"Squares" is Cyrus Mody's term for what he considers the silent majority of American scientists and engineers during the 1970s. At the time, postwar economic growth was coming to an end, and research was struggling for funding. Further, science was being promoted as a means of solving persistent structural problems in society, while university authorities faced protests over the involvement of science in matters of military strategy and the production of chemicals for warfare. However, Mody has not written yet another study of countercultural activists, psychedelic experimentations, and hippie physicists. Instead, The Squares begins with the valid criticism that the transformation of American science and technology has too often been viewed through the lens of the most visible figures or those with the most pronounced views. The case studies in this book aim to correct this narrative by highlighting some representatives of the "excluded middle" (p. 7) in historiography. Squares were white, middle-class, primarily male; they lived in suburbs, were politically ambivalent or espoused conservative values but did not publicly take sides, and adapted their agendas to changing research priorities. Squares pursued questions set by their peers or the national security state without taking on any particular social responsibility, which, as Mody rightly points out, was their political choice. The book explores social change from the perspective of the dominant group in an unequal society. It begins with an episode about protests against the Vietnam War within the American physics community, only to turn to some theoretical considerations about the kind of people whose agency was always taken for granted: the squares. In example after example, Mody demonstrates how economic stagnation fostered a culture of innovation with sometimes surprising adjustments in career strategies and research fields. Entrepreneurship ranged from the nascent industrial cluster of biomedical and nanotechnical research to parapsychology. The reader also learns how useful "interdisciplinarity" was in protecting Stanford University from ungovernability and getting the faculty through tough times, and how a type of entrepreneurial university emerged that later benefitted from neoliberal deregulation. The book also discusses NASA's strategies for coping with uncertainty. After its original mission was accomplished with Neil Armstrongs moon walk, the agency's activities expanded to include the development of astronaut food for the elderly as well as housing devices. Mody also looks into the failed attempts of squares to find new niches: Jack Kilby, coinventor of the integrated circuit, later tried to commercialize a silicon-based solar energy system. Chapter 6 looks at offshoring and the global reach of semiconductor companies, using the example of Signetics, which made changes that had the longest impact of all square ideas. This is also the only chapter that gives any indication of career opportunities for women and people of color.
展开▼
