The Contest between Information and Uncertainty

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that the Cold War – era battle between information and uncertainty is a critical origin point for contemporary social theory – informed, data-intensive projects of the US national security state. Beginning in the 1950s, international relations experts and government officials turned to digital computing to help make decisions under the unavoidable pressures of geopolitical uncertainty. By the 1970s, their data banks of political knowledge and novel statistical tools purported to forecast political unrest long before an unaided human could. These efforts sparked a new epistemology of political knowledge, one that is now common in data science, in which designers and users prioritize correlation over causality and the instrumental management of problems over scholarly understanding or explanation. Far from a historical curiosity, this history is a warning. The sensibilities of Cold War technopolitical projects are continually rematerialized in contemporary computational security projects. Left unchallenged, their durability will continue to increase in tandem with the national security state's continued investment in computational social scientific projects for geopolitical management.