A historian of twentieth-century science, technology, and the state, Marc Aidinoff studies how the state knows the citizenry. By investigating government information technologies, his scholarship explains the transformation of the U.S. welfare state from a localized system of uneven entitlements to a national regime of extraction. Beginning with the aspirational promises and operational realities of information technologies, Aidinoff historicizes seemingly bedrock principles of U.S. public policy, including the liberal social contract, and charts the digitalization of American society. 

Aidinoff’s current book project, Rebooting Liberalism: The Computerization of the Social Contract from 1974 to 2004, offers an alternative account of neoliberalism anchored in the realities of the late twentieth-century administrative county office where potential welfare recipients struggled to make themselves legible to computerized case management systems. Aidinoff traces the work of liberal policymakers who came to believe that they could make the welfare state popular with white voters by computerizing the mechanisms of governance to reprogram normative policy choices as technological problems. In the U.S. South, especially regions classified as the “internal colonies” of the United States, county bureaucrats, private-sector technicians, local organizers, and politicians, experimented with computerized mechanisms of governance and hardened a racialized social order. These heterogeneous actors did not simply shrink the state, as the dominant narrative of the rise of conservatism argues, but instead developed new paperless tools to discipline and networked mechanisms to punish private citizens, especially citizens of color. Rebooting Liberalism therefore shows how, at a technological level, the welfare state and the carceral state became entwined and unified operational systems. 

Aidinoff is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ and an incoming assistant professor of the history of technology at Harvard University. He was recently the Monell Foundation National Fellow in Technology and Democracy at the University of Virginia Jefferson Scholars Program and a visiting lecturer at the University of Mississippi. He has also taught at MIT, Harvard College, the Rosedale Freedom Project. His historical writing has appeared in Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society (Johns Hopkins University Press) and is forthcoming in Liberalism: Critical Histories of Liberalism (University of Chicago). Aidinoff’s research has been supported by the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, the Association of Centers for the Study of Congress, the Charles Babbage Institute, and the Internet Policy Research Initiative, among others. 

A strong believer in the value of historical inquiry and science studies to analyze and also to craft public policy, Aidinoff recently served as Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor in the Biden-Harris White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he helped lead a team of 150 policymakers on key initiatives including the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, guidance to ensure federally funded research is publicly accessible, and reigniting the Cancer Moonshot. Previously, Aidinoff has served as a domestic policy advisor to Vice President Joe Biden in the Obama-Biden Administration and a strategic consultant with Blue Rose Analytics. 

Aidinoff completed his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and B.A. from Harvard College.