Our minds on media.

A Review of the book “The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation” or Why We Can’t Have Nice Things Anymore.

The book “The Idea Factory” by Jon Gertner is a history of one of the most unusual institutions in American history: Bell Labs. If you have not heard of it, you have heard of everything they did, because they essentially invented the 21st century. The transistor, information theory, fiber optics, communication satellites, radar, sonar and lasers. It sounds like a song and the list goes on. Cell phones, solar cells, The B (for Bell) and C programming languages, the Big Bang Theory. These are all inventions and discoveries of Bell Labs. And I found in this book a big question: where is Bell Labs today? Not where is the actual institution and building, the artifacts and leftovers are all around. Where is the Bell Labs of today. Whither the institution? Why don’t we have Bell Labs today in the U.S.?

I don’t feel the need to retread the history of Bell Labs and tell you how incredibly important the place was. There are plenty of histories—“The Idea Factory” being a very good one. The place was an astounding nexus of science, government and industry. Instead, to pursue my question about the existence of a place like Bell Labs today, I’m going to take a somewhat roundabout path and start with Karl Marx. This oft misunderstood philosopher spoke a great deal about the simple concept of the firm and its construction. There’s a pretty basic plot to human history and property and it goes: Master-slave, Lord-servant, Employer-employee. Marx thought we could do one better and maybe have a co-op. It didn’t really have much to do with the big isms of capitalism and communism for him as much as it had to do with building institutions that bettered our lives through industry. If the people who worked at a firm owned the firm, the firm would be incentivized to do good things for the people who worked for the firm. It’s practically a tautology.

Bell Labs was not an employee-owned firm, but a private research institute owned by AT&T which had, for many years, a government sanctioned monopoly on the US telephone system. It was a blend of private equity and a government-sanctioned monopoly that granted AT&T dominance in the market. The general goal of Bell Labs, as the research branch of AT&T, was to discover new science and invent new technology that would improve the telephone system. Within the institution of Bell Labs there was a significant devotion of thought to what constituted innovation and how could Bell Labs turn scientific discovery into advances in communication for the public’s benefit. They rejected the trial-and-error, ‘try a thousand things and see what works’ approach—what you might call the Edisonian method. They worked to understand the science, master the manufacturing process and economics and deliver the benefit to the customer.

Bell Labs worked so hard in this manner that they even created their own demise. There was an unforeseen side effect: they employed the man, Claude Shannon, who created information theory and the very concept of the digital. What had been signals and waves in a telephone system was transformed into bits and computation on a network. In many ways, Bell Labs brought AT&T down because with the concept of the digital, a monopoly on signals and wires no longer mattered. The Internet created communication of any media type, anywhere, by and from anyone to anyone.

Was Bell Labs capitalist? Not really—not in the laissez-faire sense—the all-regulations-off sense. AT&T was allowed to be a monopoly in exchange for providing services to the government and a definable benefit the public—clearer, further phone calls! AT&T certainly wasn’t state-owned. And it wasn’t a co-op. There were stockholders and they made money. But it did have a significant role to play within and for the government. Many Bell Labs employees worked almost exclusively for the government, inventing systems to help the U.S. win World War II, like sonar and radar.

Bell Labs was a privately-owned, state-protected, science laboratory whose main goal was to benefit the public. If not a socialist institution, then quite a socialist outlook really. When reading “The Idea Factory” it’s very clear that the executives at AT&T and Bell Labs were highly concerned with how to utilize science and innovation to benefit the public first and foremost. It’s hard to point to other examples of this in the US right now, with companies under the heel of large shareholder institutions first and boards simply composed of more captains of industry as opposed to representatives of the public or the environment or employees.

If the frontier of innovation in communication is quantum computing and information teleportation, the US has many privately-owned, state-adverse, private innovation laboratories that benefit investors. They, of course, make claims about the benefits of what they are doing for the public for public relations sake, but are they generally making information about their progress known? Are they giving any inventions or patents away for free? Bell labs often did; look at its treatment of the transistor. It gave the patent away for free. Where would we be today without that choice? It’s only fairly recently that we decided to open up computer architectures and that was not with the blessing of companies like Apple and Intel.

In looking at modern Bell Labs analogs, it’s best to leave out the benefit to the public because even though we all get to use AI (for a price) how it replaces us in the labor market is of no concern to our technology companies. Since those same companies invest billions in elections, it’s of no concern to the government either—there’s a deafening lack of discussion about a universal basic income. They’ve lost the incentive to care. Our technology companies don’t share their knowledge and they aren’t worried about your dignity or well-being or privacy. Move fast and break things is their motto. This, I promise you, was never the motto of Bell Labs.

It’s never been more important to reign in our corporations. Some people like to make the argument that corporations are psychopathic. If they were humans only ever caring about the bottom line and killing people with pollution and lack of safety it seems an apt label. But, unlike people, corporations can be cured of their compulsions with changes to the law. And I’m not talking about tedious regulations. I’m talking about the architecture of the legal corporate entity.

The history of Bell Labs in “The Idea Factory” will show you that corporations can work toward the public good. Economists may crow about prices for telephones in the market because of monopoly pricing decisions, but what number would they put on the invention of the transistor and it being given away for free? That measure of benefit to the public and industry today must be practically incalculable. We need not move toward a completely Marxist corporate structure, only in that direction. (Although artistic collectives who can do battle with corporate-sponsored artificial intelligence theft of intellectual property might not be a bad idea.)

If there’s a lesson in Bell Labs, it’s not just that innovation is possible under the right conditions—it’s that innovation flourishes when it serves a broader public mission. We don’t need to romanticize monopolies or resurrect Bell Labs wholesale, but we do need to reckon with how the incentives we build into our corporate and legal architectures shape the world we get. The transistor was given away for free and changed everything. What have we received from today’s tech giants besides surveillance capitalism, a misinformation miasma disrupting our social institutions, and a degradation of mental health? I wonder if Bell Labs would have allowed these things to happen? If we want another idea factory, we’ll need to imagine a new kind of firm—one beholden not just to shareholders, but to the rest of us. A future worth building demands it.