From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America

6. Cable as a Cold War Technology

C H A P T E R S I X Cable as a Cold War Technology RAND Corporation analyst Paul Baran was keenly aware, in the early-1960s, of the importance of decentralizing U.S. infrastructure to prepare for a nuclear attack. Working on contract research for the U.S. military, Baran pointed to the vulnerabilities of the nation’s centralized defense communications systems . A single strike could disable the entire network. Baran sketched plans for a distributed system designed to survive a nuclear attack, and ARPANET, the military’s precursor to the internet, followed from his proposal.1 With his RAND colleagues seeking new contracts for domestic urban research , Baran considered how his ideas about defense communications might have application in American cities. Together with an MIT professor of management , Martin Greenberger, who also at that time was working on defense -sponsored communications research, he proposed that distributed communications “help alleviate some of the urban sores which previous technologies have aggravated.”2 Baran and Greenberger’s 1967 paper Urban Node in the Information Network characterized U.S. cities as overgrown “nodes” in the nation’s information infrastructure. They urged that steps be taken to disperse urban populations and use cable-based communications to maintain human connections. While their call to disperse urban populations stood outside the mainstream in 1967, Baran and Greenberger were not alone in seeing promise for attacking the nation’s urban problems by using cable communications . A cadre of defense communications experts shared that view. Cable is a television broadcast system that delivers information by underground coaxial cables rather than via over-the-air signals. A popular entertainment medium today, cable has a history that is not so well known—a history that is intertwined with the public fears of domestic social unrest that grew from deteriorating race relations in the nation’s urban areas. Cable was not of military origins, but in the hands of defense intellectuals in a period of national con_ict, it was envisioned as a tool for maintaining domestic stability and order. In this vision, the medium could end the alienation of the “ghetto dwellers” who were believed to have precipitated the violence in city streets. This alienation would end, not through the broadcast of psychological warfare but through the improved delivery of social welfare. These experts imagined services piped into every house and apartment via a municipal cable network —from banking, shopping, and adult education to medical consultations, community-produced programs, and town meetings. Histories of American science and social science have described how, during the cold war, national security priorities shaped the trajectory of many academic disciplines, from physics to psychology. Communication research, in both theory and application, also was in_uenced by such priorities. Scholars have documented many uses of media, including radio and television, to disseminate American propaganda and psychological warfare both abroad and at home, using militaristic, hierarchical approaches to communication.3 Yet military planners and managers embraced strategies of both centralized and decentralized control. During the cold war, an expanding de~nition of national security strategy grew to encompass economic and social development operations overseas alongside traditional combat. The invention of “interdisciplinary war” laid the social science foundations for a set of defensive strategies that could be interpreted as the antithesis of military operations. Ideas about development were chief among them, balancing political action and political stability, simultaneously to satisfy citizens’ demands for community participation and political leaders’ calls for social control. Similar strategies would be applied to urban development efforts in the War on Poverty at home. The reappropriation of these strategies, embedded in many of the era’s social policies and programs, can be made visible through an analysis of the de164 The Urban Crisis as National Security Crisis fense intellectuals’ plans for community development through urban cable communications. Like the military network that Baran envisioned, providing security through decentralized communication, during the years of urban crisis , alongside their efforts to export defense and aerospace innovations to centralize administrative decision making, many defense intellectuals saw an essential complement when they looked at decentralized citizen-produced cable programming. Cable became a “cold war technology” during its ~rst decade in American urban centers—1966 to 1976—as its framers envisioned uses in line with community development programs of the period, both overseas and at home. Understood in this context, the landmark 1972 decision by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to mandate channels for citizen programming...