Placebos Essays and Research Papers

Essay Instructions: Reading Below, No Faxes!

The essay should have 2 parts: first, a SUMMARY of the reading, its main arguments. (About 1/3 of the essay) Second:a RESPONSE to the reading. Consider whether you like the text or not, if you find the argument valid or invalid, whether you agree with the author’s conclusions or not. You may explain why you like or dislike the text but you must provide sophisticated and argumentative reasons. (About 2/3)
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In early July 2006 the government of North Korea tested a long-range ballistic missile that was supposed to be able to deliver a nuclear warhead as far as Alaska. The missile test did not go well for North Korea. The long-range missile fell into the sea just minutes after launch. 1 President George W. Bush's reaction to the news of the test was to boast that the freshly deployed (albeit limited) U.S. missile defense system would most likely have been able to protect the western continental United States from such a missile. "Yes, I think we had a reasonable chance of shooting [the North Korean missile] down," Bush said at a news conference in Chicago two days after the failed Korean test. "At least that's what the military commanders told me." 2 Just the day before, Bush had reinforced his commitment to a missile defense system. "Because I think it's in~{!*~}I know it's in~{!*~}our interests to make sure that we're never in a position where somebody can blackmail us," Bush sa
id at a news conference in Washington, D.C., after meeting with Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper. "And so we'll continue to invest and spend. And since this issue first came up, we've made a lot of progress on how to~{!*~}toward having an effective system. And it's in our interest that we continue to work along these lines." 3

In these statements, Bush expressed a dangerous level of faith in an unproven technology. Since a missile-defense system first emerged as a vision of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the U.S. government has spent from $2 billion to $10 billion dollars per year on various systems that would track intercontinental ballistic missiles through the stratosphere and send small intercepting vehicles up to disable or destroy the incoming warhead. This plan gathered enough enthusiasm among defense contractors to justify development and experimentation for more than a decade, despite the ease with which any potential attacker could simply evade even the best system (overwhelming the defense with "dummy" or multiple warheads, shifting warheads to low-flying cruise missiles, relying instead on human carriers to deliver warheads in luggage, [End Page 555] etc.). Every test of every part of every prototype of missile defense has failed. 4 After repeated embarrassing failures and news a
ccounts of them, the United States merely opted in 2002 to cease testing the system. Despite having no evidence to suggest it might work, the Bush administration activated elements of a system over Alaska and California in response to tensions with North Korea in June of 2006. 5

Does it matter that the technology is neither empirically viable nor theoretically effective? Such faith in technology in the absence of critical analysis or empirical support is an example of "techno-fundamentalism," the belief that we can, should, and will invent a machine that will fix the problems the last machine caused. It's an extreme form of technological optimism or Whiggishness. Techno-fundamentalism assumes not only the means and will to triumph over adversity through gadgets and schemes, but the sense that invention is the best of all possible methods of confronting problems. Techno-fundamentalism is not the exclusive property of any one political ideology or agenda. Both Thorstein Veblen and Friedrich Hayek expressed unhealthy faith in technologies to solve complex social problems. Veblen, an anticapitalist iconoclast, believed that putting important decisions in the hands of engineers was the surest path to human fulfillment. Hayek, a free-market economist and i
nspiration for modern conservatism, believed that distributed knowledge and unfettered competition would unleash technological creative forces that would mold human society justly and democratically. 6

In the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century we pay a heavy price for techno-fundamentalism. We build new and wider highways under the mistaken belief that they will ease congestion and speed traffic. 7 We rush to ingest pharmaceuticals that might alleviate our ills with no more effectiveness than placebos. 8 We invest based on self-fulfilling phenomena such as "Moore's Law," which falsely predicts that computer processing power will double every eighteen months, as if computer speed were a force of nature above and beyond specific decisions by firms and engineers. 9 Perhaps most dangerously, we maliciously neglect real problems with the structures and devices we depend on to preserve our lives, as we did for decades with the levees that failed to protect the poorest residents of New Orleans. 10 In lieu of deploying deliberation and recognizing complexity at the roots of social and political problems, we operate, it seems, in a techno-fundamentalist cloud
, waiting for someone to invent the next great things that can clean up the air, reverse obesity, and magically stop missiles from landing in our cities. We need not depend on messy diplomacy or credible military force to curb the activities of hostile states. We have "Star Wars." 11 [End Page 556]
Beyond Techno-fundamentalism

Those of us trained in the history of ideologies, ideas, and cultural processes can and must step up to challenge techno-fundamentalism. It's imperative that we employ our critical faculties to unravel the rhetorical tangles and habits that get us into so much technologically fueled trouble. American studies scholars, with their traditions of public engagement, interdisciplinary thought, and ecological predispositions, are ideally positioned to confront misguided faith in technology and progress.

In his 1959 manifesto, The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills instructed social scientists to situate their work between the poles of grand theory and numbing empiricism. "The sociological imagination," Mills wrote, "enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals." Thus the "imagineer" (as Mills would never have put it) can "take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions." Mills posits three questions, or lenses, that enable scholars to generate interdisciplinary, influential, and~{!*~}most of all~{!*~}interesting work: What are the essential components of a society and how are they related to each other? What historical changes are affecting a particular part or function of society? Who are the winners and losers in a society and how did they get to be this way? 12

Revising and riffing on Mills, this volume offers a variety of examples of the ways scholars of culture are using the study of technology to examine the flows, conflicts, tensions, and hazards of American culture. The articles in this special issue are, in a sense, employing what one might call a "techno-cultural imagination." 13 If a scholar relies on a techno-cultural imagination, she asks these sorts of questions: Which members of a society get to decide which technologies are developed, bought, sold, and used? What sort of historical factors are at work that influence why one technology "succeeds" and another "fails"? What are the cultural and economic assumptions that influence the ways a particular technology works in the world, and what unintended consequences can arise from such assumptions? Technology studies in general tend to address several core questions about technology and its effects on society (and vice versa): To what extent do technologies guide, influence,
or determine history? To what extent do social conditions and phenomena mold technologies? Do technologies spark "revolutions," or do concepts like "revolution" necessarily raise expectations and levels of effects of technologies? The essays in Rewiring the "Nation" each address such vital questions, which can be answered only [End Page 557] by considering the complex interconnections among history, culture, politics, and power. This is not an easy task. But it is one for which American studies scholars are uniquely trained. If we want different terms of debate or lines of reasoning in policies of "progress"~{!*~}at home and abroad~{!*~}we need to "rewire" the conversation. The essays in this issue represent a critical mass of current scholarship on the place of technology in American culture.
Technologies of Transcendence

In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain has his protagonist, Hank Morgan, assume the position of "boss" in medieval England by exploiting his scientific knowledge and technical prowess. After telling the story of how he took control, Morgan declares, "That reminds me to remark, in passing, that the very first official thing I did, in my administration~{!*~}and it was on the very first day, too~{!*~}was to start a patent office; for I knew that a country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab, and couldn't travel any way but sideways or backwards." 14 For Morgan, as for James Madison, patents enable progress. Without an administered incentive system, invention would halt. This notion of necessary "progress," in contrast to the "sideways or backwards" vectors of an invention-free society, is key to understanding the relationship among law, technology, commerce, and ideology in America. For that reason, Morgan was not the only new boss wh
o decided to install a patent system as a first move. Article I, Sec. 8, of the U.S. Constitution instructs Congress to create a copyright and patent system "to promote the progress of the sciences and useful arts." 15 So from the beginning of the republic, Americans have built their "imagined community" around faith in the idea of progress. 16

In the opening essay of this collection, "Technology and Its Discontents: On the Verge of the Posthuman," Joel Dinerstein shows us that uninterrogated faith in the progressive promise of new technologies tends to reinforce two crucial and dangerous myths: that of Whiggish "progress," and that of inevitable (some might say "natural") white and Western superiority. "The real questions we need to confront," Dinerstein writes, "are these: What is progress for? What is technology for?" Dinerstein issues a stern call for engagement by American studies scholars, particularly those who consider the privileges of whiteness to be central to an understanding of the dynamics of power within American culture, with the rhetorics and realities of technology. Dinerstein posits that the "posthuman" denies the "panhuman." In other words, technologically driven concepts of human progress via genetic engineering or mechanical intervention [End Page 558] is an attempt by technologists to solidify
a future "man" according to arbitrary standards of whiteness and maleness to combat the increasing multiplicity of human types and the multicultural face of human power.

There is much at stake in who designs technologies and what particular vision of "progress" they achieve (and for whom). David Nye's essay "Technology and the Production of Difference" argues that technologies can, simultaneously, restrict and enable individual freedoms. Nye shows us that those who have argued since the rise of mass media that communicative technologies would necessarily generate cultural and political conformity overstated their case. But just as important, Nye paints as naive those who see the newest forms of communicative technologies~{!*~}digital content and global networks~{!*~}as necessarily enriching and diversifying the human experience. In general, Nye argues, cultural groups use new technologies (communicative and other) to shape identity, construct and maintain distinction and diversity, and customize their life experiences. But the power to customize, Nye reminds us, is not the power to shape one's conditions. "The challenge for American studies,"
Nye writes, "is not only to examine how technologies have been incorporated into cultures of difference, but also to prepare students to take part in the social construction of emerging technologies. Too often these are left to the private sector, as if the market alone can adjudicate the best uses of new machines."

While Nye dissolves any grand claims we might make about the progressive and transformative nature of communicative technologies, Susan Douglas explodes them. In "The Turn Within: The Irony of Technology in a Globalized World," Douglas introduces us to "the irony of technology." No matter how potentially transformative or liberating a particular technology may seem, "the economic and political system in which the device is embedded almost always trumps technological possibilities and imperatives." Douglas helps us understand how video technology, once touted as a way to put a camera in the hands of individuals and diversify our views of the world has instead enabled a diverse group of individuals to collectively mistake their navels for the world. Technological devices can indeed enable individuals to challenge and transform power structures, but only if they "work" within systems that will allow it. Our challenge is to see the system and the material when we look through tec
hnological lenses: we need to look both to the television and to the constant negotiations and synergies among technologies, economics, politics, and ideologies.

The winners in these negotiations have had a disproportionate say over which technologies matter in our lives. As Dinerstein, Nye, and Douglas point out, American studies scholars can help us more fully understand the cost when [End Page 559] particular ideologies of technological "progress" win out over others. They can also help us look outside the techno-fundamentalism box and discover alternative systems of technological meaning making. And certainly, there are more important technological divides in our present condition than the digital divide. In "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud: African Americans, American Artifactual Culture, and Black Vernacular Technological Creativity," Rayvon Fouch~{(&~} proposes a "black vernacular technological creativity" that moves beyond standard and reductive notions of African American expressive culture limited to dance, music, literature, the visual arts, and athletic mastery. When one surveys the "great works" of technological hist
ory, theory, and sociology, "it would appear as if African Americans, throughout American history, did not have the ability to make technological decisions of their own and have led lives in which technology was foisted upon them." Fouch~{(&~} offers us the example of white plantation owner Oscar J. E. Stuart's attempt to patent the double cotton scraper that his slave Ned invented. The U.S. Patent Office made it abundantly clear that inventions by slaves were not worthy of patent protection. Thus Africans were systematically omitted from the grand narrative of American progress that defined success and citizenship. Fouch~{(&~} guides us through a set of problems and questions that would "produce a more textured understanding of the roles that black people have played as producers, shapers, users, and consumers of technology within American society and culture."
The Cultural Work of Technological Systems

As my coeditor, Carolyn de la Pe~{~}a, explains in her overview of the literature in the field in this volume, the historian Thomas Hughes first articulated the "systemic" approach to studying technologies. Studying particular devices or artifacts as distinct phenomena disconnected from the economic, political, and cultural ecosystems that join and motivate us necessarily fails to explain the impact of technology on everyday life, Hughes argued. 17 Ricardo D. Salvatore reveals the importance of this approach in his article, "Imperial Mechanics: South America's Hemispheric Integration in the Machine Age." The Panama Canal was a technological marvel, but considering it outside its systems of economic, labor, and commodity flows both between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (the obvious role of the canal) and between North and South America (the implicit vector of such flows) misses the big issues. Salvatore introduces two new and powerful theoretical constructs, that of "spectac
ular machines," such as the locks and gates of the Panama Canal, and of "transportation Utopias," such as the road system that facilitates commerce and migration up [End Page 560] and down the two continents. By envisioning the hemispheric engineering of "connectivity," via such projects as canals, highways, and airports, Salvatore shows how U.S. policy within the Americas was built on, by, and for machines and the infrastructures that supported them. Systems, of course, need not be grand structures of concrete and asphalt.

In "Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of U.S. Consumer Identity," Caren Kaplan also suggests that we can best understand the influence of technology by looking to systems of information flow and management rather than specific objects. Her argument focuses on geographic information systems (GIS) and global positioning systems (GPS). With its use in activities from military targeting to bass fishing, GPS has become ubiquitous in modern America, just as precise and powerful geodemographic data about U.S. residents has allowed for both commercial and political exploitation of our presumed desires and habits. Kaplan raises the concern that "discourses of precision" promote the rather anti-Kantian public ethic of viewing citizens as means rather than ends. "Yet even as these modes of identification promise greater flexibility and pleasure through proliferation of 'choices' among myriad specificities," Kaplan writes, "they also militarize and thus habituate citizen/cons
umers to a continual state of war understood as virtual engagement." So technologies that we purchase as tools of access, choice, opportunity, and freedom, Kaplan asserts, actually acculturate us to an invisible rigidity by keeping us always logged on, always present and accounted for.

In contrast to Kaplan's exploration of invisible structures tethered to particular technologies, Robert MacDougall's article, "The Wire Devils: Pulp Thrillers, the Telephone, and Action at a Distance in the Wiring of a Nation," connects explicit expressions to visible technologies of mobility and commerce. MacDougall examines a set of pulp novels from the late nineteenth century that reveal the state of American anxiety over "nightmares of 'reach.'" Americans, MacDougall writes, were keenly aware of being enveloped by a network of connection unprecedented in human history: railroads, petroleum pipelines, telephone and telegraph wires, and invisible corporate organs. These "Wire Devil" novels illustrate that "the pace of technological and economic change was indeed violent and wrenching to many Americans," MacDougall writes. "Each advance in the technology of communication and transportation gave new powers to its users, yet also compounded the ability of distant people and ev
ents to affect those users' lives." This was a new way of being in the world. The terms of such new powers (and weaknesses) were worked out through literature and conversations about literature. [End Page 561]
Technology and Knowledge Systems

Knowledge systems often depend intimately on the technologies that facilitate them. Knowledge systems might include universities, professions, libraries, or entire industries. They are nexuses of functions such as commercial practices and markets, cultural judgments and norms, legal regimes, and social capital. And since the rise of global digital networks, most of the major knowledge systems in our lives have been in flux.

Technologically framed battles over copyright have risen in prominence and importance in recent years. They play a large part in both public and scholarly conversations about the future of knowledge and communication. 18 Yet as Andrew Ross explains in his essay, "Technology and Below-the-Line Labor in the Copyfight over Intellectual Property," it's time to move beyond the liberal (or in many cases libertarian) frame through which too many scholars (myself included) have presented the conflicts and tensions over copyright, technology, and the regulation of global information flows. Lost in the debate over the culture and commerce of copyright is the status of workers. "The crusade against the [intellectual property] monopolists continues to be dominated by strains of techno-libertarianism that lie at the doctrinal core of the 'information society,'" Ross writes, "obscuring the labor that built and maintains its foundations, highways, and routine production." The consequence of
this narrow conception of what is at stake in these policy debates, Ross declares, consists of "voices proclaiming freedom in every direction, but justice in none."

What happens when a knowledge system works, but bureaucracies fail? In "Failing Narratives, Initiating Technologies: Hurricane Katrina and the Production of a Weather Media Event," Nicole R. Fleetwood reads the U.S. Congress's report on governmental failures when Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast in August 2005 as an exercise in techno-cultural bad faith: the tendency to look at technological failures and solutions instead of examining human catalysts and responses. The horrors of Katrina, the congressional report concludes, were a result of a series of technological failures both large and small. This conclusion, Fleetwood asserts, shifts blame from the human failures that underlay the collapses of communication and transportation that left so many people stranded and endangered. Instead of examining the complete and systematic breakdown in the social and political fabric, enabled by the malign neglect of many generations of political leaders at every level who have
consistently shown themselves willing to sacrifice thousands of African Americans at times of stress, the congressional report focuses on the shortage of cars and buses in metropolitan New Orleans. "Through the Katrina event," Fleetwood writes, "we see both the vulnerability and recalcitrance of the nation-state's [End Page 562] investment in a deterministic narrative of progress, one in which technology is at its core and the marginalization and disposability of certain populations are essential." Examining Katrina ecologically~{!*~}with attention paid to inputs, outputs, flows, dynamics, and long-term problems~{!*~}would yield a better understanding of complex phenomena and ways to deal with their repercussions. The analytical spirit of environmentalism is a healthy response to technological bad faith.

Fields of knowledge can intersect when examining complex phenomena that do not hold to the boundaries we have drawn in our perceptions. In "Boundaries and Border Wars: DES, Technology, and Environmental Justice," Julie Sze connects the history of technology to environmental justice by examining a particular environment that has been the subject of much reckless technological experimentation, women's bodies. Her account of the effects of diethylstilbestrol (DES) on women and fetuses reveals the extent to which human bodies are "technologically polluted." Sze concludes, "beyond knowledge and activism, we need a cultural and political analysis and a vocabulary that makes sense of DES's roots and impacts, which American studies can provide." Because all the standard categories of environmental analysis are porous (mother and fetus, human and animal, production and consumption, and environmental and technological), a properly ecological examination of a phenomenon such as DES dema
nds an interdisciplinary account that goes beyond cultural analysis, medical analysis, or technological analysis. It requires a combination of all these fields.

Offices can be ecosystems as well~{!*~}complex systems of machines, bodies, information, inputs, and outputs. And thus they demand a full ecological examination when trying to make sense of the rapid changes within commercial and financial institutions. Caitlin Zaloom documents some radical changes in financial markets in her article, "Markets and Machines: Work in the Technological Sensoryscapes of Finance." Zaloom takes us to the trading floors of commodity exchanges in Chicago and London to show how firms are adopting remarkable technologies to create new market environments. By paying particular attention to the ergonomic, environmental, and sensory conditions of their employees, trading firms are standardizing the experience of commodity trading while opening opportunities to classes and ethnicities previously excluded. This is not necessarily an innocent or progressive story, however. Zaloom demonstrates that the sensory regulation these firms employ serve the expansion
of a U.S-centric neoliberal ideology. There are costs as well as benefits to the shift from the traditional cacophonous trading floor to the serene cubicle. [End Page 563]
Technology, Mobility, and the Body

American studies scholars are at the forefront of connecting the corporeal to the mechanical. In "Educating the Eye: Body Mechanics and Streamlining in the United States, 1925~{~}1950," Carma R. Gorman revises the history of streamlining and industrial design and demonstrates that humans were made by revealing the influence of the educational and public health movement to improve American posture. Both producers and consumers of the new streamlined products were well versed, Gorman shows, in the "body mechanics" school, which emphasized "good form." Through this study, Gorman shows that it is insufficient to examine a technology or a design phenomenon as an artifact alone. One must study the cultural and ideological system in which the artifact operates. "Further," Gorman writes, "paying attention to the body mechanics literature explains more directly than many previous theories do why technological products that looked like human bodies (i.e., streamlined, formerly artless
goods) would have resonated with consumers: they had been taught, through body mechanics instruction, to understand both bodies and formerly artless goods as 'mechanical,' and as products of similar Taylorist technologies of improvement."

Vision and the sensory experience of transport are essential corporeal experiences. Technologies that move our bodies can impact how we interpret our environments and the time lines we impose on them. In "Farewell to the El: Nostalgic Urban Visuality on the Third Avenue Elevated Train," Sunny Stalter delves into the almost instant nostalgia that arose in the 1950s once New York City abandoned and destroyed its elevated train system in favor of buses and subways. Stalter argues that the elevated train "structured New Yorkers' knowledge of urban space in a way that was no longer possible on other modes of transportation." At a time of rapid technological and urban change, Stalter writes, "the El showed postwar artists a city dissociated from progress, haunted by machines of the past and visions of modernity from seventy-five years ago." The defining aspect of the El, Stalter declares, "was its openness to city space." Thus in its waning days, the El's importance to New York Cit
y was less about mobility than about visuality.

Transporting and manipulating one's body become part of the same process when people seek partners, opportunities, and new lives through online dating services that connect Latin American women with North American men. In "Flexible Technologies of Subjectivity and Mobility across the Americas," Felicity Schaeffer-Grabiel connects women's discourses of self-improvement to technologies and the marketing methods that spread the "promise of modernity [End Page 564] and mobility" by investigating why they see the need to surgically alter their bodies while engaging in online match-making. For the Latin American women Schaeffer-Grabiel has interviewed, there seems to be a unified sense of ascendancy connected to such technologies as Internet connections with potential partners, life in the North, and plastic surgery. Using ethnography as a means to push beyond the liberatory analyses of flexible subjectivity that have marked early studies of identity and the Internet, Schaeffer-Gra
biel argues that "the concept of transcending the body or recombining one's identity in Cyberspace is a privileged position that elides the labor of the body and asserts neoliberal values of choice and democratic nations of upward mobility." At a time when U.S. borders appear less permeable than ever, Schaeffer-Grabiel shows that there is nothing playful about malleable identities and neoliberal fictions of both upward and northward mobility.
American Studies and the Techno-cultural Imagination

The techno-cultural imagination need not be anti-technology. Far from it. A healthy and effective attitude toward technology demands an appreciation of the pragmatic value of inventions, devices, and conveniences tempered by a critical stance toward the ways they are promoted, marketed, and adopted. Debra DeRuyver and Jennifer Evans deploy the techno-cultural critical stance in their review essay of electronic resources for American studies research. While walking through the rich garden of primary sources for cultural scholarship, they warn against relying on these resources without subtle human guidance. "Regardless of format, it takes time to locate primary sources," DeRuyver and Evans write, "and while search engines, like card catalogs, are useful, they cannot totally replace a well-informed librarian or the human thought behind a portal site." In that spirit, they provide a service to all American studies scholars by guiding us through the most valuable sites and the be
st ways to use them.

As Carolyn de la Pe~{~}a writes, with this issue of American Quarterly we are attempting to "revitalize a 'technology studies' core" within American studies. Technology was for a brief time at the center of a particular~{!*~}almost quaint~{!*~}notion of American exceptionalism that orbited the "myth and symbol" school of cultural history. 19 But for most of the past thirty years the most exciting moves within American studies have included fresh analyses of ethnicity and diversity within the United States and flows of people, cultural processes, and ideologies across borders and within borderlands. As de la Pe~{~}a asserts in her essay, "American studies has largely left questions of technology [End Page 565] to others, in spite of our early leadership in innovative methods of technological analysis and cultural critique." But, as she rightly points out, because of the emphases within American studies on questions of identity, power, and ideology, American studies is the idea
l scholarly community to ask powerful and poignant questions about technology and its effects on our bodies, eyes, ears, minds, families, economies, armies, and academies. Our current political and economic conditions are overdetermined by techno-fundamentalism (as well as too many other fundamentalisms). The essays in this collection are examples of healthy ways to think through technological, social, and cultural problems. The unhealthy ways are too dominant in our daily deliberations. Technology is an entry point for American studies scholars to engage in public conversations over issues ranging from race to labor to war. Such contributions are imperative.
* * *

Along with many other scholars of American studies, communication, and cultural studies, Carolyn de la Pe~{~}a and I were saddened by the news of the passing of James Carey in May 2006. Jim was a brilliant and influential scholar. His work had a profound effect on both of us when we first encountered it in graduate school. He influenced many of the questions we asked in our own work and guided how we would grow to view the relationships between technology and culture. Jim will be best remembered, however, as a passionate and influential teacher who has guided the intellectual pursuits of dozens of important American scholars. He remains a role model and an influence to many. We dedicate this collection to his legacy and his memory.

Siva Vaidhyanathan , a cultural historian and media scholar, is the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (2004). Vaidhyanathan is currently an associate professor of Culture and Communication at New York University and a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities. He writes and edits a Weblog called sivacracy.net.
Notes

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution~{~}ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ or send a letter to: Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. I wish to thank Marita Sturken and Carolyn de la Pe~{~}a for their helpful comments on this article. Working with both of them over the months leading up to the completion of the issue taught me much about their strengths and my limitations. Marita Sturken deserves particular praise for her patience and wisdom, and for the leadership and vision she has demonstrated as editor of American Quarterly these past three years. For many discussions leading up to the conception of this issue and the critical sensibility that made it possible, I must thank Joel Dinerstein, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Jeffrey Meikle.

1. Dana Priest, "North Korea Tests Long-Range Missile: Controversial Rocket Fails as Other Types Are Fired; U.N. Session Set after U.S., Japan Condemn Action," Washington Post, July 5, 2006. [End Page 566]

2. George W. Bush, "President Bush Holds a News Conference in Chicago," July 7, 2006, Washington Post, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/07/AR0727.html (accessed July 8, 2006).

3. George W. Bush, "President Bush Meets with the Canadian Prime Minister," Washington Post, July 6, 2006, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/06/AR1022.html (accessed July 8, 2006).

4. BBC, "Missile Defence Shield Test Fails," December 15, 2004, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4097267.stm (accessed July 8, 2006). For a comprehensive analysis of the problems with missile defense in general, including the ease with which an aggressor might evade or fool even an effective system, see Steven Weinberg, "Can Missile Defense Work?" New York Review of Books, February 14, 2002. For an analysis of the steady degradation of the standards of testing elements of the missile defense systems, see Andrew M. Sessler, "Countermeasures: A Technical Evaluation of the Operational Effectiveness of the Planned U.S. National Missile Defense System" (Cambridge, Mass.: Union of Concerned Scientists/Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000).

5. Bill Gertz, "N. Korean Threat Activates Shield," Washington Times, June 20, 2006.

6. Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship, and the State of the Industrial Arts (New York: Macmillan, 1914), and The Engineers and the Price System (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1921); Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952), and The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944).

7. Martin Wachs, Curbing Gridlock: Peak-Period Fees to Relieve Traffic Congestion (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 1994).

8. Bo Carlberg, Ola Samuelsson, and Lars Hjalmar Lindholm, "Atenolol in Hypertension: Is It a Wise Choice?" The Lancet 364.9446 (November 6, 2004).

9. Gordon E. Moore, "Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits," Electronics 38.8 (1965). For a critical analysis of Moore's law, see Ilkka Tuomi, "The Lives and Death of Moore's Law," First Monday 7.11 (November 2002).

10. Timothy H. Dixon et al., "Space Geodesy: Subsidence and Flooding in New Orleans," Nature 441.7093 (2006). Also see Ivor van Heerden, The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why during Hurricane Katrina~{!*~}the Inside Story from One Louisiana Scientist, ed. Mike Bryan (New York: Viking, 2006).

11. For an excellent historical account of the follies of missile defense and the ideologies and corruptions that have kept the dream alive through two decades and billions of dollars, see Frances FitzGerald, Way out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

12. C. Wright Mills and Todd Gitlin, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

13. In another context I have used "techno-cultural imagination" to describe the conditions and habits that contemporary artists have enjoyed since the dissemination of digital technologies and networks. See Siva Vaidhyanathan, "The Technocultural Imagination," in 2006 Whitney Biennial: Day for Night, ed. Chrissie Iles et al. (New York: H. N. Abrams/Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006).

14. Mark Twain and Bernard L. Stein, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Berkeley: University of California Press in cooperation with the University of Iowa, 1983).

15. For a valuable historical account of the patent clause and its importance to the early republic, see Doron S. Ben-Atar, Trade Secrets : Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004).

16. Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991).

17. Thomas Parke Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870~{~}1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture, Science, Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

18. Siva Vaidhyanathan, "Critical Information Studies," Cultural Studies 20.2~{~}3 (March~{~}May 2006).

19. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). To put Marx and his work in the context of both the history of technology studies and American studies, see Jeffrey L. Meikle, "Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden," Technology and Culture 44.1 (2003), and "Reassessing Technology and Culture," American Quarterly 38.1 (1986).

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