From closed world discourse to digital utopianism: the changing face of responsible computing at Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (1981–1992)

Abstract

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) began in 1981 as a group of computer scientists concerned about nuclear destruction. Early CPSR members analysed military planning documents and levelled technical critiques at how computers were to be used in battle, highlighting the limits of computing technologies. Although early CPSR arguments were primarily technical, as responsible professionals their practices were based on a collective morality and a willingness to question their profession's economic self-interest. As the Cold War thawed in 1989, CPSR met a series of challenges, including financial issues, leadership turnover, and a changing and expanding role for information technology. CPSR emerged from this crisis with a renewed focus on "civil liberties" that was largely underwritten by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Although CPSR's civil liberties advocacy sometimes retained its early arguments and practices by addressing the limitations of information technologies, they also adopted the emerging views of Silicon Valley's "digital utopianism," advocating for the growth of information technology. We describe this seemingly contradictory shift in responsibility along three axes: the use of standpoint epistemology for responsible computing, a transition from professional choice to lobbying, and a transition from substantivism to instrumentalism. In this paper, we characterize an important instance of collective responsibility for computing by tracing the evolution of CPSR's first decade of practices, techniques, and arguments with an eye towards the challenges of responsible computing today.

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