“The Infernal Machine” Author on Power, Polarization and Political Violence

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, we look back to an earlier time of extremist turmoil. New York, in the early 20th century, when violent anarchists threatened the established order. And it’s the focus of Steven Johnson’s new book, “The Infernal Machine.” And here he is discussing it with Walter Isaacson.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you. And Steven Johnson, welcome to the show.

STEVEN JOHNSON, AUTHOR, “THE INFERNAL MACHINE”: Hey, thank you. It’s great to be back.

ISAACSON: You know, all of your wonderful books, they tend to look at an intersection, an interweaving of technology and big social movements and issues and policies. And this latest one, “The Infernal Machine,” referring to dynamite, talks about the invention of dynamite, then the rise of anarchism as a political philosophy, and then the backlash from state surveillance and policing. So, let’s start with the invention of dynamite. We all know Alfred Nobel is the founder of the Nobel Peace Prize, but of course, he’s the guy who invents dynamite. Tell me how that starts the story.

JOHNSON: Yes, it’s kind of a tragic story in some ways. Nobel had been obsessed with this newly discovered chemical of nitroglycerin, which was really the first real innovation in explosions since gunpowder. It had just been discovered in the 1840s. And most people who had messed around with natural glycerin decided it was just too unstable, that you really couldn’t handle it in a way that didn’t cause it to just detonate randomly. A number of people who had explored it in that period, you know, were either injured or killed from their experiments. But Nobel got obsessed with this idea that there was, in a sense, a way to tame this extraordinary new chemical and he had this vision of what was described as the controlled explosion. But if you could figure out a way to kind of detonate it on command in a safe way and create a kind of portable form of it that could be transported without it absolutely blowing up that it would revolutionize civil engineering, that you could build railroads and, you know, carve out new mines and tunnels and build skyscrapers, even without cigarettes.

ISAACSON: Well, you talk, and whenever you write about technology, and your books are always about inventions and technology and innovation, that there tends to be a trend, not always, but tends to be a trend where it empowers the individual. In other words, it takes power from centralized authorities. I think you say, “The invention of dynamite follows a pattern that has generally been true of scientific advances over the long-term, science and technology puts ever-increasing power, power in the sense of energy, not politics, in the hands of smaller and smaller groups.” I mean, that’s true with everything from the internet to social media and to dynamite. And so, that causes a political repercussion.

JOHNSON: Yes, it was part of the story of kind of the positive contribution of dynamite, right? You could have a smaller team, you could have a — you needed vast amounts of gunpowder to kind of — and people to move that gunpowder around if you were going to blast your way through a mountainside, but you could do it with a much smaller team with a cheap portable canister of dynamite. So, it basically, you know, created a more compact capturing of energy that could be deployed in the service of good things like building railroads. But it turned out that a number of people in — initially in Europe and then the United States began to realize that it gave them a different kind of power, a way to stage these violent acts that one single person or a small group could do that could blow up a cafe or it could blow up a courthouse. And we see in the kind of 1870s, 1880s, the emergence of really the first real example of terrorism as we know it today culminating kind of famously — and there’s a long set piece in the book about this, in the assassination of Alexander II, the Russian czar, who was killed by really histories for suicide bomber. And that just spreads across the globe. In fact, the political radicals, particularly the anarchists get so intimately connected with this new innovation from Nobel that they become known as the Dynamite Club.

ISAACSON: But these are anarchists, and that’s a new political movement that comes up at the same time that dynamite comes up. And, you know, the anarchists are everybody from Emma Goldman to Alexander Berkman and Peter Kropotkin, they’re all great characters in your book. Tell me, what was their political philosophy?

JOHNSON: Yes, it’s interesting. It’s — in some ways, it’s been lost in our popular perception of what anarchism is. In some ways, it’s gotten saturated with the bombs that they set off. Because their core idea was that industrialization had created this equally violent society and were just the kind of body count and carnage of the emerging factory system in that period was enormously violent, far more violent than any of the acts of terrorism that they were perpetuating. And they believe —

ISAACSON: I mean, to explain that, it’s like you talk about the reaper factory of McCormick, building the reapers, or the U.S. steel — the steel factories. People are dying every week, right?

JOHNSON: Yes, yes. I mean, there was there was some kind of survey of one county in industrial — outside of industrial Pittsburgh, you know, over a year. There’s something like 529 deaths. And just — that’s just deaths, right? But the number of dismemberments from these industrial accidents. And of course, each one is an accident. No one is trying to kill the workers, but it was predictable that it was going to happen. You could see this was happening. The railroad industry was incredibly dangerous at that point. And so, the anarchists believed that there was actually a better way to organize society and that we had actually lived through it — in during the Renaissance, basically, in small, you know, communities of artisans and guilds where there wasn’t a lot of social hierarchy, there wasn’t a giant government, there weren’t giant corporations, there weren’t these grotesque factories. And life had been pretty good back then. And so, people like Kropotkin and Goldman, in particular, were arguing for, in a sense, slowing down the pace of technological innovation, reigning in these, you know, huge titans of industry and also large government agencies and returning that almost kind of village life.

ISAACSON: Let me read something else from your book, which is measured against the landscape Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman encountered as young adults, even the much-lamented divisions of the Trump era look far less severe. Was the polarization 100 years ago worse than it is now?

JOHNSON: I think you have to say that it was. One, you’re talking about a world where there’s so much more political violence. You know, we’ve just come off of January 6th and obviously, that was a shocking event. But the number of assassinations, the number of riots, the number of, you know, terrorist acts, you know, domestic terrorist acts was just far more extreme, you know, 110 years ago, 120 years ago. And if you think about the values, like the range of political positions, right, you know, one of the major events that happen, in the book, is the Ludlow Massacre in — where Rockefeller employed militia burned down an encampment of striking workers in Colorado and end up killing a number of them, including some children. And you basically have a situation where, like, one side of the debate is saying, listen, if people go on strike to, like, reduce their — you know, their, you know, 60-hour workweek down to 40-hour workweek, then it’s an appropriate response to set a militia on them. That’s one side of the spectrum. And the other side thinks, we should eliminate both capitalism and big government and return to medieval, you know, guild driven society. You know, those were — those poles do not exist anymore, right? We’re in a much more narrow part of the political spectrum now. And so, I think it does give us some context about the society we live in now, looking back at a period really not that far in the past.

ISAACSON: The third theme in your book that gets woven into it is that the bombings and the anarchism lead to the rise of a surveillance policing tactics. And that includes some new inventions, like the fingerprint being a new idea, but also, to the rise of what we see in policing now of keeping track of people. Tell me how that fits in.

JOHNSON: In a way, that’s actually where I began in this project. That I was interested. As you said, I’m interested in new ideas, new scientific ideas, new technological ideas. And the first thought I had was maybe there was a book about the history of forensic sciences and modern kind of policing and techniques of identification and things like that. I mean, one of the crazy things, when we think about it, you know, 120 or 130 years ago, before this stuff was developed, if you — there was no standardized form of identification. So, if you were arrested, you could just make up a name and they really had no way to figure out who you were. And so, there’s a flurry of activity, in large part, as I document in the book, kind of triggered by anarchist activity, in — particularly in Europe led by people like Alphonse Bertillon where they start developing these techniques of basically what we would now call biometrics. So, using photography, measuring body parts. And then the science of fingerprint technology starts to emerge right as the anarchist threat is starting to emerge as well. And they kind of co-develop alongside each other. And it’s a fascinating history. And there’s some really interesting characters in the — in New York in that period on the either running the NYPD or part of the NYPD, particularly these two guys, Arthur Woods and Joseph Faurot, who really are largely forgotten, I think. Faurot kind of brings fingerprint technology over from Europe and he gets derided. They’re like, that’s just a fad and a London fad, even worse. But he kind of fights for this case and he builds a little rogue identification bureau inside of the NYPD and he wins a couple of cases and slowly starts to prove out this new science. And so, it’s the — in a sense, the battle between kind of two ideas, the idea of anarchism and the idea of terrorism and on the other side, the idea of using this new kind of state supported systems of surveillance and analysis and identification to keep that threat in check.

ISAACSON: Well, another important character near the end of the book is one most people have heard of, of course, J. Edgar Hoover. And there’s a passage about him that, you know, we think of Hoover as investigating Martin Luther King or Bobby Kennedy. But there’s a passage about him, about how he helps create scientific policing. It says, “When historians catalog the momentous inventions of history, the printing press, the telescope, the steam engine, they rarely include indexing logarithms in their canon of breakthrough ideas. But tools that help us explore the ever-larger pools of information and widen the net we can cast in those pools often turn out to trigger inflection points in history.” Tell me about J. Edgar Hoover’s editorial file system.

JOHNSON: Yes, Hoover, crucially — and you know, this has been well documented, but it’s central to this story. Was really trained as a librarian. I mean, he worked at the Library of Congress as a teenager, and there was a new file system that had been developed for the Library of Congress around that point. It just made it easy to, like, manage all the information so you could find what you were looking for. And when he began working for the — what was then called the Bureau of Investigation, became the FBI he, was set in charge of what was called the radical division, which was to deal with the anarchist threat and other, you know, kind of political radicals in a period around 1917. And he set up this system modeled after the Library of Congress called the editorial file system. And it was basically what we would now call a kind of relational database where you had index cards that were connected to both — between people, places, events, publications, alleged crimes, and they’re all kind of cross referenced. And so, if you were trying to pull, you know, all the potential, you know, subversives who were at a particular rally at a given moment in time, you could gather that information because of this technique that Hoover had designed, you know, 10 times faster than you used to be able to do before. And one person could do it instead of 10 people. It’s the same kind of principle behind dynamite in a way. You get more efficient gathering of information. And that was the technique that — it was the first deployment of the editorial file system and really the first attempt to kind of weaponize library science, which is effectively what Hoover is doing, was used to deport Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman to revolutionary Russia in 1919.

ISAACSON: In reading your book, I couldn’t help thinking often about what you’re actually doing now, because you work part-time at Google now, or quite a bit of your time at Google now, creating something called NotebookLM, which is a large language model type chatbot like ChatGPT, or for that matter, Google Gemini, but it trains on your own data, you get to put in the data set you want. It’s absolutely fascinating and it sort of feeds into this notion of data science that you talk about in the book. Explain what you’re doing there.

JOHNSON: Yes. I mean, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in, you know, it’s a shared interest of you and I both have, Walter, which is, the history of tools for thought and using software to help us write and think and create. And what became clear about two years ago is that these new language models could be harnessed in a way to make that process way more effective. And what we started to develop — so basically, Google kind of reached out to me and said, hey, would you like to help us develop a tool that you’ve been kind of dreaming of your whole life? Like, why don’t you come and help build it? Because we now have this technology that could be really extraordinary in doing this. And so, what NotebookLM does is basically, as you suggested this, instead of just chatting with an open-ended model based on the kind of general knowledge of the model, you give NotebookLM a set of documents that are important to you. So. in my case, it might be documents for a book that I’m working on or it could be your work documents or personal documents, whatever it is. And at that point, once you’ve uploaded them, it’s almost as if the model becomes an expert in the work that you’ve given it to see, and it reduces hallucinations dramatically, it — and it makes it much more personalized, right? It’s able to talk about the information that you care about, not just kind of general information of the world. And so, for instance, I have — in NotebookLM, I have one notebook where I have loaded up 7,000 quotations from books that I’ve read over the last 20 years, like my research notes, just that I’ve been collecting all these quotes from books. And I can go in there and say, OK, you know, what are some of the most interesting things about ant colonies or dolphins or the history of forensic science, you know, create a little overview with citations, with references and original quotes so that I can get a sense of the landscape in my research notes. And it’ll generate that document in 30 seconds. And so, my ability to explore these vast troves of information and to basically — the complex, laborious work of assembling the information can be done in an automatic way. And then I can — I’m freed up to actually have the important thoughts and to figure out how to creatively put it on the page. So, I’m very excited about it.

ISAACSON: The theme of your book is partly about how data science can help us in really great ways, good ways, crime solving, and also perhaps give more power to the government to keep an eye on us. In general, as we look at the data science that’s happening now, the ability to process just, huge amounts of data and find patterns, how do you think that’s going to affect society?

JOHNSON: I think in — you know, with any technological revolution that’s significant, they’re going to be unanticipated negative downstream consequences, that just happens when you have complex technologies. But I think, particularly with the A.I. technology we have today, that the opportunities for it to be used for good and for — you know, it’s an extraordinary technology for just enhancing your ability to understand material. And since anybody now has access to a tutor that can explain things to them and help them dive deeper into material. And so, in the end, I think technologies that enhance human understanding and allow us to be more creative or to come up with more original ideas that while that technology will inevitably be deployed for nefarious ends, in some cases, we still, in the end, are going to be excited that we have this technology because it is fundamentally an enhancer of our understanding of the world.

ISAACSON: Steven Johnson, thank you so much for joining us.

JOHNSON: Thank you.