How Machines Came to Speak presents a sprawling panorama that stretches from the nineteenth to twenty—first century and across domains of art, business, law, and technology. The book’s argument is so novel and complex that it defies easy summary. Petersen wants to understand “whether a body of law developed under conditions of information scarcity can prove adequate to conditions of information abundance,” and seeks to account for how the First Amendment went “from granting a narrow right to speak and print (linguistic) messages to a broad right of political and aesthetic expression.” In doing so, she emphasizes the “technocultural roots” of today’s speech doctrines. How Machines Came to Speak convincingly argues that, early on, United States law imagined speech in terms of the expression of an individual’s particular ideas and beliefs, typically as expressed in print. “At the beginning of the twentieth century…” she says, “[speech] signaled individual agency and creation, the externalization of mind and will.” The idea that actions and technologies taking the form of something other than print media would qualify as speech under the First Amendment would have seemed strange to the jurists of the late nineteenth century. Petersen argues that the proliferation of new media and platforms in the twentieth century, along with efforts by civil libertarians to protect more kinds of speech, pushed U.S. courts to shift the locus of relevance in speech law from the speaker to the speech – the information or message as an artifact in itself, potentially untethered from any one thinking and speaking individual.
In doing so, the author focuses on a series of court rulings that are likely not familiar to those outside the realm of free speech law and, in key instances, labor history – such as Hague v. CIO (1939), in which the Supreme Court found in favor of labor union’s right to distribute political literature and hold meetings in public places. What Petersen offers is a profoundly counterintuitive history of the trajectory of speech law: one in which the expansion of free speech rights, pushed substantially by the Left, inadvertently led to sweeping new powers for the wealthy and corporations. In this sense, How Machines Came to Speak is a genealogy of the infamous “money is speech” logic of Citizens United (2010). As Petersen shows, Citizens hardly came out of nowhere – even if it seemed to many progressives in the United States to have done so.