Review of Divided Highways, by Tom Lewis — and some thoughts on techno-utopian disillusionment
- Society’s transition from a techno-utopian attitude to distrust
- How to pay for such a massive project
- Engineers building systems without understanding the social consequences
- Technology’s trajectory of self-empowerment is alienation
- Conclusion
(Note: The fact that I’m writing a book review on this topic might seem odd given that I usually focus on tech comm topics. However, I document APIs for getting map data into cars, so I sometimes read books related to the automotive and transportation domain. I also run a book club at work focused on these books.)
Now, back to the book. Lewis’ book is a historical account, written by an academic but for a popular audience. The history of the interstate project has considerable cultural importance and likely has some parallels to today, such as with the Stargate project’s effort to build massive AI infrastructure — a project already estimated to be $500 billion or more, putting it in the same financial ballpark as the IHS.
Also, although highways might seem like a boring historical detail, actually the Interstate Highway System, Lewis argues, fundamentally reshaped American society so much that Lewis says that only the Civil Rights Act of 1964 shaped American society more. Lewis writes, “The Federal Highway Act of 1956, the legislation that created the Interstate Highway System, takes its place beside the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as two of the most important domestic federal measures of the second half of the twentieth century” (ix-x).
Finally, I’ve always been intrigued by the uniqueness of the highway system in the United States. We often take for granted that (as long as you have a car) you can hop on an interstate to travel across the country to any state at blazing speeds. The abundance of freeways interconnecting places isn’t as common in other countries. Part of the reason I read this book was to understand how this freeway system shaped American culture.
In my reading of the book, I see several overall story arcs emerge:
- The shift from techno-utopianism to distrust: Society’s initial embrace of the Interstate project, fueled by a belief in technological progress, gradually gave way to disillusionment when the unintended consequences of the interstate highways became apparent. This story — the transition from techno-utopianism to distrust — is a familiar story I keep seeing in tech circles.
- The funding challenge: The sheer scale of the project required innovative financing that aligned economic incentives, political will, and public acceptance. How exactly do you get people to pay $500 billion for anything? Gasoline taxes, tolls, and federal funding fueled a self-perpetuating cycle of highway construction. I don’t think the same magic alignment will happen today to fund AI data infrastructure.
- Engineers and unintended consequences: Technically skilled engineers, focused on design and efficiency, often lacked awareness about the social ramifications of their work. From urban sprawl and racial segregation to environmental damage and the homogenization of the American landscape, the freeways had tidal waves that changed social culture. Engineers, however, just thought they were building roads.
Sound interesting? Let’s explore each of these major themes in detail.
Society’s transition from a techno-utopian attitude to distrust
In the 1950s, most people enthusiastically embraced automobiles and road-building. Lewis explains the vision people believed: “Workers would live in new suburbs, accessible only by automobile, with better homes, parks, schools, and healthful surroundings. The connection was complete: Automobiles—and a modern highway system on which they traveled—would solve urban problems” (44). Modern life, with its automobiles and highways, was the future, and people were eager to embrace it. Peter Norton also describes this mindset in detail in Autonorama, noting that GM’s Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World Fair captivated the audience’s imagination toward an automobile-centric vision of the future, with elevated highways and high-speed travel in cars through cities.
Because cities sought to participate in the modern era and avoid economic stagnation, as well as slow down the flight to the suburbs, they also welcomed the Interstate project. Few voices opposed the initiative, as it seemed obvious that more roads were needed for the growing number of cars. Many people placed strong trust in experts and politicians. Lewis writes, “World War I had taught many Americans that democracy would prosper in the twentieth century only with the help of technocrats’ mastery of the scientific and the physical world. Technocratic experts would ameliorate living conditions in America” (14). The promise was clear: more roads would equal progress. Trust your scientists and engineers, and their expertise will usher in progress and economic vitality.
This techno-utopian attitude, however, slowly disintegrated, like the tread of a worn tire. Lewis highlights the changing attitude by focusing on two friends chatting in a bar. Bill Borah and Dick Baumbach, two Tulane University graduates, met for a Christmas drink at New Orleans’ Napoleon House in 1965 and learned of plans to build the “Vieux Carré Expressway,” a massive elevated highway that would slice through their beloved historic French Quarter. The discovery of plans for the expressway (from a chance conversation with the bar owner) sparked their opposition and ultimately led to a protracted legal battle, representing a turning point in public sentiment (181-182). These two friends weren’t alone in starting to question the wisdom of the project.
Lewis focuses on these friends’ turning point and crusade mostly to present a human face to the changing attitudes taking place more broadly, but many other factors also contributed to backlash. The countercultural revolution of the 1960s, with its questioning of authority, established norms, and the Vietnam War, also fostered a climate of skepticism. The Civil Rights Movement highlighted how infrastructure projects could exacerbate racial inequality, as highways were often routed through minority neighborhoods, displacing residents and disrupting communities. Lewis says: “More often than not, urban planners laid down the roadways in the neighborhoods of African-Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities, people who did not possess the political power to challenge them” (xiv). Lewis describes how Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans, once a thriving neighborhood with black businesses and residences, was decimated by the construction of a highway running right through it. The highway permanently displaced its residents and livelihood.
The oil crises of the 1970s squeezed the pocketbooks of those with gas-guzzling cars, raising concerns about energy dependence and the environmental impacts. The Vietnam War and instances of political corruption like Watergate further eroded public trust in government and large-scale projects. Road ecology started to come to the forefront too: highways acted as massive barriers to animal movement, splitting habitats and choking neighborhoods with pollution. (Note:Crossings by Ben Goldfarb dives into road ecology in detail.)
Finally, building more lanes failed to alleviate congestion; in fact, more lanes often made it worse. Lewis points out how people thought “New lanes would solve the problem, the planners assured everyone. Yet…the roads acted as powerful magnets that attracted ever more cars and trucks” (217). The concept of induced demand (the idea that building more roads only invites more cars) surfaced even in these early days. The proliferation of franchise motels (like the Holiday Inn) and fast-food restaurants (like McDonalds) created a monotonous landscape, leading to Charles Kuralt’s famous observation that you could “cross the country from coast to coast without seeing anything” (251). The initial utopian vision had fractured. The double meaning of the book’s title, “Divided Highways,” becomes clear.
This trajectory — from optimistic embrace to critical reassessment — appears in many other technological books. For example, Jeff Krinock and Matt Hoff’s May I Ask a Technical Question? (which I reviewed here) directly challenges the idea that technological advancement inherently improves lives. The “Whig Theory of History,” they write, describes the faulty belief that history is an inevitable march upward into the light and that progress. Similarly, Kara Swisher’s Burn Book: A Tech Love Story chronicles a journey from an optimistic tech-industry journalist to a more skeptical observer.
My own journey reflects a similar arc. I began my career in tech in 2005, during widespread optimism about the internet’s transformative power. Starting my blog in 2006, I enjoyed the blossoming community and vitality during blogging’s heyday. Like many, I believed that technology, especially the internet, might help solve many problems in society. Over time, I’ve become more aware of the downsides — the attention fragmentation, the doom scrolling, the dopamine hits from endless news cycles, the filter bubbles and echo chambers, the relentless pressure to stay connected and always online, the toxicity of social media, the internet’s ability to radicalize extreme views, and more. My god, it can be a mess.
Now, even my teenage daughter longs to live in a different era. Ask her what period in history she could return to if granted a time machine — it’s the period before the internet, social media, and smartphones: the 1980s!
This raises a difficult question for me: Has my career as a technical writer, focused on facilitating technological integration, contributed to a better world? The answer, sadly, is probably not. Even so, I can’t think of an alternative, more humanitarian career path I could have pursued instead. The capitalist underpinnings of most well-paying jobs involve ethical compromises, I guess. (That’s probably a topic for another post.)
As Lewis writes about the interstates, “In the Interstate Highway System we have done nothing less than express our vision of ourselves. In the fifties we thought there was nothing beyond us.” (Xivii). In other words, the Interstate story is a microcosm of the American experience with technology itself: an initial burst of utopian optimism followed by a more complex and often sobering reckoning with the unintended consequences.
How to pay for such a massive project
Let’s jump to the next overarching theme: the financing of the Interstate system. There are some obvious parallels to the current debate surrounding AI infrastructure funding. Stargate investors plan to pour in $500 billion toward AI infrastructure that will allow the US to build the best models, winning the AI race to artificial general intelligence (AGI), or better yet, to superintelligence, with China. How much of a historical parallel is there between Stargate and the massive funding for the IHS?
Unfortunately, there aren’t that many parallels with funding. The unique alignment of factors that enabled the Interstate project may be difficult to replicate for the AI infrastructure. Unlike the clear, tangible benefit of roads, AI infrastructure requires data centers that consume vast amounts of energy and water and often rely on specialized hardware and highly skilled labor. The benefits of AI are often less visible and more diffuse, making it harder to generate widespread public support for the necessary investment.
Another showstopper is that whereas the IHS created jobs, AI threatens to take jobs away. The IHS was such a colorful economic paintbrush that it became a tool used by politicians. Politicians seeking to boost their standing in economically depressed states used highway construction to add jobs and stimulate the economy in those states. Lewis notes, “Should the president decide to run for an unprecedented third term, it would be useful to have helped fund a superhighway in the middle of a state with thirty-eight electoral votes, a highway that would give employment to thousands of men at the site and thousands more in factories across the Northeast” (59). The public, increasingly reliant on cars, generally supported the project, accepting gasoline taxes and tolls as necessary costs for improved mobility.
Finally, the automotive industry (and all those workers in manufacturing plants) stood to gain enormously and actively lobbied for highway construction. Cities, desperate to retain suburban commuters and revitalize downtown areas, also lobbied for highway access.
Lewis describes the financial mechanism as “a virtual Mobius strip of money: The more cars traveled, the more gas they consumed; more gas meant more money for the fund; more money in the fund meant more money to build more miles of highways; which allowed more cars to travel more miles and consume more gas” (127). This created a self-reinforcing cycle, where the use of the highways generated the revenue to build more highways.
AI doesn’t have this self-reinforcing cycle. Not enough people use AI to make it an imperative demand. Ultimately, AI threatens to take jobs instead of creating them. There’s less of a clear benefit to investing in a technology that will lead to job loss while making billionaires richer.
Additionally, AI (at least currently) seems to be used by only a fraction of society. A recent essay by Anthropic, Which Economic Tasks are Performed with AI? Evidence from Millions of Claude Conversations, finds that the majority of AI sessions, nearly half of all usage, are within software development and writing fields: “Results show most usage in tasks associated with software development, technical writing, and analytical, with notably lower usage in tasks associated with occupations requiring physical manipulation or extensive specialized training” (6).
More specifically, AI is used most by software engineers, data scientists, bioinformatics technicians, technical writers, copywriters, and archivists. Only ~4% of occupations use AI for at least 75% of their associated tasks. And ~36% of occupations use AI for at least 25% of their tasks. Is this enough usage to propel the epic spending necessary for these data centers? I doubt it. Granted, AI tools are still new and many people might not yet know how to incorporate these tools into their existing workflows. But I suspect that if AI isn’t yet helpful in your role now, despite how good the models have gotten, it might not play a prominent role in the near future either.
In short, software developers, the primary users of AI, might not constitute a sufficiently broad base to drive the same level of investment as car-owning families did for the Interstates. There isn’t a clear “Mobius strip” of funding for AI infrastructure like there was for highways.
Engineers building systems without understanding the social consequences
The final theme in Divided Highways that I want to explore is the disconnect between engineering expertise and awareness of the social impact. IHS engineers, trained in the technical design of road building, often didn’t understand or realize the broader implications of their work. They weren’t trained to understand how these interstates would affect city dynamics, how they would affect demographics, how urban sprawl would change society, how automobiles would provide unprecedented freedoms for youth, and more. They were engineers, not sociologists or anthropologists.
Quoting an engineer, Lewis writes:” ‘We were good as technicians,’ said Griggs. ‘Ask us to design a beam. Give us the load, we could do it. Ask us to design a highway. Give us the route, we could do it.’… But engineers had little understanding of, nor did they care about, socioeconomic and environmental considerations…” (134).
In technology companies, we see the same story playing out. Most people I work with are engineers; they know the technology of building APIs, but they have little understanding of any social consequences of those APIs, in my case, of APIs that deliver map data to vehicles. Consider, for example, how dependent people have become on GPS. The fact that we can barely read paper maps or navigate on our own is evidence that we’ve lost many of our cognitive wayfinding functions. The less wayfinding skills we have, the more dependent we become on technology.
During my smartphone awakening series (see Journey away from smartphones), I wrote several articles about wayfinding. Wayfinding without a digital map was a revelation to me. I found it empowering to know where I was going, to study a map and feel the control of sensing my place within the larger landscape.
Constantly relying on turn-by-turn directions atrophies our spatial reasoning skills; it detracts from our ability to form cognitive maps of our surroundings and understand where we are. We become less aware of landmarks, less attuned to the nuances of the environment, and less able to navigate independently. We lose a sense of connection to the physical world. In fact, according to M.R. O’Connor’s Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World, having a sense of place goes deeper than just wayfinding. Psychologists say that having a sense of place is fundamental to the formation of memory. Without a place, it’s hard to remember the event. Think how nearly every story, every movie or TV show, starts out by setting the scene.
Now that GPS is old news, engineers are focused on developing autonomous vehicles (AVs), which will have even more ripples through the social fabric. Autonomous vehicles will push urban sprawl even farther as commuting becomes less painful. You could completely tune out directions or any sense of where you’re going — all you need is to enter the place name into the routing request. Then you can zone out on TikTok while the landscape blurs by, if you even look up to see the blur.
Lewis describes how the Interstates amplified urban sprawl: “By 1960, more Americans would live in suburbs than cities. By 1980, eighteen of the nation’s twenty-five largest cities would decline in population, while the suburbs would swell by 60 million people, eighty-three percent of the nation’s growth” (71).
Autonomous vehicles would also eliminate the need for parents to chauffeur their children around, removing those in-car conversations and parent-child moments — isolating and disconnecting us even more as families. AVs could take your kid to soccer and back, and maybe you could see them for 20 minutes at night to briefly tuck them into bed.
This constant push toward urban sprawl, a form of decentralization of cities, was brought about by the automobile and freeway. But the trend toward decentralization and increasing alienation parallels a broader trend in technology. As technology advances, we paradoxically experience a combination of both increased connectivity and increased isolation.
In giving a presentation the other day about using AI to interpret file diffs to write release notes, I realized that the AI-based technique reduced my needed interactions with engineers. I no longer have the regular meetings that I once had. My rapport with engineers has become more transactional rather than information exchanges. I can show up, do most of my job alone, relying on AI to work with file diffs to gather information, and only interact with engineers by sending them a changelist that they review.
Most of the time, the engineers’ comments are minor; typically it’s just LGTM (“looks good to me”). This kind of isolation (with no need to interact with anyone for needed information) is growing and presents a recurring, concerning theme in tech. The more tech empowers us, the more alienated we become from each other. It’s as if isolation is one the trajectories of technology.
Technology’s trajectory of self-empowerment is alienation
Now let me break from Lewis’s book altogether and go out on my own jetty of thought. If one of the aims of technology is self-empowerment and do-it-yourself-ism, does that mean we become less dependent on those around us, thus increasing our isolation and alienation from each other?
Consider the origins of Silicon Valley with the Whole Earth Catalog from Stuart Brand and, later, edited by Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine. The driving theme of the catalog centered on self-sufficiency, DIY, ecology, and other tools to empower individuals — especially in the face of increasing distrust and disillusionment with government and other institutions. In the countercultural wake that prompted people to get information from alternative sources and do things themselves, people embraced this publication. Considered a precursor to the internet, the Whole Earth Catalog would allow anyone to get information about anything (no matter how arcane, non-standard, or esoteric) and do things on their own — a tool for self-empowerment. I think most tech apps and products tends to share this same genetic inheritance: to help empower those who adopt it to be more self-sufficient. Technology allows you to do things yourself without the need of others.
For example, cars provide unrestricted mobility — there’s no need for public transportation. You can get in your car and drive yourself anywhere you want. Mapping apps help you get from one place to another, especially when the route is confusing, without needing directions. Zoom removes the need for in-person meetings — there’s no need to travel to meet someone face-to-face. The internet brings all the information to your screen — you can learn whatever you want without interacting with anyone or even going to the library or attending classes. On YouTube, you can find a tutorial for fixing nearly anything. You can purchase anything you want on Amazon and have it delivered to your door without interacting with anyone in the external world. You can order dinner online and have it delivered through Doordash. You can check into your hotel through an app and get a digital key, bypassing the need for physical check-in. In video games, you can connect online and play with others in remote areas. Podcasts let you eavesdrop on human conversations without interacting with humans and being a participant yourself. Social media enables you to express likes and dislikes in a faux-social atmosphere without actually engaging in social situations with physically present people.
And so it goes. Technology empowers us with the tools and information to be self-sufficient and to do it ourselves.
But this same empowerment paradoxically alienates us from others, making it less necessary to interact or rely on people for anything. As a result, the more empowering technology is, the more it isolates us from the need to interact with others. And the more isolated and alienated we become from those around us, the more socially alone we feel. We can’t go back to dependence because self-sufficiency feels powerful. It feels comfortable not to depend on others. We really can do it all ourselves, for the most part. But soon, we find ourselves drowning in silence, disconnected from those around us, for we don’t need them anymore. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Conclusion
To return to Lewis’ book, here’s a recap of my main takeaways: society’s transitioned from a techno-utopian attitude toward one of distrust and uncertainty, incentives must align for massive projects like this to be accomplished, and engineers build systems without recognizing the massive social consequences, such as increasing isolation and disconnection, that come about.
Lewis writes: “Impractical and illogical though they are… automobiles attract Americans because they offer individual freedom…” (315). This freedom comes at a cost. The freedom of mobility, the ability to travel anywhere at any time, has also given us a sense of rootlessness, a disconnection from place, and has weakened community ties. We’re more mobile than ever before, able to drive from city to city with relative ease on the superhighways, but also more isolated. The paradox is that the technologies that promise to connect us — cars, the internet, social media — also isolate us from each other. We gain the freedom to move, but we lose the stability of place. We gain the freedom to connect with anyone, anywhere, but we lose the depth of connection from face-to-face interaction.
The challenge, perhaps, is harnessing technology in ways that genuinely bring us together rather than driving us further apart. This may be difficult when technology empowers us to be more self-sufficient, not needing others. Can we introduce technology to change some of these trajectories, bringing us closer together rather than farther apart? Perhaps this will be a new story we write in the next chapter in technology’s history.
About Tom Johnson
I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.
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