Last week was all about the invasion of aliens as it was broadcast over the radio. Orson Welles’s reimagined production of H.G. Well’s The War of the Worlds, sparked an unanticipated panic throughout the U.S. on October 30, 1938. We looked a little bit into the historical context of the 1930s as well as a few reasons why people might have been inclined to believe what they were hearing like tuning in a little bit late, hearing what sounded like President Roosevelt's voice, and being fooled by the conventions of news flash interruptions.
However, those are ways to look at it from a distance, without much emotion. In the spirit of the takeaway that it’s important to empathize first before jumping to conclusions about people, let's talk about what kind of reactions people had, so that we can start feeling with them. So let’s go back to the night when aliens invaded…
Confusion, Sadness, Religion
Reactions to hearing small or large portions of the broadcast ranged from mild, yet still sad scenes of families holding each other in tears and anticipation, all the way to car accidents on the streets. Throughout the U.S. there were people making phone calls to loved ones; the last chance they felt they would have. There were also angry local leaders calling to yell at CBS for the sudden disruption to the normally peaceful cities they governed. Many people jumped into cars seeking refuge in some place less populated.
According to Robert J Brown's book, Manipulating the Ether: The Power of Broadcast Radio in Thirties America:
- Men wept, including marines at Quantico.
- People huddled in the mountains.
- People pulled out their World War I gas masks.
- People on rooftops in Boston gazed at the strangely colorful patterns in the sky—which were actually just from neon signs. (page 221)
- A woman holding poison was found just in time by her husband before the chance to attempt suicide.
- "Thousands of off-duty doctors and nurses offered their services to the victims of Martian aggression." (page 220)
- "Many churches delivered end-of-the-world prayer meetings to record congregations, and priests were 'flooded with calls from parishioners seeking confession.'" (page 220)
- "A Manhattan man in a tree claimed he could see the flames of battle through his binoculars." (page 220)
- "Perhaps the most frightening experience occurred in Concrete, Washington, where a sudden power failure 'convinced its inhabitants that the end was near.'" (page 221)
- People in northern New York State fled to the Canadian border only to find "widespread alarm" there. (page 221)
Brown sums up this chaotic array of responses with an incredible point:
There were numerous injuries, but surprisingly, no one committed suicide or died of heart failure—despite widespread rumors to the contrary.
The next few days as both people and press sorted through the aftermath, there were sharp and bold claims, like Brown just hinted at. Newspapers claimed deaths and damages that were not real. People made declarations about the intelligence of the people who had panicked, much like we do today about those same people.
Newspapers in 1938 exaggerated and misinterpreted the War of the Worlds panic in part to attract readers with alarming headlines. Those headlines sold a lot of papers, but they also inspired false fears and half-truths that are still very much with us over seventy-five years later.
This was not just a bunch of gullible, scared people who just didn’t know any better. In fact, after doing more research, I think they are more like us today in 2025 than I even thought last week!
Echoes
In today’s world, we tend to look back into history with a little bit of arrogance, so I was once again baffled at how familiar the 1930s feels to me as a resident of the year 2025. For example, let’s look at just the technology of the radio:
At the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, radio 'made being a nerd almost glamorous.' The distinction between the way the amateur tinkerers responded to and used the radio and the way later listeners consumed entertainment via radio cannot be overemphasized.
Does that not sound just like the nerdy tinkerers of the Internet and digital age? I see myself so clearly in that description as a developer: I’ve been tinkering with HTML since before I could drive. The fundamental reason I started this very newsletter was because I want to help close the gap between the "tinkerers" and the "consumers." It’s not that I know better, it’s that I want to demystify it—despite technology’s apparent, unavoidable pull towards the mystical.
I’ve also been in marketing for my entire career, which lends me a perspective into how technology is used to exploit humanity (not always, but maybe most of the time).
That line is incredibly accurate to today if we swap a few words:
The distinction between the way the amateur tinkerers responded to and used <AI | the Internet | smartphones | social media> and the way later <users> consumed entertainment...cannot be overemphasized.
Not only do us tinkerers and content-consumers relate to our 1938 counterparts, we also have a similar environment of rapid technological change surrounding an increasingly unstable political scene.
“In the view of the popular conception of science in 1938, it is no surprise that even the most fantastic elements of the broadcast seemed credible. The first several decades of the twentieth century had been a period of rapid technological change. The early 1900s had seen the development of the telephone, automobile, light bulb, photograph, typewriter, and camera. The First World War had demonstrated the ways in which science could be mobilized to produce weapons of mass destruction: fighter aircraft and zeppelin bombers, poison gas, tanks, submarines, machine guns, and flamethrowers…According to [Hadley] Cantril, many people without a scientific background saw these modern devices as “manifestations of a baffling power, in which the principles by which they operate are completely unknown.” Even radio itself appeared to originate from a ‘world outside and lie within a universe of discourse completely foreign to the perplexed layman.’”
"...the principles by which they operate are completely unknown," is a chilling line. When people are accustomed to taking technology on faith because they don't actually understand how it works, they are set up for potential dangers like scams, misuse of the tech, and other unintended consequences. What's even more scary to me is that artificial intelligence isn’t even something that experts in artificial intelligence understand completely.
We live in yesterday's science fiction stories and movies, where computers can talk back, intentionally tell lies, and take actions independent of human involvement. It might be easy for us to say, “Oh, they just weren’t used to being critical about what they heard,” but if we then share that incredible cat video on Instagram without even realizing it was AI-generated, we don’t have much high-ground to stand on.
Not So Innocent
While the Mercury Theater, Orson Welles, and crew surely didn’t intend to cause injuries and true panic across the United States, they may not have had completely pure intentions either. From a quote on page 227 of Brown’s Manipulating the Ether, we get this insight from Welles himself at a BBC interview that aired in 1955:
We were fed up with the way in which everything that came over this magic box, the radio, was being swallowed. People suspect what they read in the newspaper and what people tell them, but when the radio came...anything that came through the new machine was believed.
Radio in those days, before the tube and the transistor, wasn't just a noise in somebody's pocket—it was a voice of authority. Too much so. At least I thought so. It was time for someone to take the starch...out of some of that authority: hence my broadcast."
Now, I’m just a little bit suspicious that 17 years of hype and reflection has colored Welles’s statement. At the time of the infamous broadcast he was in his early twenties, and while he was prodigious in the use of radio as a medium for performance, I have doubts that the broadcast was meant to be some kind of authority-shakedown. After all, Howard Koch recounts in The Panic Broadcast, that they only had 6 days to produce the script and prepare for the broadcast (sounds like a typical way-too-fast marketing project to me!), but you never know, maybe that was in the back of Welles's mind.
Regardless of the accuracy of the admission, Welles points out the concerning weaknesses that he saw in radio listeners that transfer perfectly to a soon-to-be AI saturated world. When we type in a Google search, we’re used to that action being a somewhat reliable means of gathering good information. Now that an AI overview pops up as the first thing we see among search results, it may feel that the feature would also be authoritative—it borrows the trust built from years of normal Google searching. But AI hallucinates (makes up information) even at times when it is critical to get accurate information. I’ve heard people complain about trying to find events in large cities and AI has invented fake events including locations and times.
The lesson is hopefully clear: just because a machine says so, doesn’t mean it’s true, accurate, or authoritative. Just like the listeners to the War of the Worlds broadcast, we have the option to “change the channel” to verify if what we’ve found is real, but are we actually taking that option?
Even worse is the concern of advertising taking the reins. Now, ads are starting to show up in the AI Overview section of search results in Google. While they are currently not being served through a bidding process like they normally are in search results and Google's support article says that you “can’t directly target ad placements in the AI Overviews,” that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be wary of what advertising will do. This matters because advertising has been a driving force for technological adoption and development, and has wide-reaching ability to sway culture and public thought. For example, the shift from radio to TV was directly related to advertising:
Although some US advertisers expected television to boom, this was by no means a widespread conclusion. Why, then, did the dramatic content on US radio fade away so rapidly, disappearing almost entirely by 1960, while dramatic content has become a core part of US TV? Succinctly, it was because advertising moved from radio to TV. The soaps and serials that could have sustained radio moved along with the advertising onto TV.
The Internet, I believe, is—and has been for a while—under a similarly tenuous position. What started as a place for experimentation, learning, and organization turned into a marketplace and an entertainment machine. Social media largely led the charge into the attention-harvesting, ad-selling digital environment we now inhabit.
The “American system” of radio existed to help companies push products; audience attention was the commodity that broadcasters sold to advertisers. It was in the industry's best interest to maximize the size of its audiences, and this commercial imperative led broadcasters to produce a surfeit of variety shows, melodramas, and soap operas that were broadly appealing and inoffensive.
Radio can thank the War of the Worlds broadcast as well as other programs and critiques for inspiring debates, pacts, and regulations about how it should be used, how to differentiate between news and entertainment, and how to protect the public’s interests. The FCC eventually introduced the Fairness Doctrine in 1949 that required broadcasters to “devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters.” (Wikipedia, the Fairness Doctrine)
The Fairness Doctrine lasted almost forty years, until the FCC unanimously voted to do away with it in 1987. This gave broadcasters the freedom to tailor news content towards certain demographics, in order to maximize their ratings and appeal to advertisers. Instead of keeping everyone informed on the same topics, each audience would get its own information, slanted to reaffirm what it already believes. As a result, on too many issues Americans can no longer agree on which facts are really facts, on which news is true and which is fake...Too often, stories are crafted first and foremost to grab viewers, rather than to inform.
Cyborg
I think that revisiting this story with empathy in mind is of crucial importance today because we are stewing in a very similar set of circumstances, and therefore we can draw some important lessons from the history. First of all, we can all participate in designing our technology. If we remain passive, then advertisers will design it for us. However, as the Fairness Doctrine demonstrated:
…the public interest ethos helped ensure that a protected space existed for artistic or informational shows that could not compete in the ratings, and American culture was better off because of it. Nowhere is the need for such a protected space clearer than in news broadcasting. When news is forced to compete for ratings, journalism all too easily gives way to sensationalism…This can lead to a dangerous form of fake news with long-lasting repercussions.
Without careful, intentional policies, standards, and regulations, we are at the mercy of companies with different incentives than our own (expansion, customer loyalty/addiction, profits, and domination).
Finally, I’d like to revisit the situational factors specifically at play, which appear to be echoes from last century. Psychologist Hadley Cantril made the following insightful observations in 1940 in his book, The Invasion from Mars in which he looks at data from surveys and other research:
Probably more important than anything else, the highly disturbed economic conditions many Americans have experienced for the past decade, the consequent unemployment, the prolonged discrepancies between family incomes, the inability of both young and old to plan for the future have endangered a widespread feeling of insecurity.
Sound familiar? Let's keep going:
“Prolonged bewilderment combined with lack of training to seek the basic causes of maladjustment are precisely the conditions most conducive to frustration and anxiety...Yet they desire an understanding and their desire increases with their perplexity. They become highly suggestible to some simple and sovereign formula provided by a demagogue. The whole tactics of Hitler show the importance he places on providing directed relief to bewildered souls. If they are not already sufficiently bewildered, bewilderment can be manufactured to sufficient propaganda.
“Just as there is little possibility that people will be wholly impervious to propaganda for war or for dictatorship until the basic economic and ideological conflicts causing wars and dictatorships are removed, so it would seem that there is little reason to expect people would be wholly insulated from panic-creating situations until the basic causes for panic are removed. It is not the radio, the movies, the press or “propaganda” which, in themselves, really create wars and panics. It is the discrepancy between the whole superstructure of economic, social, and political practices and beliefs, and the basic and derived needs of individuals that creates wars, panics or mass movements of any kind.”
Systems impact all of us, and technology is not the only kind of system. The weakening of our policies, of our commitments to standards and quality in information resources, of our intolerance for inhumanity all have contributed to our current situation—not just in the U.S.—and can have far-reaching effects in the distant future. It’s difficult, but necessary to take stock of what is or might be influencing you and your perception of reality.
Be careful out there.