The History of IT Ethics

What Is Information Technology?

In 399 BCE, the philosopher Socrates was condemned to death by a jury of five hundred Athenians for impiety and corrupting the youth. His real offense, many historians believe, was that he questioned everything, including the authority of those who claimed to know best. He died having written nothing. Everything we know about him comes through other people's accounts, above all the dialogues of his student Plato — an irony Socrates would have appreciated, since he distrusted writing as a poor substitute for real conversation. He lives in history only because someone wrote about him.

This chapter begins with Socrates because his skepticism captures something true of every information revolution: adopters see the possibilities, critics see the risks, and history usually proves both partially right — with surprises larger than anyone predicted.

We need two definitions first.

This broad definition matters because it prevents us from treating the digital revolution as unprecedented. Every generation has faced the question of what new communication technologies mean for society, for truth, and for power. The second definition frames how we evaluate the answers.

This course is primarily concerned with normative ethics applied to technology: not just describing what societies have done with their information tools, but evaluating whether they did it well. The five revolutions ahead are chronological, and each gives us new concepts and cases for that project.

Notice the last column: in every row the same technology pulls in two directions, and the thinkers we will meet line up on opposite sides. Keeping that tension in view, rather than deciding in advance that technology is good or bad, is the habit this chapter is trying to build.

Revolution 1: Writing

Around 3200 BCE, in the city-states of ancient Mesopotamia — now Iraq — scribes began pressing reed styluses into wet clay to produce the world's first writing system: cuneiform. Its early uses were mundane: grain allocations, cattle inventories, commercial debts. Writing began as a technology for keeping score. Yet within a few centuries it had become a tool for preserving law, transmitting religion, accumulating science, and producing literature. The Epic of Gilgamesh, composed around 2100 BCE, is one of the earliest works of literature we have — a meditation on mortality, friendship, and the search for meaning.

Writing externalizes memory. Before it, knowledge lived inside people — in the minds of elders, the performances of bards, the skills of craftspeople — and died with them unless passed on by direct instruction. Writing broke that cycle. A legal code could outlast its author by millennia; a proof could be checked by people who never met its originator; a religious text could reach believers scattered across continents.

Not everyone celebrated. In Athens, Socrates looked at writing and saw something troubling: a technology that would give people the appearance of wisdom without the reality.

Key Thinker

Plato (c. 428–348 BCE)

Plato was born into an aristocratic Athenian family and became Socrates's most influential student. After Socrates's execution in 399 BCE, he traveled widely before returning to Athens to found the Academy. His works, all dialogues, explore ethics, politics, metaphysics, and epistemology.

Here lies the great irony: Plato preserved Socrates's oral philosophy in writing. In the Phaedrus he records Socrates arguing against writing itself — and we know that argument only because someone wrote it down. Socrates wrote nothing, believing genuine understanding could come only through live dialogue. Plato spent his life honoring his teacher's ideas by doing exactly what his teacher distrusted.

His Republic imagines an ideal state ruled by philosopher-kings; his Apology recounts Socrates's trial and death. His theory of Forms — that abstract concepts like Justice and Beauty are more real than physical objects — shaped Western philosophy for two thousand years.

The Myth of Theuth and Thamus

In the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates tell a myth about the invention of writing. The Egyptian god Theuth presents writing to Thamus, king of Egypt, for royal approval, promising it will make the Egyptians wiser and improve their memory. Thamus disagrees, sharply: Theuth has invented not a memory aid but a reminder system — and a dangerous one at that.

One caution about the story itself. Socrates introduces it as an old tale he has "heard," handed down from Egypt, and generations of readers have taken him at his word. Classicists generally do not: no Egyptian source tells it, the names do not behave as genuine Egyptian traditions do in Greek retellings, and the structure is suspiciously well suited to Plato's argument. The myth is almost certainly Plato's own invention, dressed in borrowed antiquity for authority. Sit with that. Plato invented a story attacking writing, wrote it down, and it survives twenty-four centuries later because he wrote it down — the critique reaches us only through the technology it criticizes, and wearing a false citation.

For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

Thamus draws a precise distinction between memory — actively held, internalized knowledge — and reminding — the passive retrieval of stored information. His worry is not that a written text is false, but that readers will mistake looking something up for understanding it. They will "seem to know many things" while knowing very little. The same objection has since been raised about Google, Wikipedia, calculators, and AI chatbots. Every generation faces a version of Thamus's worry: does this new tool help us think, or does it think for us?

Is this convincing? Something in it is undeniably right: students who can recite a definition without being able to apply or explain it have experienced exactly what Socrates describes. And yet the argument seems too strong. The accumulated knowledge of human civilization — mathematics, science, literature, history, law — would be impossible without writing, and Socrates himself benefited from reading Homer, earlier philosophers, and Athenian drama. The argument identifies a real risk without proving that it outweighs the gains.

Revolution 2: The Printing Press

On October 31, 1517, a thirty-three-year-old monk and theology professor named Martin Luther circulated ninety-five theses — arguments he wanted to debate — in Wittenberg, Germany. The familiar image of Luther nailing them to the Castle Church door may or may not be true; historians have argued about it since the 1960s, because Luther never mentions the nailing and the earliest report comes from a colleague not yet living in Wittenberg. Posting theses on a church door was in any case a routine academic gesture. What happened next was not: within a few years his ideas, and his German translation of the Bible, had swept the continent. None of it would have been possible without the technology a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg had developed roughly three-quarters of a century earlier: movable type printing.

Before Gutenberg, books were handwritten one at a time by scribes, usually monks; a single Bible might take a skilled scribe years and cost as much as a house. How many books existed in Europe on the eve of printing is genuinely unknown — estimates range from a few thousand to a few tens of thousands, and rest on assumptions hard to check. The scale of the change is not in dispute: by 1500, fifty years after Gutenberg's press began operating, European printers had produced between nine and twenty million volumes, depending on whose estimate you accept. Books became cheap enough that a prosperous merchant, and eventually a schoolmaster, could own one; literacy spread beyond the clergy and aristocracy; and the Catholic Church's long monopoly over the production and interpretation of written texts was shattered .

Luther's enthusiasm for the press is usually illustrated with a single sentence, and it is worth pausing over.

The art of book printing is the last and greatest gift, because it is through this that the question of the true religion will become known to the entire world — to the very ends of the earth and in all languages — in accordance with God's will. It is the inextinguishable flame of the world.

Attributed to Martin Luther; provenance uncertain

This passage circulates everywhere — histories of printing, commencement addresses, posters in library corridors. It is also untraceable: it reaches us secondhand, through later compilers of Luther's table talk, and cannot be matched to anything Luther himself is known to have written. The sentiment fits him; the wording may not be his. It rhymes with the chapter's opening — we know Socrates only through Plato, and this Luther only through whoever wrote him down. Treat the quotation as a fair summary of Luther's attitude, not as evidence of what he said.

Luther and Erasmus: Two Visions of the Press

Luther's great contemporary, the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536), also benefited enormously from the press. His satire The Praise of Folly was a bestseller, and his 1516 edition of the Greek New Testament — collated from manuscripts he tracked down in Basel and England, printed alongside his own corrected Latin translation — was a monument of Renaissance scholarship. Yet he viewed Luther's use of the press with deep unease.

For Erasmus the problem was not the press but Luther's use of it: flooding the reading public with inflammatory, doctrinally complex arguments most readers were not equipped to evaluate. Where Luther saw a marketplace of ideas in which truth would triumph, Erasmus saw a bazaar where the loudest voice, not the wisest, would win. Reform should come from careful scholars within the Church, not from mass movements whipped up by pamphlets. Both men were partially right.

The Luther-Erasmus debate is the prototype for an argument that recurs in every later information revolution: maximize the free flow of information, or filter it to prevent harm. We meet it again in internet content moderation (Chapter 3) and AI-generated misinformation (Chapter 7).

Revolution 3: Distance Communication

On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sat in the Supreme Court chamber of the U.S. Capitol and tapped out the first message over America's first long-distance telegraph line, forty miles to Baltimore. (Britain had beaten him to a working commercial telegraph by a few years, but Morse's line was the one that convinced the United States.) The message, chosen by Annie Ellsworth from the Book of Numbers, read: "What hath God wrought!" The telegraph was, by the standards of its time, magic: news that had traveled at the speed of a rider or a ship now arrived in seconds. For the first time in human history, a message could outrun the messenger.

Nineteenth-century commentators responded with extravagant enthusiasm: newspapers declared the telegraph would unite all nations, abolish war, and usher in universal peace. An 1858 transatlantic cable worked barely three weeks before failing; when a durable cable finally joined North America and Europe in 1866, it was celebrated as one of the greatest achievements in human history. The journalist Tom Standage calls the telegraph "the Victorian Internet" , and the comparison is apt: the utopian claims made about it in the 1860s were made almost word for word about the internet in the 1990s.

Two of the century's most important thinkers, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, offered sharply contrasting analyses of what communications technology meant for society. Their disagreement goes to the heart of a debate that still divides us: Is technology a neutral tool that enables individual freedom, or is it always shaped by — and in service of — whoever holds economic and political power?

A word about how we are using them. Mill and Marx never debated the telegraph — or each other about anything, in print or in person — and neither wrote a systematic philosophy of communications technology. What follows is not intellectual history but a reconstruction: we treat them as representatives of two positions that have outlasted them both, because each states his side with unusual clarity and because that disagreement organizes almost every argument about media ownership since. Read it as a staged contrast, not as a report of an argument these two men actually had.

Key Thinker

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)

John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, economist, and Member of Parliament, and the most influential liberal thinker of the nineteenth century. His father, James Mill, educated him with extraordinary intensity — Greek at three, Latin at eight — an experiment in radical rationalist education he later blamed for a serious psychological collapse in his twenties.

His most enduring work is On Liberty (1859), which argues for the maximum sphere of individual freedom constrained only by the "harm principle": you may do as you like until your actions harm others. On ideas Mill was an absolutist: even false opinions must be allowed expression, because the collision of ideas is how truth advances. Later readers named this picture the "marketplace of ideas," but the phrase is not Mill's — it entered circulation through twentieth-century American free-speech law, and Mill would probably have resisted it, since he wanted unpopular opinions actively protected rather than left to compete.

Mill also championed women's suffrage and worked to extend the benefits of liberal society to those excluded from it. He saw communications technology as, on balance, a force for individual liberation.

Key Thinker

Karl Marx (1818–1883)

Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary who, with Friedrich Engels, developed historical materialism and founded modern communist thought. Born in Prussia into a middle-class family of Jewish descent, he was radicalized by his studies of Hegel and by industrial capitalism's human costs. Expelled from Germany, France, and Belgium, he settled in London, researching in the British Museum while living in poverty.

Marx's central insight for our purposes is that technology is never politically neutral. It is developed, owned, and deployed within a specific economic system, and tends to serve those who control it. "The ruling ideas of each age," he and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, "have ever been the ideas of its ruling class" . Applied to communications: whoever owns the newspapers, the telegraph wires, or the platforms controls what ideas reach the public, and on what terms.

This does not mean Marx was always right. His predictions of capitalism's inevitable collapse proved incorrect, and regimes claiming to act in his name produced some of the worst tyrannies in history. But his framework for thinking about technology and power is applied today by thinkers across the political spectrum.

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

Mill's argument rests on the claim that truth tends to emerge from open debate. Suppress a right opinion and we lose the truth; suppress a wrong one and we lose the chance to understand why it is wrong — and an unexamined belief is a fragile one. But it assumes the market in ideas operates fairly: that all voices have equal access and the best arguments tend to win. Marx challenges precisely that assumption.

You do not need to be a Marxist to find this argument troubling. In the United States today, most major media outlets are owned by a small number of large corporations, and the platforms through which most people receive their news are run by some of the wealthiest companies in history. Their algorithmic decisions — which stories are shown, which voices amplified, which content suppressed — have enormous consequences for public discourse. Mill's dream of open exchange and Marx's warning about concentrated ownership are both relevant here; neither alone is sufficient.

Revolution 4: Mass Media

The first three revolutions — writing, printing, distance communication — shared a structural feature: they moved information between individuals or small groups. A letter goes from one person to another; a printed pamphlet reaches thousands, but each reader reads alone. Radio and then television introduced something qualitatively new: broadcast — the simultaneous transmission of identical content to millions of passive recipients. For the first time in history, a single broadcast could address an entire nation at once.

The implications were enormous. Radio and television created genuinely shared cultural experiences at national scale and spread public health information, political news, and educational content rapidly. But they also created a new vulnerability: a small number of people controlling the broadcast infrastructure could shape the beliefs and emotions of a mass audience as earlier media could not. Two thinkers who witnessed the most catastrophic demonstration of that vulnerability — the rise of totalitarianism in Europe — provide our framework here.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him… And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that!

The passage describes what Orwell saw as the ultimate goal of totalitarian propaganda: not merely to make people believe false things, but to destroy their capacity to distinguish true from false at all. Once that is gone, a regime no longer needs to win arguments — only to repeat assertions loudly and often. Broadcast media was especially dangerous, in Orwell's analysis, because it reached everyone at once with the same message, eliminating the diversity of sources that might give people the resources to resist.

Key Thinker

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

Hannah Arendt was a German-Jewish philosopher who fled Nazi Germany in 1933, spent eighteen years as a stateless refugee, and became one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century. Persecution and exile gave her an outsider's perspective on institutions most Western thinkers took for granted.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), she argued that Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were not aberrations but outcomes of specific historical and social conditions . Her analysis is distinctive in focusing not on ideology but on loneliness: the breakdown of the social bonds and shared public world that give individuals a stable sense of reality. Isolated people, she argued, become susceptible to movements offering belonging and a totalizing explanation of the world.

Arendt is also famous for covering the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who organized the transportation of Jews to death camps. Her "banality of evil" — the observation that Eichmann was not a monster but a bureaucrat who had stopped thinking — remains one of the most disturbing ideas in modern ethics.

Arendt adds an important dimension to Orwell. He focuses on the content of propaganda — the lies, the slogans, the manipulation; she focuses on the audience: why are people susceptible in the first place? Her answer — that isolation makes people hungry for the belonging ideological movements provide — has obvious implications for the present. If social media simultaneously increases connection and deepens loneliness, as some researchers argue, it may be amplifying exactly the vulnerability Arendt identified.

Revolution 5: The World Wide Web

In 1989, a British software engineer named Tim Berners-Lee, trained as a physicist and working at the CERN particle physics laboratory, wrote a memo proposing a system for managing information across the lab's network. His supervisor wrote "Vague but exciting" on the cover and returned it. Two years later, Berners-Lee had built the World Wide Web: hyperlinked documents reachable through a common protocol and address system. He then pressed CERN not to lock it down, and on April 30, 1993, CERN placed the Web software in the public domain, free for anyone to use or modify. By the mid-1990s the Web was transforming global communication; by the 2000s it was the dominant medium of human expression.

The early web carried utopian overtones familiar from every previous information revolution. "Information wants to be free," declared the technologist Stewart Brand — a slogan usually quoted at half its length, since Brand's point at the 1984 Hackers Conference was that information also wants to be expensive, and that the two pulls fight each other forever. The web would disintermediate — cut out the middlemen — empowering individuals and undermining institutional gatekeepers. But if the first phase of the web resembled a printing press in everyone's hands, the second — Web 2.0 and social media — resembled the consolidation of broadcast media into a few powerful hands.

By 2010, a handful of American technology companies — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple — had become the new gatekeepers of global information, their algorithms determining what news billions of people saw and what ideas were amplified or suppressed. These companies live on advertising revenue, which depends on engagement — and content that provokes outrage and fear generates more of it than calm content does. The best-documented example comes from Facebook's own files, copied in 2021 by the former product manager Frances Haugen and given to regulators, Congress, and journalists. Since 2017 the News Feed had counted each emoji reaction — including "angry" — as five times more valuable than an ordinary Like, on the theory that reactions signaled deeper engagement. By 2019 the company's own researchers had concluded that heavily "angry"-reacted posts were disproportionately likely to carry misinformation and low-quality news. Facebook cut all reactions to one and a half times a Like, and eventually cut "angry" to zero.

A caution, because confident claims outrun the evidence here. The most widely repeated story about algorithmic harm is the YouTube "rabbit hole": the idea that recommendations reliably walk ordinary viewers from mainstream political video toward extremist channels. Early journalism and small-scale audits supported it. Larger studies published since 2021, working from real browsing histories rather than from fresh accounts clicking whatever is recommended, find much weaker effects: most viewing of extreme content follows from subscriptions, off-platform links, and prior preferences rather than from the algorithm . They cannot rule out effects on small vulnerable groups or over long periods, and the debate is unsettled. The honest summary is that ranking systems demonstrably reward emotional intensity, and that how much they radicalize anyone remains genuinely contested.

The result is a structure none of the early web utopians predicted: an open network carrying traffic that is filtered and shaped by private, for-profit intermediaries whose interests are not necessarily aligned with the public good — the arrangement Shoshana Zuboff named "surveillance capitalism" . This is not unique to the web. The telegraph was carried by companies with commercial interests; radio and television were dominated by networks serving advertisers.

The pattern repeats. Secular printers and state censors replaced the Church as arbiters of what could be published; Western Union took a near-monopoly on American telegraph wires, with an exclusive arrangement with the Associated Press; a few national radio networks — NBC, CBS, and Mutual, joined by ABC in the 1940s — controlled what most Americans heard; and the internet reintermediated around Google, Facebook, and Amazon. The form of the intermediary changes; the fact of it does not.

The Pattern Across the Revolutions

Across five information technology revolutions the pattern is strikingly consistent: every one promised liberation, and every one also enabled new forms of control — imperial bureaucracy, religious war, colonial coordination, totalitarian propaganda, surveillance capitalism. Both the optimists and the pessimists turned out to be right, about different things or about the same things at different times.

The most important lesson may be about technology and power. Technology is not a neutral tool societies simply pick up and use. It is developed within existing social structures, deployed by people with interests and agendas, and shaped in its effects by who controls it, who has access to it, and what system it operates within. This is not a counsel of despair: the printing press really did spread literacy and challenge the Church's monopoly, and social media really did let ordinary people organize in ways authoritarian governments found hard to stop. But it does mean that "Is this technology good or bad?" is usually the wrong question. The right questions are: Who controls it? Who benefits? Who bears the costs? And what governance could make the distribution of benefits more just?

The table also frames the topics ahead. Free speech, intellectual property, privacy, AI, and labor automation are not new problems; they are new chapters in a long story. Asking whether AI companies should be liable for what their systems generate is a version of the question asked about printing houses in the seventeenth century. Debating the regulation of social media algorithms echoes debates about telegraph monopolies in the nineteenth. The technologies change; the questions about power, access, truth, and harm recur.

Summary

This chapter has traced the history of IT ethics through five information revolutions. In each, both the optimists and the pessimists were partially right — and the decisive factor was not the technology itself but who controlled it and toward what ends. Socrates, Plato, Erasmus, Luther, Mill, Marx, Orwell, and Arendt offer frameworks that remain powerful for analyzing contemporary technology, from content moderation and surveillance capitalism to artificial intelligence and algorithmic amplification. We draw on all of them in the chapters ahead.

References