then, you know, he was in favor of. Of when Gore. The gore bill in 1991, helping to lay the underlying infrastructure for the Internet. Internet, right. So the idea of government involving itself in technological infrastructure was not anathema to Gingrich. I mean, Gingrich wanted to cut the welfare system. Right. He was pretty clear about that. He wanted to strip away lots of government regulations. He wanted to privatize many functions of government. But people sometimes have the idea from that that Gingrich is this radical anti status. And in many ways he was, but not when it came to questions of technology investment. For him, that was actually an appropriate role for the government. And so there is this strange territory of relative consensus between him and Gore, going back to their days in the Congressional Clearinghouse for the Future, into the politics in the 1990s, where you do have a certain kind of Republican vision of state investment in technology that finds this kind of common ground. Now, I don't want to claim that that's a broader Republican vision. I think Gingrich was generally an outlier among Republicans and advocating for that, and he got lampooned by other Republicans frequently. And I think it ultimately played a role in the end of his speakership. When you have the debates about, say, the Communications Decency act, and you have lots of socially conservative Republicans with deep anxiety about pornography on the Internet, interacting with Gingrich, who really did want to try to lighten the regulatory load as much as possible.

[Lee Vincel]

Yeah.

[Angus Bergen]

On this emerging telecommunications world, it was a. It was a tension, and it was a tension that ultimately, I think, served to erode some of his authority. But. But I think he's just interesting to look at as somebody who not only created this new partisan political world, but also tried to articulate a kind of radical futurist vision for the political right.

[Lee Vincel]

Angus, maybe just as a way to wrap up. Can you say, like, when you think about the end of your book, you're going to end your story at some point. Right. I mean, where do you situate the kind of turn away from this optimistic vision of the Internet and its role in society? When do you think that happened?

[Angus Bergen]

I think it happens at different stages for different questions. So a lot happens between 2000 and 2010. I mentioned earlier a lot of the studies about different kinds, whether it's political polarization or cyberbullying or everything else, all these. Essentially, what happens, just to step back for a second, is starting in the late 1990s, what had been a projective discourse that is essentially futurists, technologists, people who had some investment in thinking about the future, writing about what it would look like, suddenly became a social scientific discourse. So you have enough people in the United States going online that you have all these social scientists starting to study them. It's this big question of the time. Social psychologists want to know what its effects are, et cetera. Economists want to start to think about how it's ramifying across the economy and everything else. And that's when things begin to shift, because as soon as the social scientists start studying, they start finding things that don't align with their vision.

[Lee Vincel]

Look, we get huge pleasure, kinky pleasure, out of pointing out how those folks are wrong. I mean, it's not just we're into finding that dark stuff that is part of, like, our makeup. Right? I said it. You don't have to say it. Yeah.

[Angus Bergen]

Natalie, are you talking about historians writing about social scientists or social scientists writing about people?

[Ben Waterhouse]

Both.

[Angus Bergen]

I mean, I think that's the paradox of where we are as historians writing about these social scientists. On the one hand, I think historians writing about the history of social science always want to kind of have an ironic, knowing gloss on how social scientists were naive about the. Their subjects. But then in this case, we're writing about social scientists who were themselves revealing the irony that technologists were wrong about whatever they were promising. And I think, as historians, we have sympathy with the irony that they were trying to bring to the story. And so we get tangled in our own interpretations.

[Ben Waterhouse]

Well, and the other problem is they still work upstairs and make more money than we do, so.

[Angus Bergen]

Well, that's a big reason for the resentment, I think.

[Lee Vincel]

Right, right, right. Well, Angus, this has been a ton of fun, man. And, you know, our big hope with this show is to bring people back on multiple times to talk about different things. So we hope to have you back around sometime, man. And we. I'm really looking forward to your book. It's going to be a big thing.

[Angus Bergen]

So thanks so much, Lee. Thanks for being here. Yeah, I was happy to talk about the 90s.

[Joe Fort]

Well, that's the 411 home slice for us. This has been all that and a bag of chips. Word, word. Mad props for today's guests and contributors and for all of the hands that helped to make this episode a thing. Our hosts have been Ben Waterhouse of UNC Chapel Hill and Lee Vincel of Virginia Tech. The show is created in cloud spaces across the ether, but is anchored right here in the Newman Library Athenaeum on the Blacksburg campus of Virginia Tech. The whole thing chillaxes under the auspices of Virginia Tech Publishing and Press, and the New Books Network distributes our show to all of the places you'll find your podcasts. Along with myself, JM Lamb, and Graham Conway, our editors, Sara Beatty, built the art and animation any YouTube listeners may encounter. I am producer Joe Fort, and this has been the I Heart 90s history podcast. As a final note, I'd like to say that our deepest and most earnest gratitude has been reserved for you, our dear listener. Thank you very much for listening.

[Angus Bergen]

Peace out,

[Unidentified Speaker]

Sa.