PATHS TO DIGITAL MODERNITY 357
ogy), and then later the Chinese (all areas). This talk of falling behind
reappeared over and over again, until it began to fade after the fi rst crisis
in the so-called “tiger economies.”
The socialist counterpart to the Western term “third industrial revo-
lution” was “scientifi c-technical revolution” (Wissenschaftlich-technische
Revolution, or WTR). This idea became a key rhetorical phrase through-
out the Eastern Bloc within the context of the system rivalry. A look at
its genesis and metamorphoses reveals the strategies that politicians and
functional elites in the state socialist countries adopted to deal with the
issue of technology. The idea of the “scientifi c-technical revolution” had
been introduced by the Irish physicist John Desmond Bernal, whose 1954
work Science in History appeared in the GDR in 1961. It later made its way
to other state socialist countries and soon became a classic work in scien-
tifi c literature. Bernal sought to use this term to describe a revolutionary
process that took place in the twentieth century in which most areas of
life in industrialized societies underwent what might be termed a pro-
cess of “scientifi cation” (Verwissenschaftlichung). Essentially, as early as
the 1950s Bernal predicted that the manual labor done by workers would
be taken over by machines and electronically controlled devices, thereby
doing away with hard and monotonous tasks.^25 One of the defi ning charac-
teristics of this WTR was the use of electronic control systems in produc-
tion. In 1970, moreover, Walter Ulbricht wrote in a draft proposal for the
politburo that the success of this revolution “would make it possible for the
GDR economy to catch up to the level of productivity in West Germany.”^26
Despite the system rivalry and the diff erent trajectories of technology
policy in both systems, the visions for the future in East and West Ger-
many were quite similar until the end of the 1960s. The dream of fac-
tories devoid of humans and people liberated from having to do hard
manual labor was just as prevalent in the theoretical writings of socialist
technical visionaries as in the theories of Western European Marxists.^27
Unmistakably, however, by the beginning of the 1970s, these optimistic
visions of the future had lost their appeal in the West. The introduction of
computer science as a university subject, in contrast, indicated an at least
somewhat positive attitude toward electronic data processing. Neverthe-
less, computers and microelectronics appeared rather seldom in popular
science literature and the press until the end of the 1970s because the
majority of the population did not seem to be interested in most of the
uses for this technology. The optimistic faith in the socialist future also
waned among the citizens of the GDR, but computerization was not an
indicator of this in the East.
In the Communist bloc countries, offi cial statements proclaimed that
“socialist automation,” together with the planned economy, would bring