PATHS TO DIGITAL MODERNITY 351
on the United States and Japan. The only people who seemed to be in-
terested in whether the Eastern Bloc could keep up with computerization
in the West were political observers and companies in those industries
that saw the potential to tap into new sales markets or set up production
facilities with licensing agreements.
Computerization, Information Society, and Digital Modernity
Computerization was associated with diff erent terminology and social
concepts in East and West Germany. The classic analyses by Daniel Bell,^3
Alain Touraine,^4 or Karl W. Deutsch,^5 as well as Manuel Castells’ The
Information Age,^6 which was published later, share the idea that the trans-
formation brought about through computer technology constitutes a new
historic era. The subsequent evolution of the Internet then added further
fuel to the fi re of such assessments of the time and predictions of the
future. Metaphors of a revolution driven by technological progress also
appeared in the Eastern Bloc countries within the context of the reform
and modernization eff orts of the 1960s. This then fed into the infl ationary
use of the term “scientifi c-technical revolution” in political propaganda at
the time.^7 The idea of freeing up labor resources through rationalization
was thus portrayed as a new chance for a Communist future that could
be brought about through technological progress. In the Richta Report
inspired by the Prague Spring, this vision of a scientifi c and technolog-
ical utopia was interlaced with a fundamental critique of the alienating
tendencies of state socialism.^8 Drawing on the early writings of Marx,
it pointed to the liberation of the individual within a renewed socialist
utopia while maintaining that civilization had come to a crossroads. As
part of the cybernetics craze that hit most of the Eastern Bloc countries
in the 1960s, this utopia was reduced in a technocratic sense to the level
of data-driven social management and forecasting. After a short heyday,
however, the party leadership within the bloc suppressed these visions.^9
In spite of the various diff erences in detail, these notions all rested on
the idea that industrial society would have to make way for a postindus-
trial society strongly shaped by information technology. Even in the GDR
and the other Eastern Bloc countries, the expectation was that the cur-
rent path of industrial development could be redirected through the com-
puter-supported intensifi cation of production. At the core, these rather
optimistic interpretations were essentially inspired by a new dynamic of
advancement. From this perspective, the social transformation that oc-
curred on the cusp of the 1980s was therefore embedded within a new
way of thinking about progress. In keeping with this line of thought, the