Bell Labs needs no introduction, it is more mythology than reality at this point. A place where the profit-motive could be temporarily set aside to pursue higher learning and discovery.
Now of course the title is a little provocative, and I’m in no way an expert on the subject or have ever worked in Bell Labs, but I look up to the institution that was Bell Lab and and the fact it brought me one of my favorite things in life: UNIX. So I do believe I have an interesting idea to explore here.
I’m going to talk about the decline of Bell Labs, and by that I do not mean that it now somehow a bad organization, I’m sure its still staffed by a lot of brilliant people, but from what I can gather, Bell Labs, like almost every other institution, has become dominated by short-term profit seeking mandated by the neoliberal economy and the golden age of long-term research without a clear way to make profit has long since been over.
Now most often when I see people talk about the decline the Bell Labs, it’s almost always through a technical and economical lens, but never really through the lens of neoliberalism and ideology, which what I hope to explore here.