One of the defining debates of 20th century media studies was within the Frankfurt School, between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Famously, Benjamin worked to articulate the latent potentials for liberation in new media technologies, which might lead to less damaged and damaging forms of life. For Theodor Adorno, by contrast, new media technologies only ever reconciled damaged life to the calamitous demands of fascism ascendant, or a capitalist liberal democracy that was only barely less inhumane. These figures refract two major attitudes in the study of technological media: ambivalent embrace, or condemnation and rejection.

This talk will rework this debate within the history of computing in the 1970s by taking up the work of two computer scientists at MIT working on “artificial intelligence”: Seymour Papert (who developed the LOGO pedagogical programming system) and Joseph Weizenbaum (who wrote ELIZA, a famous, early chatbot). We can see an echo of Benjamin’s ambivalent optimism in Papert’s work to promote exploratory and humane models of computer education in elementary schools. And Weizenbaum’s early critique of the AI program in his 1976 Computer Power and Human Reason: From Calculation to Judgment updates the critique of instrumental reason for the dawn of the computer age. Drawing on extensive archival research and careful treatment of published works, this talk both situates Papert and Weizenabaum’s work in a larger history of the critique of instrumental reason, and offers lessons for current critiques of machine learning technologies and the fascist techno-political economy.