Episode 7: The History (and Future) of Technology, with Susannah Glickman

[upbeat music] Welcome back to Dreaming Against the Machine. I'm your host, Adam Becker. This week's guest is Professor Susannah Glickman, who's a historian at Stony Brook University, and she's an expert on, among other things, the history of science in the US in the mid-20th century, and that's why I wanted her on the podcast this week. One of the running questions on this show as, as you'll know if you've listened to most of the earlier episodes, is there's been a surprisingly durable picture of the future in the American psyche that really seems to come from 1950s science fiction of, like, rocket ships and chrome as the inevitable future or the place where the future is supposed to be. And I've been wondering for a long time why that's been such a persistent idea in American culture in particular, and that's why I brought Susannah on the show. She is someone who really understands a lot about how science has presented itself to the American public, how science thinks of itself, and where different ideas about the future of science and technology have come from. And so I wanted to talk with her about that, and I think you're gonna enjoy the conversation that we had. It was a fun one. So let's get to it. Susannah, welcome to Dreaming Against the Machine.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm just glad we make this wo- uh, we made this work out 'cause you're on the road right now.

Yeah, I've been running around doing talks. I'm, I'm luckily, very fortunately on research leave, so I shouldn't complain about that, but [laughs]

[laughs]

I have been run-- I have been doing a lot of traveling.

Just to give our guests a sense of who you are, how would you describe your work?

I was trained in sort of a traditional American history department, um, but I have a background in mathematics and anthropology. Specifically within mathematics, I did, like, a year-long research, um, thesis on optimizing quantum algorithms, and then was hired to continue that work. So I have a little bit of a technical side and a l-- um, of a humanistic side. Um, and then presently, yeah, my work sits at the intersection of, like, y- US history, political economy, which is like economics, but a little bit more expansive than the discipline as it currently exists, and, like, history of tech, especially physics and computing. I'm very interested in how the national security state as a part of that has transformed.

Well, history of physics is one of my passions as well. I, I wrote a whole book on the history of quantum physics. Uh, but I think I may have told you that when we talked before, when I decided that you had to come onto this podcast whether you liked it or not. [laughs]

Yeah.

But yeah, the main thing... I mean, we, we met on a call a few weeks back, and the main thing I wanted to talk with you about, or one of the things I wanted to talk with you about, was you seem like a likely candidate to be able to give me a good answer to a question that I have been kind of obsessed with for a while.

Mm-hmm.

And have asked a couple of other guests on this show as well, which is there's this mid-20th century chrome-plated rocket ship, uh, vision of the future that has been surprisingly