God Looks After Fools, Drunks and the United States: John Steele Gordon on How Information Technology United America

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's not too far from America's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary. The Wall Street Journal's been running an interesting series, the most impactful US inventions from one to about twenty. And the invention that gets first place, at least according to The Wall Street Journal in terms of American inventions over the last two hundred and fifty years, is the Internet. It's very much in keeping with another really interesting piece The Wall Street Journal recently ran in celebration of America's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary: "From the Telegraph to the Smartphone: How Information Technology Unified a Nation." It was written by John Steele Gordon, the very distinguished American business and technology journalist, and John is joining us now. John, congratulations on the piece.

00:01:25 John Steele Gordon: Thank you very much.

00:01:27 Andrew Keen: So this piece, John — you've written many books, and it's a relatively short piece. The idea of information technology unifying a nation: do you argue that this is the key technology shaping America over the last two hundred and fifty years — maybe the Internet, certainly the telegraph, and the smartphone?

00:01:52 John Steele Gordon: It was certainly a very important one. The government from the very beginning was afraid that because The United States was so large — the original United States that went as far as the Mississippi River was larger than all of Western Europe — and communication was very, very slow. They were afraid that parts would drift off. George Washington said that the Trans-Appalachian West was hanging by a thread, because their commerce had to go down the Mississippi. It couldn't go over the mountains. So he was very concerned with that, and we've been concerned ever since. When California became a state in 1850, it was 1,500 miles west of the Mississippi. Originally they had the Pony Express, but that only lasted about — I think it's about sixteen months — but then they finally got a telegraph line across. And one of the reasons they spent so much time on the post office was that in the time of George Washington, the post office was basically the only means of communication.

00:03:08 Andrew Keen: You wrote an interesting book in 2003 entitled A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable, an epic nineteenth century achievement that united America and Europe. You begin your Wall Street Journal piece talking about these undersea cables. Tell us about them and why in your view they're so critical in the history of America.

00:03:35 John Steele Gordon: Well, again, The United States was so far from what was then the center of the world, which is to say Western Europe. In 1800, if you were lucky, the westbound trip would last about two months and eastbound about six weeks. If you weren't lucky, it could last much longer than that. And even with steam-powered ships, by the eighteen fifties it took about ten days either way. So if you could get a cable under the Atlantic, well, you reduce it from ten days to ten seconds, basically simultaneous. The technology had begun to develop in the eighteen forties. The first undersea cable ran between England and France, and a fisherman accidentally hooked it and pulled it up and had no idea what it was. So he cut out a section in order to do show and tell when they got back to shore. And that was the end of that cable. But pretty soon they had cables as long as a hundred miles or so. And then Cyrus Field, who was an American who had been in the paper business — didn't know anything about cable technology — but he suddenly said to himself, reading about it, why don't we lay a cable across the Atlantic Ocean? And this was a bit like reading about Sputnik and saying, well, hey, let's go to Mars. He was a very determined man, and he didn't let anything stop him. He finally got it done. It took six tries and about ten years, and a great deal of technology had to be developed in order to do it. One of the important people was William Thomson, who is known today as Lord Kelvin, one of the towering figures of nineteenth century physics. He did a lot to make the cable a practical technology.

00:05:54 Andrew Keen: John, should we think of the cable in a metaphorical sense as the thing defining America? I mean, obviously there's the physical reality you've written about in this book, A Thread Across the Ocean — you're one of the leading historians of undersea cables and other kinds of unifying technology. But can the idea of the cable be used as the metaphor to describe the two hundred and fifty year history of America?

00:06:29 John Steele Gordon: Well, I think it was one step on the way. If you were born in, say, 1820, communication moved at the speed of a horse at best — and seven, eight knots if you had a fair wind on the water. If you lived from 1820 to say 1900, well, by then you could carry on a conversation with somebody in Europe. Now it was expensive, but you could do it. The nineteenth century — they thought of themselves as living in an age of miracles. We take those miracles entirely for granted. But somebody who suddenly had hot and cold running water — that was just a miracle to them. A hundred years earlier, kings didn't have that. The nineteenth century was a great period of optimism, unfortunately.

00:07:37 Andrew Keen: Yeah, of miracle making. And I want to come to our twenty-first century, which is much less optimistic, later in this conversation. You also wrote a book which did extremely well, An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power. How much in your view, John, in terms of this age of miracles in the nineteenth century, was the development of communications technology, cables, and everything else that we'll come to, and economic power and wealth — how much were they bound up with one another?

00:08:09 John Steele Gordon: Well, they were entirely bound up with one another, and not only voice communication or information communication, but moving goods, which is what an economy is all about. It was the railroad that united the American economy into one national whole, and allowed big factories to make goods which would then be shipped all over the country. Again, in 1800, every little town had a shoemaker and a blacksmith and what have you, who made the stuff that was needed. By 1900, shoes were being made in Worcester, Massachusetts and shipped all over the continent — at a much cheaper price too, and a much better shoe. So being able to move goods and move ideas was essential to the development of the American economy.

00:09:15 Andrew Keen: You talked about the importance of railways. Interestingly enough — maybe because the railway wasn't invented in The US — railways don't get on the journal's list of the most impactful US inventions. The airplane comes out number five in terms of transportation devices or technologies. But of course the railways in the nineteenth century are very much bound up with the idea of extremely wealthy men, what we call today billionaires. Leland Stanford comes to mind, of course. Was there always in America a hostility, a suspicion, of the titans of information technology, John, beginning in the nineteenth century?

00:10:02 John Steele Gordon: Not too much of information technology, but certainly railroad technology. As early as the eighteen fifties, the New York Times was describing Commodore Vanderbilt — they didn't quite use the term, but they certainly used the analogy — they called him a robber baron, after the robber barons of medieval Germany on the Rhine, who wouldn't let your boat pass unless you paid the money.

00:10:27 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And that term, of course, stuck. Historians still use it.

00:10:31 John Steele Gordon: They still use it. The dead can't sue, but the great industrial leaders of the nineteenth century certainly should. Because Commodore Vanderbilt gave a much better transportation network at much lower cost than had been available before. What's wrong with that? He got very, very rich. He died the richest man in The United States in 1877, worth $105,000,000 — an inconceivable amount of money in those days. It's barely conceivable to most of us today. But nobody complained about his railroads or his steamships earlier. They were fast, they were safe, and they were cheap. What's wrong with that?

00:11:24 Andrew Keen: John, then in terms of the development of undersea telegraph cables and the other cables that, as you note in your piece, unify the nation — were there in the nineteenth century Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk types who made vast fortunes?

00:11:45 John Steele Gordon: Oh, indeed. Henry Ford was born in the eighteen sixties. He was going to change the world by developing an automobile. The automobile was invented in Germany, but it was a rich man's toy. The first automobile race in this country was known as the Vanderbilt Cup. But Henry Ford said, I'm going to build an automobile that the average man can afford, and he did. That profoundly changed the world and profoundly changed The United States — much for the better. He was as creative as Elon Musk is today in developing a reusable rocket, which hugely reduces the cost of rocketry, of space exploration and space travel.

00:12:42 Andrew Keen: Although, of course, Ford's politics were, to say the least, controversial.

00:12:51 John Steele Gordon: I'm sorry. I didn't quite hear that.

00:12:54 Andrew Keen: Ford's politics — Henry Ford's politics — were, to say the least, controversial. Did some of these early information tech barons, the robber barons you described, were they always interested in politics? Or in terms of the nineteenth century, did most of them try and keep out of politics?

00:13:14 John Steele Gordon: Well, they were all involved in politics to some extent, but not nearly to the extent they became later, when the government became so much larger and so much more powerful that one had to be involved in politics. In the eighteen sixties and seventies, Cornelius Vanderbilt didn't have much to do with politics other than bribing the New York State legislature, because that was the way you got things done in New York State in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was so incredibly corrupt. But Commodore Vanderbilt's word was as good as his bond when it was freely given.

00:13:55 Andrew Keen: Was it also fair to say that in the nineteenth century, the state was, obviously, much weaker? The federal government was marginal, sometimes barely relevant in terms of business, so there was no real reason to become involved in politics.

00:14:11 John Steele Gordon: Exactly. They didn't have to, and they had better fish to fry.

00:14:17 Andrew Keen: Speaking of better fish to fry, John, as we move into the twentieth century, we have new technologies. We've, of course, radio, the invention of the transistor, and then television, personal computers, and the Internet. How would you juxtapose the nineteenth and twentieth century in terms of the history of information technology in The United States, and how it united and perhaps sometimes even today particularly disunited a nation?

00:14:51 John Steele Gordon: Well, information technology has made argument on a wide scale much easier to do. You don't write magazine articles anymore in order to argue. You have a podcast. But I think it's pretty much the same — the nineteenth century technology changed nineteenth century life profoundly, and the twentieth century has changed ours. I sometimes talk about how, if some modern day Rip Van Winkle had gone to sleep in 1970 and just woke up and said, what's new — well, you might say...

00:15:39 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And John just waved his smartphone, which he took out of the breast pocket of his jersey, at the screen.

00:15:49 John Steele Gordon: The technology of a smartphone was just inconceivable to somebody who lived fifty years ago, when I was very much alive.

00:15:58 Andrew Keen: Well, it's a supercomputer. I mean, there were smartphones fifty years ago, but they were stored in large buildings, and they cost many millions of dollars.

00:16:07 John Steele Gordon: There was no technology remotely resembling this in the 1970s. Telephones were still corded, and you had to dial them — or by the nineteen seventies you were pushing buttons. But a phone that you could — when I was growing up, if you called somebody on the phone and they answered, you knew where they were. They were home. And often you knew what room they were standing in.

00:16:34 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's a good point.

00:16:35 John Steele Gordon: Now somebody could be anywhere on the planet.

00:16:38 Andrew Keen: Radio is, of course, really important. You write about that — Marconi's pioneering of the radio. Was radio the thing, John, that fundamentally united America in terms of information, certainly in a political sense? Of course, FDR pioneered the political speech. How do you define the role of radio in unifying The United States in the beginning to middle of the twentieth century?

00:17:12 John Steele Gordon: One of the ways it unified The United States was through entertainment. Because until then, entertainment was local — and there were some very big stars like Jenny Lind in the early nineteenth century, but most entertainment was local. Radio made it possible for people to become entertainers, become national figures. The movies did too, of course.

00:17:41 Andrew Keen: And how would you juxtapose television with radio? Was television just radio with pictures, or did it represent a very different way of uniting America?

00:17:53 John Steele Gordon: Well, early television of the nineteen fifties, I think, was basically radio with pictures. And interestingly, vaudeville had more or less died in the 1930s, and then they had a revival in the early 1950s on television. Ed Sullivan, for instance, had lots of old vaudeville stars like Sophie Tucker and what have you. So in some ways, television went back earlier.

00:18:25 Andrew Keen: Many people, John, look back now at this era of radio and particularly television in The United States as a time when America really was united. I want to talk about the Internet and how some people at least see it disuniting America these days. Do you look back with a degree of nostalgia to when there were three television stations and there were one or two prominent journalists who everyone trusted? Was this the apex, the climax, of American unity in the nineteen fifties?

00:19:03 John Steele Gordon: Oh, I don't think so. We certainly had huge political fights in the nineteen fifties. People were accused of being communists. Joe McCarthy was notorious for that — "I have here a list of fifty communists in the State Department" — a list of which, of course, he never actually revealed. So I don't think that has changed. There were fewer outlets for political disputation in the mid-twentieth century, but I don't think we're any less unified than we are. I think we're in a particularly bad patch when it comes to political disputation in these years, but that'll pass.

00:19:50 Andrew Keen: But would it be fair to say in the fifties in particular, you didn't have a deep distrust of technology, of radio or television, or even of the forces that ran it? I want to — in the second half of the show, I want to talk about a recent study about America now being down on AI, the latest technology. Most Americans trust AI much less than most people around the world. I assume that the technologies you've written about in your career and that you write about in this piece for the journal, celebrating the American two hundred and fiftieth birthday — most people liked television and radio. There wasn't a deep hostility as there seems to be these days, particularly towards AI. Is that fair?

00:20:40 John Steele Gordon: No, I don't think there was a deep hostility towards television. Although — I know my grandparents, even though they lived well into the television era, one grandmother never had a television set in her life. And my other grandparents, they only got a television set when my grandfather discovered there were football games on television.

00:21:03 Andrew Keen: Were they conscientious objectors, or—

00:21:04 John Steele Gordon: They just weren't interested.

00:21:05 Andrew Keen: I mean, they were perfectly—

00:21:08 John Steele Gordon: They were perfectly happy. My grandparents liked to play bridge after dinner. It never occurred to them to sit around watching I Love Lucy.

00:21:20 Andrew Keen: We are speaking with John Steele Gordon, one of America's leading economic and technology historians, who has a wonderful piece in the Wall Street Journal this week, "From the Telegraph to the Smartphone." We're going to take a break now, and then after the break I want to talk to John about the Internet — how it has changed America, brought the country together, and perhaps also divided it. So don't go away, anyone. We'll be back in a second.

This is not a commercial break. That's because we don't have commercials on this show. I'm not going to waste your time trying to sell you inane products. However, I do have a pretty good deal for you. I'm writing a book about The United States. It's due out in 2028. And if you become a paid subscriber on my Keen On America Substack, you'll not only get very cool notes and photographs and videos from this project, but I'll also send you a personalized signed copy of the book when it comes out in 2028. So go to keenon.substack.com and become a paid subscriber. That's keenon.substack.com.

And now back to our conversation. We're speaking with John Steele Gordon, author of "From the Telegraph to the Smartphone," a wonderful piece in the journal this week about how information technology united a nation. John, as you know, many people now believe that the Internet, particularly social media, is disuniting America. What's your take on that?

00:23:15 John Steele Gordon: I think that may be true to some extent, because we now have so many places we can go. As you said, in the nineteen fifties most cities had three television stations. I grew up in Manhattan — we were spoiled rotten, we had seven. But now there's an infinity of places you can go, and I think people tend to go where they feel most comfortable. Just like in the nineteen fifties, liberals tended to read the New York Times and conservatives tended to read the Herald Tribune. Today you have an Internet that could take you to every tiny little thought about politics. And they tend to become echo chambers, I think, because they don't have anybody disagreeing.

00:24:05 Andrew Keen: Do they bring out, do you think, John, the worst in us in some ways — some of these new social media platforms and even these devices?

00:24:16 John Steele Gordon: Oh, I think that's one of the problems. We have a million years of instinct about not getting into fights when you're standing three feet away from somebody. But when you could be 12,000 miles away from somebody, I think you're more likely to be rude.

00:24:37 Andrew Keen: There's been a whole spate of recent cases, John, about the addictive quality of social media and of smartphones in general. More and more people are suggesting that the government needs to regulate these platforms and technologies. Was there always a concern about the addictive quality of these new technologies from the nineteenth century? I mean, we haven't even talked about newspapers, certainly radio and television.

00:25:05 John Steele Gordon: No. I'm not aware of any concern about that, because for one thing, they were very expensive, and therefore you used them sparingly. Nowadays it's so cheap. Whenever you have a brand new technology that comes into existence, you have to figure out what rules are needed to make that technology a positive force, not a negative one. When Henry Ford first started selling the Model T, there were no traffic lights. There was no idea that people had to learn to drive and get a driver's license. I remember my great-aunt telling me how in nineteen-oh-eight, they were living in Islip, Long Island, and her husband told her how to drive a car, and the next day she picked him up at the train station. In most states, you didn't need a driver's license until the nineteen thirties. So we've now decided that, yes indeed, you need to prove that you're able to drive an automobile. This is happening now with social media, because I think we are seeing more and more evidence that social media can be very bad for children. They go off into their own little world instead of getting properly socialized. That we need to limit. Just like we've learned long since that you have to limit access to alcohol for children. They should be growing up before they start drinking, because it's very bad for them to do it earlier — it's bad enough as adults. So I think we're working out those rules. We did the same thing in the nineteenth century with industry, in the post-Civil War era, when companies grew much, much bigger and they had to find out what rules made these new worlds work. I'm sorry.

00:27:17 Andrew Keen: Yeah. That's probably one of your old teachers. Might be your grandparents, John. John, what about the role of education in all this? In your books and in your article "From the Telegraph to the Smartphone," the way in which information technology unified a nation — how important are these technologies in the development and reinvention of education? More and more talk these days, of course, about how AI should and shouldn't be used in schools. Lots of controversy about the role of smartphones in classrooms. Did these new technologies define the history also of education, American education, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?

00:28:01 John Steele Gordon: I don't think the communications technologies in that time period affected much, because, again, nobody walked around with a phone. You had to go find a payphone. That just didn't happen. And again, you couldn't walk around with a television set in the nineteen fifties — standard ones weighed a hundred pounds or more. But now you can. I have a television in my breast pocket. I can use it anytime I want. And that has consequences. So again, the technology was so primitive back then that it didn't have that much impact on human life. Now, because everything is concentrated in one of these things — it's a miracle, but it's a miracle that needs regulation. We just have to figure out what those regulations need to be.

00:29:02 Andrew Keen: John, you've written extensively on the relationship between technology, industry, and Wall Street. You wrote a book back in 1999, The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power. This year, 2026, marks America's two hundred and fiftieth birthday. There are likely to be two massive IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI worth many billions, perhaps even trillions of dollars. How important in your view has Wall Street been in terms of driving these new information technologies? And have we reached a kind of climax when it comes to the IPOs of startups like Anthropic and OpenAI?

00:29:56 John Steele Gordon: Well, there have been massive IPOs before today — not as big, but certainly they were big. And Wall Street is where you find the money to make your dreams come true. That has been true for a hundred and fifty, a hundred and seventy years now.

00:30:19 Andrew Keen: What do you think your grandparents would think of that little device you keep on pulling out of your jersey pocket?

00:30:28 John Steele Gordon: They probably would have told me to put it right back in. They would have regarded it as extremely rude. But I think they also would be fascinated by it.

00:30:41 Andrew Keen: What about, John — and you touched on this earlier — it seems as if Americans are becoming deeply skeptical of technology. The Musks and the Altmans and the Zuckerbergs are now public enemies number one, certainly on the left. The Washington Post did a poll: Americans are down on AI. When you compare America and China, for example, the Chinese have apparently 84% trust in AI, where The US only has 38%. Are you concerned with the way in which Americans seem to be falling out of love with information technology?

00:31:23 John Steele Gordon: Not really. I don't have much faith in those kinds of polls. I'm not sure—

00:31:27 Andrew Keen: You just disregard them? You don't think that they have any truth?

00:31:30 John Steele Gordon: I'd have to look at the polls and what they call the internals of the polls. But a lot of those kinds of polls — you can get people to say whatever it is you really want them to say, sometimes without even being aware that you're doing that. It depends on exactly how you phrase the question. Those kinds of polls — if in a political poll, are you going to vote for this guy or that guy, they can be fairly accurate. Sometimes you've got a big — okay.

00:32:02 Andrew Keen: I take your point. Although presumably they're asking the same question in China and The US. Let's just say that poll has a degree of truth. What do you make of that? Does it concern you as a historian of the importance of information technology? I mean, AI is really just the latest, brightest, newest kind of information technology.

00:32:27 John Steele Gordon: Well, I think it may be passing. I think an awful lot of people don't really understand what AI does that couldn't be done before. I'm not entirely sure that I completely understand it, because I'm not in the first blush of youth, when you're much easier to adapt to new technologies. And I think they're a little frightened of it, because they think that perhaps AI could turn into a monster — that suddenly we're doing its bidding instead of the other way around, like HAL in the movie 2001.

00:33:09 Andrew Keen: I tend to disagree with you, actually, in terms of that poll. I think there's some truth to it. It's been supported by the fact that there's more and more local opposition now to AI data centers, which of course are the essential platforms to drive the AI revolution. As a historian of the importance of information technology in uniting America and in making it wealthier, what would you tell people who don't want an AI data center in their neighborhood, in their town?

00:33:42 John Steele Gordon: Well, I don't think you could stop us any more than you could stop the Mississippi. I think you can perhaps channel it in positive ways. I can understand why people don't want wind power in their landscapes — those things are hideous. But AI centers are just ordinary buildings that suck up an extraordinary amount of electricity. Supplying that electricity is going to have to be done. But I think that's pending. They don't take up much room, for that matter.

00:34:24 Andrew Keen: And John, you strike me as a reasonably positive, optimistic person. How optimistic will you be on July 4 this year about the future of America?

00:34:39 John Steele Gordon: Well, nobody has ever made money selling America short. We're an extraordinary country. I always think of what the great German chancellor Otto von Bismarck said in the late nineteenth century: God looks after three things — fools, drunks, and The United States of America.

00:35:04 Andrew Keen: Is he giving us a ride?

00:35:05 John Steele Gordon: I think he is, yes. I'm not sure he takes care of fools and drunks, but we have a blessed country beyond any other in the history of the world.

00:35:16 Andrew Keen: What will concern you about the state of the country in July this year when you celebrate? What are you going to do? Are you going to let off some fireworks?

00:35:26 John Steele Gordon: I don't know. I like fireworks, I have to admit. There are several things that disturb me that we're going to have to deal with, and they're not technological — I'm not terribly worried about that. But the national debt of The United States today — it used to be used only to pay for wars and for great depressions. It is now used to make sure that nobody in Congress ever loses an election again. It is completely out of control. The budget system of the federal government is an unbelievable national disgrace. They can't even appropriate money in a timely manner. They have these ridiculous seventy-day shutdowns and what have you. Why are the congressmen getting paid when they're not doing their damn jobs?

00:36:22 Andrew Keen: Finally, as I said, the journal — I know you write for them — has a list of the most impactful US inventions of all time. The Internet wins. It's number one. The light bulb is number two. Integrated circuit, number three. Personal computer, number four. Is that how you'd rank it? I mean, the Model T is down the list. Nuclear power, airplanes, television, refrigeration. The railways don't even get into the list. Is the journal ordering it right? Is the most impactful US invention of all time — when we celebrate in July — should we be thanking God or Bismarck or whoever for the Internet?

00:37:09 John Steele Gordon: Oh, I think so. The Internet has changed everything just in the last thirty years, and we've basically seen nothing yet. It's just an incredible technology. You see behind me all these books. Years ago, if I wanted to look something up, I had to go to the index and see if it was in that book. And if it wasn't, I'd go to some other book and see if I could find it in that index, and so on. Today I just type into Google and boom, I have an index to the entire intellectual world at my fingertips. Scholars bless that every day of their lives, I promise you.

00:37:53 Andrew Keen: Reason to be cheerful, reason to celebrate, according to John Steele Gordon, at least. America remains vibrant, remains perhaps God's favorite — at least according to Bismarck — and the greatest invention of the American two hundred and fifty year experiment is the Internet. John, real honor to have you on the show. Let me wish you an early happy two hundred and fiftieth. You're an important voice in America, a man who understands the history of the country, and your "From the Telegraph to the Smartphone" is a very good introduction to the role of information technology in uniting America. Thank you so much.

00:38:35 John Steele Gordon: Well, thank you very much for having me.