The Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna invites to its regular Transformative Salon on May 7, 2026 at 7:00 PM, this time with Besnik Pula (Virginia Tech/RECET), commented on by Sheng Peng (RECET). The Salon will be moderated by Rosamund Johnston (RECET).
Venue: Café Merkur, Florianigasse 18, 1080 Vienna.
The digital age is conventionally narrated as a Western story, one in which liberal capitalism's institutional flexibility enabled the technological transformation that state socialism's rigidity precluded. This Transformative Salon challenges that narrative by arguing that the intellectual and institutional history of computing's social promise was a genuinely global one, shaped as much by developments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as by those in the United States.
Drawing on research for the book Democratic Machines, the talk reconstructs the striking theoretical convergence between Daniel Bell's post-industrial society thesis and Radovan Richta's theory of the scientific-technical revolution (STR). Despite originating on opposite sides of the Cold War divide, both frameworks rested on a common assumption: that the transformation of industrial society through computing and scientific knowledge was properly a top-down, institutionally managed process, to be directed by a professional-technical elite, whether Bell's meritocratic knowledge class or Richta's party-guided scientific intelligentsia. Both visions, the paper argues, were expressions of a shared mid-twentieth-century faith in technocratic governance that transcended ideological boundaries.
The talk examines the distinct but structurally parallel failures of both visions in the 1970s. In the United States, computing was deployed extensively but primarily as an instrument of managerial control and deskilling, generating investment without the promised social transformation. In the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the STR's ambitions were defeated by specific institutional pathologies of the command economy: fragmented industrial capacity, bureaucratic obstacles to diffusion, and ultimate surrender to Western technological dependency. These were different crises with different causes, not generic illustrations of a single systemic failure.
The talk will suggest that the post-industrial framework, including Manuel Castells' influential application of it to explain Soviet collapse, misreads the East European experience by treating the absence of informationalism as intellectual failure rather than recognizing it as the defeat of a sophisticated, parallel vision of digital modernity. A genuinely comparative history of the digital age requires taking that vision seriously on its own terms.
The talk will be followed by a public discussion.
Besnik Pula is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech, specializing in political economy, social theory, and global development in Central and Eastern Europe. At Virginia Tech, he also directs the International Studies Program and is an affilated faculty with the Department of Sociology, School of Public and International Affairs, the Center for European and Transatlantic Studies, and the Center for Future Work Places and Practices. During the Spring and Summer of 2026, Besnik is Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna's Department of Political Science and the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET).
Sheng Peng is a postdoctoral researcher at RECET. His research specializations include Cold War history and the history of technology transfer. He has recently published his first monograph Jimmy Carter and China: Multilateral Competition in the Global Cold War with Columbia University Press.
Rosamund Johnston is a postdoctoral researcher at RECET. She is the author of Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969 (Stanford UP, 2024) and Havel v Americe (Host, 2019).
FREE ENTRY! No registration required!
