As Theodore J. Flicker's bizarre satire The President's Analyst (1967) demonstrates, concerns about electronic surveillance were well-established as part of cultural discourse of the 1960s and 1970s. In this scene, fears of widespread government wiretapping are validated when a computerized android from the phone company reveals its megalomaniacal plan for replacing the physical infrastructure of the telephone system with neural implants, allowing direct communication among human beings without phones or wires.

It is worth remembering that between 1934 and 1984, AT&T and the Bell System held a federally regulated monopoly on all telecommunications in the United States. In part sparked by fears that the phone companies would exert excessive control over the growing computer industries, the phone company's monopoly was ended by court order in 1982, leading to the breakup of Bell into multiple competing service providers. The President's Analyst hints at public sentiment toward the phone company's monopoly as early as 1967 and articulates a portentous fear of potential abuses of privacy when monopolized technologies are placed in the hands of government agents and private contractors.

Comment on this page