Databases and Witnessing: The Case of Harvey Matusow

Seattle.
The next session at AoIR 2011 starts with Caroline Bassett. Her focus is on Harvey Matusow and the Anti-Computing League (in the 1950s), as an example of political activism. How were groups turned on or off from nascent media technologies; how did they come to see potential uses of such technology?

The Anti-Computing League emerged at a time when personal computers didn’t yet exist; computers weren’t yet viewed as media, and counterculture was driven by Oz Magazine which presented print with television aesthetics. The ACL in England had some 5000 members in the late 1960s (roughly matching the number of computers in the country at the time), and envisaged a war against computing and data processing (e.g. by poking extra holes in their punchcards); it had a certain surrealist element, and aimed to disrupt computers.

The ACL saw itself as a ‘cool’ organisation, part of the counterculture, but also gained a substantial amount of mainstream media exposure; it was founded by Harvey Matusow, a journalist who was taken relatively seriously by others and whose activities boosted ACL membership. Notably, the ACL wasn’t against computers as such, but rather against the growing role of data processing in society: it feared the emergence of a database society, the ‘everydayisation’ of computerisation.

Where did Matusow come from, though? It was known that he’d previously written on the McCarthy era, but indeed he had been directly involved, bearing (as it turned out, false) witness against people accused of communist sympathies in the U.S., and subsequently going to prison for such false testimony. So, he was a formal professional informant during the McCarthy era, who later became a campaigner against the database society: this connection is far from accidental, in fact. Matusow later donated his personal materials to the University of Sussex library, and even here, the two lives are kept disconnected (literally, in two separate boxes) – but this should not be overestimated.

Matusow became a spectacular media object during McCarthyism; right from the beginning, therefore, he was also a database creature, in many ways. He joined the Communist Party in 1950, became an informer in 1951, and was expelled from the party in 1952; he proudly joined the spectacle of the show trials, becoming something of a showbiz character on the lecture circuit, too. He is also a collector: a photographer of his friends in the party and thus a gatherer of data on it; an industrial collector of names for the Communist sympathiser blacklist.

Eventually, Matusow recants from informing, however; his experiences of databasing activities may have contributed to his later aversion against databases, therefore. This case study might be interesting as away of rethinking the relationship between witnessing and the media, then.