Human Programming is a cultural history of the idea of the programmable mind in U.S. culture. It argues that literary, cinematic, and rhetorical figurations of the programmed mind have shaped conversations in U.S. political and scientific culture about freedom and unfreedom, and about democracy and its enemies from World War II to the War on Terror. Beginning in the early twentieth century, developments in media technology, cybernetics, behaviorist psychology, and sociology made it possible to imagine the malleability of human behavior, or automatism, on a mass scale. Propagandists, scientists ... More

Human Programming is a cultural history of the idea of the programmable mind in U.S. culture. It argues that literary, cinematic, and rhetorical figurations of the programmed mind have shaped conversations in U.S. political and scientific culture about freedom and unfreedom, and about democracy and its enemies from World War II to the War on Terror. Beginning in the early twentieth century, developments in media technology, cybernetics, behaviorist psychology, and sociology made it possible to imagine the malleability of human behavior, or automatism, on a mass scale. Propagandists, scientists, and creative producers alike adapted visions of human programmability in order to imagine the psychological conditions of non-democratic unfreedom, often in the service of representing its opposite, a supposedly exceptional American freedom. As explicitly racist and eugenics-based propaganda fell out of favor after World War II, the enemies of the U.S. were increasingly represented and understood through the figuration of mental unfreedom. Human Programming charts this shift by examining the figure of the “human automaton”: the will-less, automatic, and therefore subhuman figure whose uncanny and sometimes comedic effects drive narratives about human programmability. Rather than attributing either a universal philosophical meaning to automaton narratives or ascribing to them a single symptomatic interpretation, as other readers of this literary figure have done, the book traces how the human automaton developed through a network of exchanges between different forms of discourse in popular culture, the public sphere, and scientific writing.