Jacob Bruggeman
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Historian @osuchasecenter working on political histories of computing in modern America | Alum of @JHUhistory, @CamHistory, & @miamiuniversity.
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Articles by Jacob Bruggeman
Don’t Look Now, But the Tech Bros Are Losing
(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock) The Nerd ReichSilicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracyby Gil Durán Avid Reader, 352 pp., $30 IT WAS HARD TO MISS the American tech elite’s MAGA makeover. Tech CEOs poured money into Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and later his inauguration. Elon Musk alone spent a staggering $288 million to help elect Trump and downballot Republicans.
Phreaking Politics in Modern America
In the early 1970s, journalists, policymakers, and corporate executives in the United States grew concerned with a growing group of college students, telephone tinkerers, and electronics hobbyists who dubbed themselves “phone phreaks.” The phreaks, whose name reflected a phonetic play on “phone” and “freak,” were “college students high on electronic circuitry, freckle-faced teen-agers,” “pranksters,” and “blind kids,” wrote Los Angeles Times columnist Maureen Orth.
Peter Thiel Looks Everywhere for the Antichrist Except the Mirror
Peter Thiel on Fox News’ Fox & Friends in 2019(The UnPopulist illustration) When droves of tech bros donning Patagonia puffers queued up opposite neo-Pagans, Satanists, and witches outside the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco last fall, it wasn’t just another day of conventions in the City by the Bay.
The Obama-Era Roots of DOGE
On Wednesday, September 17, several hundred technologists, legislative staff, software developers, open government advocates, and so-called “civic hackers” streamed into an auditorium beneath Capitol Hill for the 7th Annual Congressional Hackathon. Despite a looming shutdown and rising political violence, House Speaker Mike Johnson made an appearance. The ostensible focus of the 2025 event was how to leverage artificial intelligence tools in government.
How Higher Ed Can Ace Civics Education — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
A need to reinvest in civics education has become a bipartisan refrain in recent years. While academics lament declining trust in our institutions and worsening political polarization, civics education has become an often-invoked panacea. But civics has also become a front line in the ongoing culture wars.
Wings, Angels, Tentacles: Talking with Siddhartha Deb
The Light at the End of the World is Siddhartha Deb’s third novel. The novel moves spatially from the center (New Delhi) to the “light” emerging from an edge of the Indian republic—the Andaman Islands. A heterotemporal novel, The Light at the End of the World goes back from near future Delhi to 1984, 1947, and 1859: all key moments in colonial and postcolonial Indian history.
What Previous Government Reform Efforts Tell us About DOGE Original
By Jacob Bruggeman & Casey Eilbert / Made by History March 3, 2025 2:13 PM EST Before there was the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), there was Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s campaign to “reinvent government.” As alarmed critics point to the unprecedented developments of DOGE’s early weeks—aggressive incursions into the U.S. government’s multi-trillion dollar payment infrastructure, the abrupt defunding of USAID, racist comments by youthful engineers and the specter of mass layoffs—Elon...
Sinking the Clipper Chip
With AI becoming increasingly popular, critics of the new technology have cited concerns about privacy and data security. Such objections are nothing new: Thirty years ago, increasingly widespread use of the internet prompted many of the same criticisms.
In the Shadow of Sputnik
January 7, 2025 By Jacob Bruggeman The Soviet space program is not remembered; it is misremembered. The statues of Gagarin rise like monoliths to a triumph that tells only half the story. In the West, we cast it as a sideshow to our own grand narrative: NASA, the moon, the Right Stuff. But the history of the Soviet space program, as John Strausbaugh makes clear in The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned, hardly unfolded so neatly.
What is Rural America?
October 29, 2024 Jacob Bruggeman When you think of rural America, what comes to mind? In his new book, Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is—and Isn’t, historian Steven Conn contends that what we imagine as “rural” is shaped by myths going back to Thomas Jefferson. American literature and political rhetoric frequently portray the rural as a pastoral Eden, a place apart from the forces of modernity.
Disinformation or Shared Search for Meaning?
Regular news readers are likely familiar with headlines describing the recurring “deluge of disinformation” in our political life. Disinformation—distorted or false information disseminated with the desire to deceive those who encounter it—is nothing new. As historians have shown, conspiracy theories, a form of disinformation that many in the media see as the great threat to American life today, have been something of a constant in U.S. political life for more than a century.
Could the AI Evangelists Be Right? — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
Asked about chatbots in 2022, a colleague or professor may have replied, “Huh?” In 2024, however, AI-assisted chatbots are seemingly everywhere: embedded in social-media feeds, integrated into workflows, and visibly open on many a screen in America’s classrooms.
The Politics of Nostalgia
By Jacob Bruggeman Nostalgia seems to be everywhere in politics today. On the left, communitarian movements and concepts like “degrowth" seem to search for a future informed by a human past that was more localized and in touch with the environment. Then too, policy proposals like those clustered in the “Green New Deal” explicitly harken back to the heyday of midcentury and wartime liberalism, when the American never shied but rather embraced big social problems and infrastructure projects.
What We Can Learn From the Luddites
In a November 2023 New York Timesinterview, OpenAI’s on-again, off-again CEO, Sam Altman, was asked about the risks of novel AI technologies and even the ominous possibility of AI-driven human extinction. He responded, rather dismissively, by reaffirming his belief in technology as the driver of human progress. “Yeah, I actually don’t think we’re all going to go extinct,” he said. “I think it’s going to be great.
A Victorian Frankenstein – Jacob Bruggeman
In his 1889–90 fictional portrait of aspiring Victorian artists grasping for success, Henry James observed that novels of the age were “large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary.” Science, technology, and imperial expansion encouraged Enlightenment thinkers and popular broadsides to rhapsodize about the steady march of “progress” and the supposedly rational, modern subjects beating its drum.
Hacking the Humanities — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
We are living through a period described by technologists as an “AI Boom” or “AI Spring.” A swift and impressive gain of function in generative artificial-intelligence systems (AI), made possible by developments in computer-science techniques known as deep neural networking, has given new force to old questions about technology and society. Drawing on new designs for large language models especially, technologists have sustained a period of major investment and growth in the industry.
Learning to Imagine
By Jacob Bruggeman In 1929, Albert Einstein sat for an interview with the Saturday Evening Post. Einstein’s work on general relativity and unified field theory won him a Nobel Prize in 1921 and captivated the public imagination. When the Post interviewer asked about the inner-workings of the physicist's mind, Einstein replied: “I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited.
An Ode to Infrastructure – Jacob Bruggeman
Flash flooding is a powerful reminder that public infrastructure is vulnerable under extreme pressure. In late September, when seven inches of rain fell in New York City within less than 24 hours on the evening of September 28 and early morning of September 29, this fragility was on full display. Tunnel traffic, subway cars, passenger rail, and air travel all ground to a halt as the city’s streets became fast-moving rivers. I experienced marginal effects from the flooding firsthand.
Fordism Comes to the Gallery-and AI Comes for the Artists
“The keyword of the new [20th] century was modernity. Modernity meant believing in technology and not craft, human perfectibility, not original sin. And above all in a ceaseless consumption of things and the images of things.” —Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, Episode One: “Mechanical Paradise” In recent years, the tech industry’s tendency towards promotional mania has accelerated at a rate of speed that might have surprised even Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
Why the Internet Hates Gay People
For kids whose formative years fell in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when home computers ebbed with the widespread availability of portable screens, the practice of covertly spelunking into salacious corners of the Web—often while our parents weren’t home—was something like a rite of passage. Chat rooms like ChatRoulette or Omegle, the old Tumblr, and, of course, porn sites, offered a window into the most mysterious aspect of adult life: sex.
The Pseudo-Ethics of Hackers
You've successfully subscribed to American Purpose Great! Next, complete checkout for full access to American Purpose Welcome back! You've successfully signed in. Success! Your account is fully activated, you now have access to all content. On April 13, half a dozen rifle-wielding FBI agents arrested twenty-one year-old Massachusetts Air National guardsman Jack Teixeira at his family’s home in North Dighton, Massachusetts.
Opinion | Down and Out at the AHA
In early January, nearly a thousand historians gathered on a Friday night in the grand ballroom of the downtown Philadelphia Marriott, quiet but restless. The occasion was James Sweet’s presidential address at the 136th annual American Historical Association. Sweet’s address, a history of one Liverpool family’s corporate conspiracy to obscure the violent origins of its wealth in the African slave trade, ended with reflections on the “presentism” debate he kicked into high gear in 2022.
The Intimate and Interconnected History of the Internet
Where should a history of the Internet begin? If you asked this question to a Zoomer or one of the ever-growing groups of digital natives who can recall viral videos as vividly as awkward school dances, you might expect social media as an answer. Among millennials, a more common response might be the World Wide Web.
The Myth of Libertarian Exit
Imagine if Ayn Rand had written a novel that imported the basic attitudes and ambitions from her famous protagonist John Galt into a steel-willed detective who gallivanted around the Caribbean in an attempt to turn a coup d’état into the stateless society of tomorrow.
What Happens When Cops Seize Crypto and Bitcoin?
Tiffany & Co Releases Those CryptoPunk Pendants And They Are Expensive, Here’s All The Intel “Shall we custom make @TiffanyAndCo CryptoPunk pendants available for CryptoPunk owners to order for 1 week?” Alexandre Arnault, Tiffany & Co Executive Vice President of Product and Communications asked his 20.9k Twitter followers in April. The question was accompanied by a Twitter poll. The …
Pearson Says Blockchain Could Make It Money Every Time E-Books Change Hands
4 hours ago Even as Moscow's war machine crawls across Ukraine's east, trying to achieve the Kremlin's goal of securing full control over the country's industrial heartland, Ukrainian forces are scaling up attacks to reclaim territory in the Russian-occupied south. The Ukrainians have used American-supplied …
Empathy and Its Limits
American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears, by Farah Stockman (Random House, 432 pp., $28) On November 8, 2016, New York Times reporter Farah Stockman walked the campus of Wellesley College in Massachusetts to collect perspectives for a story on the country’s first female president, alumna Hillary Clinton. But as the night wore on, confident expectation was mugged by political reality.
Archivists Serve Historians? A Case of Academic Hubris — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
In early August, archivists and other scholars erupted in protest when the American Historical Association (AHA) wrote a letter asking broad questions about how archives plan to reopen. The AHA framed its letter as an effort to advocate for professional historians and countless other researchers who were without access to most physical archives throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet the letter was received—whatever its intentions—as a callous call for archivists to serve historians.
Helen Hooven Santmyer
Greene County Courthouse Xenia, Ohio By Jacob A. Bruggeman I first visited Xenia, Ohio, a small city in the state’s southwestern corner, on a hot May afternoon in 2018. Headed north from Cincinnati on Interstate 71, smoke started rising out from under the hood of my 1999 Toyota Corolla. I pulled onto the highway’s shoulder, popped the hood, and prepared to do battle with the Toyota’s notoriously oil-burning engine.
Bernard Bailyn at Last: Illuminating History
Bernard Bailyn challenges card-carrying historians and interested citizens alike to embrace intellectual humility and amiability at a time when public discourse has taken a decisive turn away from such virtues. This challenge is evident in Bailyn’s final work, “Illuminating History.” The American historian Bernard Bailyn, who died of heart failure at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts, this summer, was a giant of historical scholarship.
Bernard Bailyn at Last: Illuminating History
(AP Photo/Julia Malakie, File) The American historian Bernard Bailyn,whodiedof heart failure at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts, this summer, was a giant of historical scholarship. After receiving his PhD from Harvard in 1953, Bailyn taught there for nearly a half century until 1991. Bailyn remained active well into retirement. His last book,Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades, was published shortly before his death.
Bernard Bailyn at Last: Illuminating History
December 21, 2020 By Jacob A. Bruggeman The American historian Bernard Bailyn, who died of heart failure at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts, this summer, was a giant of historical scholarship. After receiving his PhD from Harvard in 1953, Bailyn taught there for nearly a half century until 1991. Bailyn remained active well into retirement. His last book, Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades, was published shortly before his death.
Removing Confederate statues does not erase U.S. history
ANALYSIS/OPINION: Confederate statues are coming down across the country as Americans grapple with national conversations about racism in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman.
Opinion: Frivolous lawsuits jeopardize our economic recovery
While America slowly reopens in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the public stands in a legal no man’s land of liability. Businesses are understandably worried about a deluge of lawsuits from consumers who could contract the virus while dining, drinking or simply browsing wares. Employees are concerned over workplace safety. The family of an Illinois Walmart worker, for example, who reportedly told supervisors about symptoms, has filed a wrongful death lawsuit.
Five Classics to Read During the COVID-19 Lockdown
The COVID-19 lockdown has imposed a serious and necessary strain on social lives and mental health everywhere, but there’s a silver lining in the state-enforced solitude: ample time to read. To be sure, the current news cycle isn’t calm, but the chaos on our screens and swelling concern in our communities doesn’t need to detract from the unprecedented seclusion this quarantine spells for our day-to-day lives.
The Brutal and Beautiful Art of Education — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
Tara Westover and her family lived off the grid on Buck’s Peak, a mountainside in Idaho so remote that life there was anchored in “circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant that nothing had changed at all.” Tara’s father, a Mormon fundamentalist whose family had been living on the Peak for a half-century, ruled it as his kingdom, where he prepared for Jesus Christ’s second coming.
Opinion: Frozen lakes are friends not foes
Jacob A. Bruggeman, Opinion contributor Published 2:53 p.m. ET Feb. 24, 2020 Much of Ottawa County, especially along the coast of Lake Erie, was coated with a layer of ice on Thursday morning after getting slammed by wind, snow and freezing rain overnight Wednesday. (Photo: Jon Stinchcomb/News Herald) The last six years have been the warmest in recorded history, and for regions east of the Rockies this winter, temperatures are higher than average.
Opinion: US-Iranian tensions hitting close to home
Jacob Bruggeman, Opinion contributor Published 3:34 p.m. ET Jan. 12, 2020 Graduating with an advanced degree in political science is the harbinger of a hidden penalty: family, friends, and peers expect you to have readymade comments on contemporary events. After President Trump announced on Jan. 3 that Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani was eliminated by airstrike "to stop a war," countless family and friends in Ohio called and texted to ask, "What’s next?" My honest answer: I don’t know.
A More Affectionate America
Cover illustration for Mariner Books (Andre Junget, Mariner Books) by Jacob Bruggeman Today’s politics are pockmarked by our recent crisis of faith in the United States’ democratic institutions and a pervasive distrust of one another. Many sources report of unprecedented polarization, with some detailing a move toward “peak polarization” and an increase in hateful rhetoric.
Heroism Translates Ideals into Action | Jacob Bruggeman
Contemporary American society seems to be rife with divisions, deceptions, and all kinds of demagoguery. Indeed, in what some have dubbed an Age of Wonkery, the labels of ‘divider’, ‘deceiver’, and ‘demagogue’ are daily applied to individuals in the orbit of the public eye, and the application of these tag-line-titles are hotly contested.
Large-scale political change starts with small-scale communities
It's no secret that the American people want change. For all the trouble and terror it's caused, our current political climate has sparked a longing for civic, healthy communities and less hostile hometown politics in the average American. Whether they want "the good old days," or a promise of "a new day on the horizon," every heart has its hopes for a better tomorrow. You can see these hopes in a neighbor's wave, a friend's face, a teacher's desperate lesson on civics.
On Gratitude
Be Thankful (Cindi Albright, Flickr) Date: February 25, 2018Author: The New Herald by Jacob Bruggeman As many of us are brought up, we are told again and again that there is always something to be grateful for, that gratitude is a cornerstone of any life well-lived, and that being grateful is the first step along a lifelong road to joy and purpose. It’s interesting, then, that Gratitude is so clearly avoided by men and women of all ages–most commonly so among the young.
Making the Case for Midwestern Startups
The Midwest is besieged by troubles of all sorts. States like Kentucky, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and my native Ohio are among those with the highest opioid-overdose rates in the country.
Musket Before the Ax: Howells and Ohio
The year 1860 was a predictably good one for William Dean Howells, an up-and-coming man of letters from Ohio. In the four years prior, Howells had been elected as a clerk of the Ohio House of Representatives and took up an editorial post atOhio State Journal. In 1860, he completed a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln and acquired a consulship in Venice, but perhaps more important than either of these considerable achievements was Howells’s pilgrimage to his “holy land”: Boston.
Why Students Should Still Pick a History Major — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the history field has seen a precipitous decline in the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in American colleges. As Benjamin Schmidt, a historian at Northeastern University, reported in the American Historical Association’s Perspectives, the number of history degrees awarded fell by 30 percent—from 34,642 to 24,266 in just nine years from 2008 to 2017. History’s steep decline is not an anomaly, but part and parcel of a broader “crisis” in the humanities.
Less traffic will translate to not-so-damned roads in Michigan and elsewhere, as well as fewer traffic-related deaths, Bruggeman writes
Jacob Bruggeman Published 11:00 p.m. ET Sept. 28, 2019 Gov. Gretchen Whitmer ran for office with a bold slogan: “Fix the damn roads.” But for state's like hers there’s a compelling case to be made that fixing the damn railways might also be a great benefit. Across the Midwest, roads are indeed crumbling — but so are railways. For example, a couple weeks ago in Dupo, Illinois, multiple train cars derailed and caught fire.
Gov. Mike DeWine's vaping ban promotes bad policy
Jacob Bruggeman, Opinion contributor Published 3:35 p.m. ET Sept. 27, 2019 Vaping isn't actually harmless, recent studies show. getty images Vaping isn't harmless, studies show. (Photo: File/Thinkstock) E-cigarettes, or vapes, have received a wave of national attention recently. After several people died from vaping-related illnesses, President Donald Trump’s administration pulled out the prohibition playbook and began considering banning flavored e-cigarettes altogether.
Dayton shooting — Rep. Keller no stranger to controversy, it's her brand: Today's talker
By Jacob Bruggeman Ohio Rep. Candice Keller, R-Middletown, has done it again. Following the Dayton shooting in which a gunman killed nine — including his sister — and injured two dozen, Keller took to Facebook and blamed the human wreckage on everything but the shooter himself. According to Keller, America’s mass shootings are caused by Democrats in Congress who don’t value the Second Amendment, "drag queen advocates," deadbeat dads, "open borders" and pot smokers.
Opinion: Rep. Keller's no stranger to controversy - it's her brand
Jacob Bruggeman , Opinion contributor Published 12:47 a.m. ET Aug. 6, 2019 Representative Candice Keller listens to statements in the House of Representatives at the Ohio Statehouse in downtown Columbus, Ohio, on Wednesday, June 26, 2019. (Photo: Sam Greene/The Enquirer) Ohio Rep. Candice Keller, R-Middletown, has done it again.
For male survivors of sexual assault — like me — #MeToo can help change culture of silence
Jacob A. Bruggeman, Opinion contributor Published 7:00 a.m. ET July 26, 2019 #MeToo has upset many American men, but avoiding conversations about masculinity and sexual assault makes it difficult for male survivors to get help. #MeToo is still making its mark. It has already taken down hundreds of allegedly abusive and wicked men, resulted in policy changes across industries and brought about a shift in the culture that is more accepting of those who report sexual abuse.
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