Who is J. C. R. Licklider?

A psychologist who in the 1960s led the Information Processing Techniques Office at the US agency ARPA and sowed the seeds of what became the internet. He advocated "man-computer symbiosis". The book *Plurality* makes him the central figure of chapter 3-3, "The Lost Dao".

What dream did the internet we use every day start from? The book Plurality shines a light on a psychologist who studied how we hear sound, as one of the people who drew that dream. Much of Licklider's dream has not yet come true, in the book's assessment.

In short

J. C. R. Licklider was an American psychologist. His field was psychoacoustics, the study of how sound is heard. In the 1960s he led the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at ARPA, a research agency of the US Department of Defense, and sowed the seeds of a network of computers linking universities: what later became the internet. He was commonly known as "Lick" [1].

The book Plurality makes Licklider the central figure of chapter 3-3, "The Lost Dao". Chapter 5-6 calls him "our hero in The Lost Dao" [1][2].

Connection to Plurality

The words that open chapter 3-3. Chapter 3-3 opens with a sentence from Licklider's essay "Computers and Government" [1]:

"(D)ecisions about the development and exploitation of computer technology must be made not only "in the public interest" but in the interest of giving the public itself the means to enter into the decision-making processes that will shape their future."

The book repeats this sentence in chapter 7-0, "Policy", as the reason why the legitimacy of technology must come not from military technocracy but from public engagement [4].

From psychology to computing. According to the book, Licklider received his PhD in psychoacoustics in 1942. While studying human performance in high-stakes interactions with technology, such as aviation, his attention turned to interacting with the "computing machine". At MIT he helped found Lincoln Laboratory, among other things, and he became Vice President of BBN, an early MIT spin-off [1].

Man-computer symbiosis. In his 1960 paper "Man-Computer Symbiosis", Licklider wrote that "in due course...'machines' will outdo the human brain in most of the functions we now consider exclusively within its province", but that "(t)here will...be a fairly long interim during which the main advances will be made by men and computers working together". He expected that "those years should be intellectually the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind" [1]. → Collaborative technology

The "Intergalactic Computer Network". Under ARPA's second director, Jack Ruina, Licklider was appointed to lead the newly formed IPTO. He spent only two years at ARPA, but, the book writes, laid the groundwork for much of what followed in the next forty years [1].

Licklider seeded "time sharing" projects, in which many users share one computer, at universities around the US. The five universities supported, Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, UCLA and Carnegie Mellon, went on to become the core of computer science. He also supported the research center of Douglas Engelbart, which produced the mouse among other things. And he dubbed the network of collaboration between these hubs, "with his usual tongue-in-cheek", the "Intergalactic Computer Network", hoping it would become a model of collaboration and shared governance through computers [1]. Chapter 4-4 of the book rereads this 1963 memo, noting that "a core aim of Lick's 'Intergalactic Computer Network' was to facilitate the sharing of digital assets, such as computation, storage and data" [5]. → Property and contract

The computer as a communication device. After Licklider left, Robert Taylor, whose research field was also psychoacoustics, moved to IPTO and eventually, in charge of it, commissioned BBN to build the first working prototype of the ARPANET. In their 1968 article "The Computer as a Communication Device", the book writes, the two articulated their vision for the future of personal and social computing, anticipating the culture of personal computers, the internet and smartphones [1].

Chapter 4-2 of the book takes from this article the idea that online communities "will be communities not of common location, but of common interest." It also notes that the only challenge the two foresaw was ensuring that being "on line" would be a right rather than a privilege [6]. → ⿻ Publics

Two scenarios. According to the book, as early as 1980, while TCP/IP (the internet's basic protocols) was coalescing, Licklider foresaw in "Computers and Government" "two scenarios" for the future of computing: it could be dominated and its potential stifled by monopolistic corporate control, or there could be a full societal mobilization that made computing serve and support democracy [1]. For the first scenario, Licklider projected ills including the following [1]:

Pervasive surveillance and public distrust of government.
Paralysis of government's ability to regulate or enforce laws, as they fall behind the dominant technologies citizens use.
Debasement of creative professions.
Monopolization and corporate exploitation.
Pervasive digital misinformation.
Siloing of information that undermines much of the potential of networking.
Government data and statistics becoming increasingly inaccurate and irrelevant.
Control by private entities of the fundamental platforms for speech and public discourse.

The book writes that the later backlash against Big Tech closely resembled these warnings [1].

The layers that were never built. According to the book, what prompted Licklider to write this essay was ARPA's shift in focus from supporting networks to research closer to weapons. The layers that Licklider and Ted Nelson considered essential, such as identity, privacy and security, asset sharing and commerce, were never built into the internet in the end. Licklider died in 1990 [1][3].

The starting point of Part 4. Chapter 4-0 of the book writes that Licklider "saw a far wider range of fundamental protocols as foundational to a network society than have thus far been manifest in internet protocols. Yet his analysis was more a laundry list than a philosophical analysis." Reorganizing it from the concepts of ⿻ is the task of Part 4 [7]. → Rights operating system

The noisy room. The discussion of voting in chapter 5-6 uses as an analogy a phenomenon Licklider studied: you can still hear your conversation partner in a noisy room, partly because unrelated noise tends to cancel out on average [2].

The most successful industrial policy. Chapter 7-0 calls Licklider's IPTO "perhaps the most successful example of industrial policy in American and perhaps world history". But Licklider's aim was not regional development; it was to realize a vision of human-computer symbiosis, attack-resilient networking and the computer as a communication device. "⿻ builds closely on Lick's very much unfinished vision," the book writes [4]. At the same time, it says that because the ARPA model was centered on the military, some of its basic elements are a poor fit for contemporary digital life [4].

Different years in different editions. The year of "Computers and Government" is given as 1980 in the English edition, and as 1979 in the Japanese and Traditional Chinese editions [1][3].

Main ideas

According to the book and those around it, Licklider's ideas can be summed up in four points.

Man-computer symbiosis: before AI replaces people, there will be a long era of people and computers working together [1].
The computer as a communication device: computers will become tools linking communities joined by common interest [6].
Means for the public to take part in decisions: letting the public itself decide the direction in which technology develops [3][4].
Two scenarios: the future of computing divides between heading toward monopoly and serving democracy [1].

What the authors and those around them have said

Glen Weyl. In his 2022 review "Sovereign Nonsense", Weyl wrote that most of the technological vision described in The Sovereign Individual had already appeared in research papers such as Licklider's "Computers and Government", and described Licklider as perhaps the first founder of the internet [8]. On a podcast the same year, he said that the most influential technologies of the last 60 to 70 years came out of the projects of Licklider and Engelbart, which began as a network of user-experience researchers [9].
The DeSoc paper (2022). Puja Ohlhaver, Weyl and Vitalik Buterin wrote that a decentralized society (DeSoc) would advance Licklider's vision of "man-computer symbiosis" in an "Intergalactic Computer Network" [10].
Reverse alignment (2026). An essay in Noema by Weyl and others cited the ARPANET that Licklider led, and the open standard-setting that grew up alongside it, as a precedent in which technology and institutions cannot be separated [11]. → Reverse alignment
6-Pack of Care. Tang's 6-Pack of Care names Licklider's "Man-Computer Symbiosis" as one source of the word for its sixth pack, "Symbiosis". In the third pack, too, it places this paper in the lineage of the idea that Civic AI should be an "apprentice" to people rather than their "replacement" [12][13].
A Japanese introduction. A note post by ryo introduces the book's argument: the functions Licklider and others envisioned, such as identity checks, payments and secure data sharing, which take effort and make no money but which society cannot do without, were left unbuilt, and Licklider foresaw the consequences as eight futures [14].

Sources

Plurality, 3-3 "The Lost Dao" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 5-6 "⿻ Voting" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-6/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, Japanese edition, 3-3 "失われた道" (The Lost Dao) — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/jpn/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 7-0 "Policy" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/7-0/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-4 "Property and Contract" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-4/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-2 "Association and ⿻ Publics" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-2/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-0 "Rights, Operating Systems and ⿻ Freedom" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-0/eng/ ［CC0］
E. Glen Weyl, "Sovereign Nonsense" (2022-01-18) — https://www.radicalxchange.org/updates/blog/sovereign-nonsense/
Hear This Idea, "Glen Weyl on Pluralism, Radical Markets, and Social Technology" (2022-03-15) — https://hearthisidea.com/episodes/glen/
Ohlhaver, Weyl and Buterin, "Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul" (2022) — https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763
E. Glen Weyl, James Evans and Chris White, "What Humanity Needs To Flourish In The Next Decade" (Noema, 2026-07-21) — https://www.noemamag.com/what-humanity-needs-to-flourish-in-the-next-decade/
6-Pack of Care, "Pack 6: Symbiosis" — https://civic.ai/6/ ［CC0］
6-Pack of Care, "Pack 3: Competence" — https://civic.ai/3/ ［CC0］
ryo, "『Plurality』って何？ Web2.0 の夢を+AI でやり直す" (What is Plurality? Redoing the dream of Web 2.0 with AI) (in Japanese) — https://note.com/ryryo/n/nd2ad711aee5d

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