abstract:

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s 1984 privatization of British Telecom was a landmark moment for neoliberalism. It served to popularize and vindicate the sale of state utilities around the world. This article shows how computer models of the future were central for British telecommunications’, and thus for Britain’s, transition from social democracy to neoliberalism, from monopoly to market. The British telecommunications network was a key interest in both the social democratic and neoliberal British state’s plans for the digitalization of Britain. I argue that computers were crucial to the rise of neoliberalism, both as a managerial tool that simulated futures of free markets and as a technology that symbolized and supported the contraction of the British state. This article traces the history of the British telecommunications system’s Long Range Planning Department, which was at the heart of British Telecom’s privatization. In doing so, it argues that the history of technology is in a unique position to study how tools such as computers both forecast and symbolize the political power of the future.

摘要：

撒切尔总理（Margaret Thatcher）于1984年将英国电信私有化，这是新自由主义的里程碑。它有助于在世界范围内推广和维护国有公用事业的销售。本文说明了未来的计算机模型如何成为英国电信的中心，并由此成为英国从社会民主到新自由主义，从垄断到市场的过渡的中心。英国的电信网络是社会民主主义国家和新自由主义英国国家对英国进行数字化计划的主要兴趣所在。我认为计算机对于新自由主义的兴起至关重要，它既是模拟自由市场未来的管理工具，又是象征并支持英国衰落的技术。本文追溯了英国电信系统私有化的核心-英国电信系统的远程计划部门的历史。在这样做时，它认为技术史处于研究研究计算机等工具如何预测和象征未来政治力量的独特位置。