Star Wars Stories
The automation scare came roaring back to life in the 1980s. We’ve seen that
narratives often recur in mutated forms. Sometimes the new narratives make use
of new words, but sometimes an old word comes back. Figure 14.1 shows an
enormous spike of automation in the early 1980s. Use of the word robot, coined
in the 1920s, also shows an enormous spike in the early 1980s. One possible
explanation: the contagiousness of robot stories was encouraged by the
phenomenal success of home computer manufacturers Atari and Apple, which
led people to believe that technical progress was accelerating. A company called
The Robot Store began manufacturing and selling humanoid robots in 1983.
These robots looked like people, and the company’s president predicted that
between 10% and 20% of American households would own robots within two
years.15 In fact, these devices were practically useless, and the product line
flopped.
Consistent with this observed spike of the word robot around 1980, we
observe a sequence of very successful robot movies around the same time,
showing how contagion can change over time and bring new viral stories with it.
George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy, a sequence of three movies that appeared
between 1977 and 1983, featured the world’s most famous (to date) robots, R2-
D2 and C-3PO. The American television cartoon feature The Transformers,
which focused on the adventures of gigantic robots with the ability to transform
themselves into vehicles and weaponry, aired from 1984 to 1987. Both of these
series were accompanied by massive sales of children’s toy figures. Blade
Runner (1982) and The Terminator (1984) were other successful robot films of
that time.
Of course, robots had appeared in movies long before the 1970s, and they
continue to do so today. In fact, robots in movies precede even the word robot
coined by Čapek, the Czech playwright, which started to go viral in 1922.
Notably, film robots (or automatons) were called dummies (as in The Dummy,
1917) or mechanical men (as in L’uomo meccanico, 1921). Many more robots
appeared in movies after 1922, notably Futura in Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis,
which called a robot a Machinen-Mensch, or Machine-Man. However, most
films featuring robots were B-grade horror movies with wildly implausible and
juvenile themes, analogous to space-aliens-destroy-the-world films that have had

relatively little impact on public thinking.16 These mostly silly movies probably
did not have much impact on economic activity except where they may have lent
emotional color to fears about the automated future.
Another spike in successful robot movies preceded the automation scare,
1957–64. Film robots of that era included Ro-Man in The Robot Monster (1953),
Tobor (robot spelled backward) in Tobor the Great (1954), Chani in Devil Girl
from Mars (1954), the Venusian Robots in Target Earth (1954), Robby the Robot
in Forbidden Planet (1956), Kronos in Kronos: Destroyer of the Universe
(1957), the Colossus in The Colossus of New York (1957), and M.O.G.U.E.R.A.
in The Mysterians (1957).
A significantly mutated form of the automation narrative came back with the
twin recessions of 1980 and 1981–82, when the unemployment rate reached into
the double digits. The unemployment encouraged the thought that automation
might again be responsible for the loss of jobs, an idea that must have fed back
into reduced aggregate demand and even higher unemployment. In 1982,
Andrew Pollack of the New York Times discerned a “new automation,”
exemplified by the now very visible beginnings of automation of offices:
Those affected so far by office automation have been mainly secretaries—
who are still in short supply—and other clerical workers, whose tasks can be
speeded by replacing typewriters with electronic word processors and filing
cabinets with computerized storage systems. But new office automation
systems are affecting management as well, because they give managers the
ability to call up information out of the company computers and analyze it
themselves, a function that once required a staff of subordinates and middle-
level management.17
Once again, a narrative went viral that we had reached a singularity that made all
past experience with labor-saving machinery irrelevant, that might just now be
producing a huge army of unemployed. “I don’t see where we can run to this
time,”18 Pollack says. This viral narrative may well be the real reason that these
twin 1980s recessions were so damaging.
As Figure 14.1 shows, there was a third spike in automation around 1995.
Once again, narratives surged that a singularity was at hand that made all past
experience with labor-saving devices obsolete. In 1995 at the very beginning of
the Internet boom, there was a narrative about the advent of computer networks: