Network Euphoria, Super-Information Systems and the West German Plan for a National Database System

Abstract

Much attention has been devoted to planning as the key concept in political discourse of the Federal Republic from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Much less attention has been paid to the closely related notion of information. At the turn of the 1970s, one of the most important initiatives of the West German government in the informational domain was a proposed national database network. The conception of politics that underlay this project bundled the utopian aspirations associated with the use of computers to integrate and analyse information with the conviction that more, better and different kinds of information would make complex, industrial societies like the Federal Republic more governable. The West German database network embodied two complementary modernist visions: The dream of total data integration and the antithetical but equally seductive documentarian belief that the problems of information management could be solved by reducing the symbolic field within which information was always embedded to stable, elemental units of meaning. However, the plan for a national database network collapsed before it could even fully make it onto the drawing board. This article argues that the project failed not because of privacy concerns, but because these modernist visions quickly ran up against limits that were as much political and conceptual as technological. In the end all that was left was a documentation system for the federal government in which the connections to social planning, which had provided much of the original impetus for the system, had all but disappeared.