Abstract
In The Long Arm of Moore’s Law: Microelectronics and American Science, Cyrus C. M. Mody delivers a richly crafted account of the semiconductor industry’s coevolution with major changes in American science. The historical sweep of Mody’s narrative takes in the past sixty years, moving from the late 1950s up through the early 2010s, in the course of which he devotes considerable attention to the “first thirty years” (1965 to 1995) of the trend that has come to be widely known as “Moore’s Law” (p. 221).
Named after Gordon E. Moore, Intel cofounder and former director of research at Fairchild Semiconductor, Moore’s Law at base holds that “the density of circuit components per unit area that it is most economically profitable for commercial, high-volume manufacturers to cram onto silicon doubles over a constant time period.” While the period in which component doubling is predicted to occur has changed—that is, it went from Moore’s initial forecast of roughly one year in 1965 to every two years by 1975—the overall trend has maintained. Indeed, Mody underscores to this point the most visible, “most astonishing physical aspect of Moore’s Law,” the significance of which will likely register with even the most casual observers of everyday life in the modern world—the “exponential decrease in the size of electronic components” (p. 5).
By and large, however, this physical aspect of Moore’s Law is not per se Mody’s point of focus. Rather, pushing into fresh territory, he brings a sharp eye to bear on those arguably less visible, but certainly no less significant, social-institutional innovations that have emerged and played out in tandem with, as per Moore’s Law, the pace of innovation in the semiconductor industry. This begins to drive at the real novelty of Mody’s angle of approach, which is grounded in his recognition of material-technological innovation’s deep entanglements with social-institutional arrangements: “social technologies” that facilitate collaboration, “generate knowledge,” and “translate knowledge into products” (p. 4). This relational position on material and social technologies as such—as mutually constituting, as co-evolving—is threaded through and in many ways animates the cases that compose Mody’s study. Indeed, he effectively leverages this position to “provide a new explanation” (p. 15) for the changes in American science since the 1960s, among them the “decline in basic corporate research” (p. 2), increasing commercialization, and a penchant for interdisciplinarity and the short term (p. 4).
Mody applies pressure to received accounts of these changes: he decenters neoliberalism, biotechnology, and the life sciences and posits neither “rupture” nor “epochal break” (p. 14). Instead, he tracks realignments between government, academy, and industry, the institutional nexus or Cold War “triple helix” of American science (pp. 13, 19). For sure, Mody tugs at a good number of historical threads here. His overall argument, however, turns heavily on the departure of the Cold War national-security state from its positon as the chief benefactor, shaper, and customer of computing and microelectronics. Amid the ensuing “civilianization” of these industries, Mody brings to the fore American semiconductor firms, which, having amassed considerable wealth from Cold War defense contracts, stepped into and exerted their weight of influence throughout those institutional spaces of American science previously beholden to the interests of the security state (pp. 16, 172). The takeaway is that these developments stoked realignments of the Cold War settlement of the triple helix, the elements of which were pressed into experimentation with new institutional forms aimed at both accommodating a civilianizing semiconductor industry and boosting its competitiveness in the global economy, particularly in relation to Japanese firms. The industrial consortia, interdisciplinary academic research centers, and other “social technologies” that emerged from this institutional experimentation (p. 188), Mody maintains, beyond successfully positioning the semiconductor industry to compete and keep step with the march of Moore’s Law, were taken up as “templates for the reorganization of American Science in general” (p. 6). Hence the phenomenon—the “long arm” of Moore’s Law.
Pairing extensive archival research with interviews and brief stints of participant observation, Mody offers a history of these institutional realignments, experiments, and innovations, tracking their coevolution with actual and anticipated developments in microelectronics. In so doing he moves through a considerable stretch of terrain, examining electrical engineering at Stanford during the height of Vietnam-era protests against the university’s cozy relationship with the national-security state (Chapter One); IBM’s Josephson computing program (Chapter Two), a dead-end search for an alternative to silicon logic that nevertheless shuffled relations between the “microelectronics industry, American science, and the American state” (p. 48); and subsequently the construction of a global (though largely charismatic and ill-fated) interdisciplinary research network around molecular electronics (Chapter Three). Mody’s conceptual work is centered primarily in these latter two chapters. He proposes a “zig-zag” model of innovation that both departs from the Cold War linear model and tracks with the shifting role of government from a shaper of markets to a host of heterogeneous networks (pp. 54–56, 76–77).
The remaining chapters explore the academic microfabrication center. Pivoting on the failed research network detailed in Chapter Three, Mody turns to this more robust “social technology,” following its stabilization across a set of case studies that examine the National Research and Resource Facility for Submicron Structures (NRRFSS) at Cornell University (Chapter Four); the National Nanofabrication Users Network (NNUN) (Chapter Five); and the place of microelectronics in Nobel laureate Richard Smalley’s “diversified ‘garden’ of organizational and technological experiments” (p. 187) at Rice University (Chapter Six).
In my reading, the cleanest line between Mody’s case studies and his position on coevolution is drawn by his argument that “Moore’s law is not a law of nature in the way that E = mc 2 is” (p. 8). To the extent that Moore’s Law has been interpreted as such, however, Mody argues that both material and social forms of technological innovation have been carried forward by actors who think they are “simply keeping up with Moore’s Law” (p. 10). The text overall, then, in many ways unfolds as a demonstration of both the performative and deterministic aspects of Moore’s Law, a “social fact” made “empirical fact” due to “actors’ perceptions of Moore’s Law as empirical fact” (p. 9). This is a compelling argument. So compelling, in fact, that I was both surprised and disappointed that Mody opted to forego explicit theoretical elaboration beyond the fine few pages offered in the Introduction (pp. 4–10).
This minor disappointment aside, The Long Arm of Moore’s Law is a richly crafted book that will appeal to sociologists and historians of American science and technological innovation. It is ideally suited, moreover, for extended discussion in graduate and advanced undergraduate seminars.