possibility that machines threaten a new fascism must be weighed against the vigor of the liberal ideas, institutions, and norms that Wiener championed throughout the book. The flaw in today’s dystopian prophecies is that they disregard the existence of these norms and institutions, or drastically underestimate their causal potency. The result is a technological determinism whose dark predictions are repeatedly refuted by the course of events. The numbers “1984” and “2001” are good reminders. I will consider two examples. Tech prophets often warn of a “surveillance state” in which a government empowered by technology will monitor and interpret all private communications, allowing it to detect dissent and subversion as it arises and make resistance to state power futile. Orwell’s telescreens are the prototype, and in 1976 Joseph Weizenbaum, one of the gloomiest tech prophets of all time, warned my class of graduate students not to pursue automatic speech recognition because government surveillance was its only conceivable application. Though I am on record as an outspoken civil libertarian, deeply concerned with contemporary threats to free speech, I lose no sleep over technological advances in the Internet, video, or artificial intelligence. The reason is that almost all the variation across time and space in freedom of thought is driven by differences in norms and institutions and almost none of it by differences in technology. Though one can imagine hypothetical combinations of the most malevolent totalitarians with the most advanced technology, in the real world it’s the norms and laws we should be vigilant about, not the tech. Consider variation across time. If, as Orwell hinted, advancing technology was a prime enabler of political repression, then Western societies should have gotten more and more restrictive of speech over the centuries, with a dramatic worsening in the second half of the 20th century continuing into the 21st. That’s not how history unfold