Technology:
Past, Present, (Future?)
Nikos Raptis
Abstract:
This article attempts to follow the evolution of technology in the course
of history and tries to understand the logic (or the lack of logic) that was the
basis for its creation in each stage of history. Also, it attempts to identify
the people that were the
Introduction
In 1829
, in a series of lectures at Harvard, the physician Jacob Bigelow observed:
“There has probably never been an age in which the practical applications of
science have employed so large a portion of talent and enterprise of the
community, as in the present. To embody... the various topics which belong to
such an undertaking, I have adopted the general name of Technology, a word
sufficiently expressive, whch is found in some of the older dictionaries, and is
biginning to be revived in the literature of practical men at the present day.
Under this title is attempted to include an account... of the principles,
processes, and nomenclatures of the more conspicuous arts, particularly those
which involve applications of science, and which may be considered useful, by
promoting the benefit of society, together with the emolument of those that
pursue them.”For
that American physician and intellectual, even at the beginning of the 19th
century, the aim of technology was profit and together with that (maybe) the
benefit of society.
Thirty-tow
years later, in 1861, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was
established in Boston. The name “Technology” in the title of MIT was
proposed by Bigelow himself “to indicate that the study of science at MIT,
rather than being a form of polite learning, would be directed toward practical
ends.”
This is
how not only the “name” , but also the “substance” of modern technology
,as analyzed in this article, were “given birth” through MIT.
A few
decades later, in the First Edition of the (Merriam) Webster’s International
Dictionary (1891 - 1903) we find the following definition for technology:
“Industrial science; the science or systematic knowledge of the industrial
arts, especially of the more important manufactures, as spinning,weaving,
metallurgy, etc.” This was how technology was defined 40 years before the
Second World War!
In the
famous Second Edition of the (Merriam) Webster’s New International Dictionary
(1934 - 1945) the 1903 definition is repeated, but one more version is added
which considers technology to be “Any practical art utalizing scientific
knowledge, as horticulture or medicin; applied science contrasted with pure
science.”
Finally,
in the 1993 Merriam Webster’s
Collegiate Dictionary the definition has evolved as “the practical application
of knowledge esp. in a particular
area:...<medical technology>...” (Emphasis added). We see that in the
present definition (of 1993) we do not find the term “scientific”, but the
more general term “knowledge”.
Science
had always been separate from technology. In the classical times science
“belonged” to the aristocrat-philosophers. Technology was the task of the
manual workers. In post-Renaissance Europe and especially in seventeenth-century
Britain science acquired a socio-philosophical hue and “was seen as a
progressive force, closely linked to the enhancement of the human welfare.”
However, that did not last for long and during the eighteenth century in England
“science became an activity for a cultured, moneyed and leisured class.”
Indeed, “the term ‘scientist’ did not exist in Britain until the
mid-nineteenth century; the phrase actually used was ‘a cultivator of
science’.”
The
meeting of science and technology took place only in the nineteenth century.
Although the roots of modern technology go back to the Middle Ages. The first
time that science was linked to technology was when the German Justus von Liebig
(in 1842) applied chemistry to make synthetic fertilizer. However, this
distinction between science and technology gradually faded away. For example, 50
years elapsed before there was a technological application by Edison of
Faraday’s scientific discoveries in electricity.“Only seven years passed
between the realization that the atomic bomb was theoretically possible and its
detonation over Hiroshima and Nagashaki. The transistor went from invention to
sales in a mere three years. More recently, research on lasers was barely
completed when engineers began using it to design new weapons for the
government...”
If we
accept that technology is the “application of knowledge”, immediately there
arise two questions: first, when did technology start and second, what is the
relationship between technology and human nature.
We
think that technology started when man, for examle, used for the first time a
stick to shake a fruit off a tree and afterwards used a stone to break the hard
shell of a nut. As for the relationship between technology and the nature of man
we assume that all humans have an innate ability to use their mind to apply
their knowledge in a practical manner, that is to act
“technologically”. What is not innate to humans is to use their
mind “scientifically”.
Let us
examine the example of the primitive man that breaks the shell of a nut by using
a stone. Almost instantaneously that man could estimate at what hight he should
raise the stone, with what speed he should bring down the stone, and at which
point he should strike the shell of the
nut,
so that he would simply break the shell and not crush the nut. If that man were
to use mathematics and physics to atttain the same result, we find that it would
take him hours, if not days, to solve the problem that the “technological”
way of thinking solved instantaneously. And that is not the only thing. Man
managed to solve (in a satisfactory way) the problem of the structural strength
of a shell after the decade of 1950! In the text that follows, we shall try to
test the validity of this assumption, about the relationship between the
“technological” and the analytical scientific
way of thinking, on the basis of the historical facts.
As we
record the course of technology through history we are obliged to raise some
additional questions: who decides
how
(to what end) is technology to be used and which
will the technology be (of all possible technologies). These questions and
the possible answers to these questions indicate that we accept that technology
is “ an essentially human phenomenon, (and) is thus a social process.”
One could add, that the history of technology is ,in essense, the history of
mankind.
To
proceed in this task, we divide the history of mankind, on the basis of
technology, in three periods: The first period, which we call “past”, starts
from the primitive man and reaches up to 1879, when Edison for the first time
demonstrated the use of electric current for lighting. The second period, which
we call “present”, starts from 1879 and reaches to the present. The third
period is the future (if there is a future).
The Past
Already
since the time of Neanderthal man (70,000 B.C.) humans used primitive tools. Due
to the fact that the number of humans on earth was very small, they did not
leave (or there have not been found yet) significant technological samples from
those distant times. After that epoch, followed the period of stone up to the
Neolithic period (around 10,000 B.C.). During all these tens of thousands of
years human technology is marked by the following principal charachteristics:
First, the human mind is used in a tacit
manner. That is, the solution of the technical problems is achieved by
“feel” rather than through “analysis”; it is achieved through what we
have called the “technologigal” way of thinking. Second, for what end will
the technology be used is decided collectively
by the group that is using the technology and this end is the satisfaction of
the needs of the group. And third,
which
that technology will be is again decided by the group, each member of which,
possibly, contributes his own ideas to the solution of the technical problems.
Close
to the end of the Neolithic period (around 8,300 B.C.) we find the city of Catal
Huyuk, in Anatolia of present day Turky, which perhaps is “the oldest city in
history”,
and which flourished up to 6,500 B.P. “Its population reached 6,000 people.
The foundations of the buildings and the burial sites indicate that there were
no palaces or especially treated burial sites.All houses were approximately of
the same size,a fact that suggests a lack of hierarchy. An additional element is
that in Catal Huyuk there were no streets. “One moved from one part of Catal
to another over rooftops, ascending or descending ladders, entering into the
recesses of dwellings and crossing small squares.”Which indicates that Catal
Huyuk must have been a highly collective community with direct contact of its
citizens to one an other.”
Moving
on from the Catal huyuk, of 8,300 B.C., we arrive to the Great Pyramid, of 2,700
B.C., in Egypt. The established theory holds that the pyramids were constructed
with stone blocks carved at various quarries and transported at the site of the
pyramids. It is estimated that it took 20 years to build the Great Pyramid and
that each year 100,000 men were needed in the building process. In 1988 a
chemical engineer, Dr. Joseph Davidovits, on the basis of extensive reasearch
that he had done, proposed, through
a book (which he wrote in collaboration with Margie Morris),
a new theory according to which, the blocks with whch the pyramids were built
are made of concrete that was poured in forms in situ at the site of the
pyramid. By this method, each year only 1,400 men were needed to work in the
construction of the Great Pyramid. This kind of concrete, which is called
“geopolymeric concrete”, was prepared with a “cement” which had been
used for thousand of years in the area and had as basic constituents raw
materials, that were mined in a series mines in the Sinai. Davidovits succeded
in resynthesizing the polymeric concrete of the ancient Egyptians in a modern
laboratory.
Whether
it was 100,000 or 1,400 people that worked to build the Great Pyramid the
questions and the answers conserning the problem of technology are very
revealing. Who decided that the Great Pyramid should be built? A single
individual, the Pharaoh. What was the aim for the construction of the Great Pyramid? None! In essence it was a structure
without any meaning. Who can claim that , if the 100,000 or the 1,400 people had
the power to make a decision themselves, they would have decided to build the
Great Pyramid by working for 20 years, in vain? This “urge” of using
technology to create huge monumental structures, which one could call the
“pyramid syndrom”, continued to prevail in the centuries that followed the
building of the Great Pyramid and still prevails to this day.
Thus,
in 1889, a civil engineer, by the name of Gustav Eifel, was instructed to build
the “Eifel Tower” on the occasion of the (commercial) exhibition that was to
commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. Could it be,
that, even if the aim of the commemoration was right, more modesty was in order
(the tower has twice the hight of the Great Pyramid) for a historic event which
had a certain meaning when that event took place? And the French story continued
with Mitterend’s glass (dwarf) Pei pyramid in the court of the Louvre, etc.
The
“pyramid syndrom” was transmitted also to the ‘new world’ of America
with the construction of the Empire State Building in New York , in 1931, which
had a hight of 1,250 ft (that is 262 ft above the hight of the Eifel Tower) and
which later reached the hight of 1,472 ft through the addition of a 222 ft high
TV antenna. But about the multistory building and the “family” of this kind
of buildings we shall talk further down this article. Anyway, the “first” in
relation to the skyscraper branch of the “pyramid syndrom” has moved
to...Southeast Asia!
To a
probable claim that these gigantic monuments constitute the “miracles” of
humanity, one could answer that the real miracles of human endeavor are the
music of Johann Sebastian Bach and his comrades, or the folk (popular) music of
all
people’s, or Rodin’s sculpture’s, or
the small arch briedges of old and even the bridges that were built in
the course of thousands of years to this day, or the modest and beautiful houses
that man has built from the Cyclades to all corners of this earth. That is, all
the works of art or of structures which were created to either express the
creative urge of man or were built for a concrete and rational purpose.
Returning
back to the path of history(after wandering for a little in the fields of the
“pyramid syndrom”) we arrive to the Greece of the classic era “and the
Platonic disdain for the practical arts...”
Then follow the centuries of the Middle Ages where we find the beginning of the
roots of modern technology, as previously mentioned. The early twelfth century
will see the invention of the lethal crossbow (which is the bow we usually see
in William Tell films). Pope Innocent II will prohibit , under threat of
anathema, its use against Christians, will allow, though, its use against the
Muslims and other infidels. The decision on how to use the technology is again
taken by a single individual. The aim of the technology is the infidel. Toward
the end of the Middle Ages (1,100 to 1,300 A.D.) in the cities of Italy,
Belgium,and Holland, there is a flourishing and an application of the concept of
the Athenian “direct democracy”, this time, however,
without the disdain for the modest arts. People in these cities
“whether they do manual work, or work in the administration, or are merchants,
or lawyers, were neither customers, nor bosses of anyone, except when they
taught their art to their apprentices.”
However, for various reasons,that become apparent later in this article, this
“direct democracy” begins to decline. So, in the thirteenth century we meet
the invention of the “mechanical clock.” In this case, also, it is very
obvious who decides which will be the technology and to what end will it be
used. The decision makers are the top members of the hierarchy of the
Benedictine monasteries and the end for which the technology will be used is “
to provide a more or less precise regularity to the routines of the monasteries,
which required, among other things, seven periods of devotion during the course
of the day.” And, as Lewis Mumford
wrote, “‘The mechanicel clock made possible the idea of regular production,
regular working hours and a standardized product.’ In short, without the
clock, capitalsm would have been quite impossible.”
It is
important to note that two centuries later a remarkable scientist, Leonardo da
Vinci, kept secret his drawings for the construction of a submarine, because he
was afraid that some people might use
them for barbarous military purposes. The Leonardo case is the the first of a
total of three cases, in which a scientist refuses to let his work be used for
purposes that do not satisfy rational human needs. The other two are: first that
of the English scientist Robert Boyle, who, a century after Leonardo, kept
secret his discovery of a poison and second that of Leo Szilard, the scientist
who essentially solved the problems of the nuclear sector (military and
“peaceful”), who in 1946 quit physics,
because of the way his ideas were used by the American state, and who
switched to biology. Only three cases in the last one thousand years of human
technology!
In the
end of the fifteenth century the Europeans conquered America. The Europeans
achieved this, basically, because “ in Europe (warfare) had become a
science.”
Therefore, one should agree with the remark that “ It was thanks to their
military superiority, rather than to any social, moral or natural advantage,
that the white peoples of the world managed to create and control, however
briefly, the first global hegemony in History.”
The principal agent for the creation of this colonial hegemony was the
“warrior-merchant.” Perhaps, one of the most important contributions of
technology to this brutal cause is the invention of the stirrup. The stirrup had
been originally invented in the Far East, in 200 B.C., but reached Europe around
800 A.D. This technological invantion was used by the European
“warrior-merchants” to fight on horseback, which was a terribly effective
way to attack the enemy. By now, the decisions on what kind will the technology
be and for what ends it will be used are not made by the King (the Pharaoh), the
Pope, etc, but by the state that has already emerged and which almost coincides
with the “warrior-merchant.” Aim of the technology: the commercial profit.
At the
beginning of the sixteenth century we meet Gutenberg as he converts an old wine
press into a printing machine with movable type. Fifty years after Gutanberg’s
invention (which apparently was achieved by means of the tacit way of thinking),
more than eight million books had been printed in 110 cities in six different
countries. These books are filled with information that start with law, medicin,
linguistics, etc and end up with information on metallurgy. There are even
manuals on good manners.
Up to that time this information was unavailable to the average person. Neil
Postman is right when he observes that; “Nothing could be more misleading than
the claim that computer technology introduced the age of information.”
(Postman p.61). So, almost immediately after Gutenberg there is an information
“saturation.” However, the most important effect of Gutenberg’s invention
could be the consolidation and development of the nation-state, which had
already been borne in the France of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a
development that brought us to the “controlled” information of the twentieth
century, which has been analyzed to a considerable depth by Noam Chomsky, Edward
Herman, and Alex Carey.
Moreover,
Gutenberg’s invention gave birth to the modern school “ which took shape in
the seventeenth century.”
The topic of the role of the modern school in the “control” of information,
as a “ system of imposed ignorance,”
a topic that cannot be examined in this article, is possibly one of the most
depressing examples of who is using
technology and for what purpose.
One of
the most important events in the history of mankind was the discovery, in the
middle of the nineteenth century, that cholera and typhus are spread through
contaminated drinking water. This discovery took place in London, in 1854, (only
143 years ago!) through the efforts of John Snow, a physician. These efforts
were based not on his scientific medical knowledge,as, on the one hand, this
knowledge was limited (worldwide) and, on the other hand, the role of microbes,
as a cause for disease, was not yet known (it became known quite a few years
later). To solve this problem Snow, also, used the indirect way of tacit
thinking. Through intuition he suspected that the difference in the number of
deaths from cholera in different houses of the
same
street was due to the drinking water. Investigating the case
epidemiologically he found that the two groups of houses , that showed a
difference in the number of deaths, obtained their water from two different
water supply companies. The company that pumped its water from a point upstream
of the Thames ( water which was clean) showed fewer deaths than the one that
pumped its water from a point of the Thames
in
the city of London.
From
then on it was a matter of engineering technology, and a new sector of civil
engineering was established, sanitery engineering. Again, it is important to
discuss who pushed technology towards that direction and whose needs were to be
satisfied. The push was given by the class of the elites for mainly two reasons:
cholera and typhus, first (and importantly) wiped out most workers and those
that survived were very weak, hence profits were diminished, and second, these
epidemics did not discriminate as to social classes; the elits died also. The
instrument for the push towards that technology was a report that was compiled
by Edwin Chadwick and was published in 1842 under the title:
The
Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. The
conclusion of the report was that there is a “ close relationship between
poverty and disease”!
After
the deliverance of humanity from cholera and typhus (but not from poverty) the
way was open for the “present’.
The
“Present”
Introduction
The period of time that we have designated as the present era
(from 1879 to the present) is charachterized by a dominant fact: the emergence
of the big corporation.
The
potential for the rise of the big corporation was furnished by science. There
are, mainly, two types of industries that
based
their existance and their development on science. These are: “the electrical
and the chemical industries”.
The electrical industry
emerged first and remained in a dominant position from 1880 to 1920.
The
emergence of the electrical industry and, in essence, of the modern era, is due
to Thomas Edison, who on the one hand transformed “invention from a haphazard
phenomenon into a routine, businesslike enterprise”, and on the other hand he
saw that his “investigations and experiments were inextricably informed by
economic considerations”.
After developing the first incandescent electric lamp, on October 21, 1879,
Edison created , in 1889, the Edison General Elactric Company, whch in 1892
evolved to become (the very well known) General Electric Company (Edison himself
had already withdrawn from the company) by merging with Sprague Electric and
Motor Company (a pioneer in electric traction). “The most important impetus
behind the formation of the General Electric Company... was the patent
situation”.
It was the sharing of the patents of the two merged companies that made
possible the electric lighting of the cities of the world. The (rather savage)
role of the patent in the shaping of the economic, social, and also of the
technological structure of modern society is paramount.
The
principal goal of the big corporation, with the patent as a weapon, was and is
to secure a monopoly for itself. In general, there are two
ways to use the weapon of the patent: First, through legalistic
manipulation (mergers, parallel patents, etc) and second through the virtual
elimination of the “lone inventor”. The first, the legalistic, results in
the increase of the profits of the big corporation (and the increase of the
poverty of the rest), however the second, the control of the inventions, has
disastrous effects.
In
essence it was and is the big corporation that decides
what
kind of technology humanity should have. Already the historical record is
full of unbelievable monstrosities. At a House committee hearing of tha US
Congress, one witness testified that “the greater the contribution (of the
lone inventor), the more certain is it to be denied recognition by the
entrenched corporations and their servile laboratory staffs. And the lack of
such recognition...[in part] explains the shameful spectacle
of every single one of the world’s great inventions having
been
forced to be idle until outside competition had forced their adoption
despite the cunning and conspiracy of the great corporations in the field - and
often only after the inventor was no longer here to receive his due reward
(emphasis added).”
Which technology are we talking about? What kind of progress are we talking
about? Even worse, the big corporations not only “force to be idle”
inventions that have already been made, but now they absolutely direct the
research towards where it is beneficial for them and not for the population of
the earth.
During
the same period of the establishment of General Electric, another corporation
that is involved with electricity, Westinghouse, becomes gigantic, on the basis
of the invention on the alternating-current that it bought from the Croat Nikola
Tesla which revolutionized the way of transporting electricity. As expected,
there was a war between General Electric and Westinghouse. By 1896
over three hundred patent suits were pending. The “rational” solution
that the two compnies found to the problem was to “agree to pool their
patents, with General Electric handling 62.5 percent of their combined
business.”
Concerning
the alternating-current, that we mentioned, there is an instructive (and rather
strange) sequel to this story, in relation to the themes of this discussion.
Protagonist in this sequel was Charles Steinmetz. Steinmetz was borne in 1865 in
the German city of Breslau. At birth he was afflicted with a physical deformity,
hunchback. In the university, as a student, he had the (Greek) nickname
“Proteus” (first among the many). While a student he joined the student
socialist club, which was banned by the government after becoming affiliated
with the German Social Democrats. When his fellow party members were arrested,
Steinmetz took over the editorship of the party newspaper, “The People’s
Voice”. In 1888 he managed to evade arrest by the security police and flees
Germany. One year later, travelling by steerage, he arrives in the US as an
immigrant, where he anglicizes his first name to Charles and adopts Proteus as
his middle name! He works as an electrical engineer in the company of another
German immigrant, Rudolf Eickemeyer, and in 1893 the newly formed General
Electric Company purchases the Eickemeyer company,
primarily to acquire Steinmetz, who was considered its major asset.
During the same period Steinmetz announces the results of his scientific work,
which, based on mathematics, solves all the problems in relation to the
alternating -current. This contribution by Steinmetz is considered as one of the
most important in the history of technology (and of humanity). If Steinmetz had
not solved the problems around the alternating-current, perhaps life would have
been different today.
Steinmetz
became chief engineer of General Elactric, but he kept his socialst ideas to the
end of his life. Moreover, he was politically very active as a member of the
American Socialist Party (of that era of the first decade of the 20th century).
The strange part of the Steinmetz story, as previously hinted, is that he, a
socialist, “came to view corporate development as the centralization of the
means of production that would ultimately, and inevitably, usher in
socialism.”
In 1922 Steinmetz ran on the Socialist and Farmer-Labor ticket in New York state
for the position of state engineer and surveyor. He was not elected. A year
later, on October 26, 1923, he died. He was 58 years old. Fourteen days after
his death, on November 9, 1923, Adolf Hitler attempted his first putsch and
initiated his Nazi course to power and to the numerous holocausts. Hitler’s
principal weapon was the
technology that had reached to a considerable point of development, due (to a
great degree) to the contributions of Steinmetz, the young socialist that the
security police of Hitler’s predecessor’s failed to arrest 35 years earlier.
The question is the same: by whom and
for what purpose is the technology of
the mechanical clock of the Benedictine monks or the altarnating-current of
Steinmetz is used.
Going
back to the science-based corporations that were involved with electricity we
find out that and the other important sector of that industry, the
telecommunications, follow a parallel course to that of the General Electric
Company, in relation to their meeting with the problem of patents, etc. AT&T
proves to be the entity in the telecommunicatins sector that corresponds to
General Electric. “The radio-patent pool agreements of the 1920s, among such
odd bedfellows as AT&T, GE, RCA, United Fruit, American Marconi, and
Westinghouse, provide an illuminating example.”
Before leaving the electric industry we should mention
that besides pure science, on which this idustry was based, it would not have
been possible for this industry to develope without the tremendous contribution
of the simple machine shop, which
nurtured the mechanical engineer, and who in his turn made possible the
practical application of the scientific discoveries on electricity. Indeed, we
consider as very important to cite a
“dramatic example” of the tacit way of thinking in a macchine shop.
At one (US) aircraft company they engaged a team of four mathematicians,
all, of PhD level to attempt to define in a program a method of drawing the
afterburnur of a large jet engine. This was an extremely complex shape which
they attempted to define by using Coons’ Patch Surface Definitions. They spent
some two years dealing with this problem and could not find a satisfactory
solution. When however, they went to the experimental workshop of the aircraft
factory, they found that a skilled sheet metall worker, togrther with a
draftsman, had actually succeeded in drawing and making one of these. One of the
mathematicians observed, “They may have succeded in making it but they
didn’t understand how they did it.” [This example is mentioned on pp. 104 and 105 of Mike Cooley’s book,
Architect
or Bee?, see notes, who says about the above comment of the mathematcian:
“This (comment) seems to me to be a rather remarkable concept of reality.”]
Let
us now move to the other science-based big corporation, that of the chemical
industry. As already mentioned the first attempt to link science to technology
was made in the field of chemistry by Liebig,in 1842. From that time up to the
end of the First World War the German chemical industry was the world leader in
that sector of technology. After the First World war the US government seized
all the German-owned patents in the chemical industry and with the help of these
resources the US chemical industry, which had already intensified its efforts to
meet the war needs in exrlosives, etc, took over as the world leader. The
conduct of the big chemical corporation was and is similar to that of the
electric corporation.
These
two “pioneering” industries, the electrical and the chemical, were emulated
by the oncoming new industries, mainly those involved in oil and in cars. For
the new industries, apart from the above two, a catalytic role for their
development were the twe major discoveries of the transistor and of the DNA.
Perhaps the case of these two discoveries ( and that by Steinmetz on the
electrical current) are the only ones in the history of technology that somthing
major was discovered through the analytic scientific way of thinking and not
through the tacit way as it usually happens. However, in spite of his analytical
way of thinking William B. Shockley, one of the three scientists that discovered
the transistor, drew up a legislative proposal “calling for the sterilization
of all persons with IQs below 100” (See,Arditti, p.8). Shockley took part in
the discovery of the transistor in 1956, only eleven years after the death of
Adolf Hitler.
To
exploit the potential of science/technology the big corporation used three main
“tools”: the standardization, the university and the “art” of
management.
-
Standardization
Contrary
to the myth about competition the free market cannot exist even for a minute.
The solution for the survival of the big corporation was and is management and
the intervention of the state. With the same logic in the field of technology
the intervention through standardization
was necessary for the running of the big corporation. The standardization had to
do not only with the material aspects of the corporate activities but also with
the men and the women that it employed. Thus, one could discern two aspects for
standardization: first that which concerns the division of labor (men and women)
and second that which concerns the standardization of materials.
The
first aspect is dealt with by the “art” or “science”
of management, which we discuss further down. For the second aspect, that
of the standardization of the materials, one could say that there is essentially
some logic in trying to avoid waste and technical difficulties by having for
example one or, at the most, two types of bolts. That this helps increase the
profits of the big corporation has nothing to do with the pure logic of
standardization. What has a lot to do with these profits is the social system
that feeds the big corporation.
Also,
in relation to the standardization of the materials, one ,surprisingly,
discovers the existence of some kind of direct democracy in the process of the
drafting of the specifications for the standards that refer to the materials.
For example, in the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), “almost
30,000 individuals (engineers, academics, etc) serve without pay”
in the process of decision making, for the standardization of methods of testing
and of the quality of materials. Of course, it is only logical to assume that
the big corporations and the government shall attempt to impose their will, but
it is a bit dificult to manipulate 30,000 people.
-The University
Given
that the big corporation was created on the basis of the potential provided to
it by science, it was only natural that in the course of its development the big
corporation would turn to the place where science is cultivated, that is to the
university. What the big corporation demanded and got from the university were,
first, the solution of the technical problems (later, also of the human
problems) of the corporation, and second, to “supply” the people who would
apply the solutions that the university produced.
The way
that research was done in the universities, for the benefit of the corporations,
up to the Second World War, was for the corporation to “farm out” the work
for the solution of its technical proplems to the university for a modest fee.
So, the corporation shifted the cost of research to the university and used
gratis the facilities of the university, the personnel, the libraries, the cost
for the education of the personnel, the time of the researchers, etc.
After
the Second World War almost all research in the US (the home of the big
corporation) is done by the Pentagon through grants to the universities. Which,
in essence, means that the population of the country subsidise the private
corporations, since the corporations instead of paying for the cost of research
themselves get gratis the results of the research that is done in the
universities with Pentagon money, that is with the money of the taxpayers.
Important as it is, in its negative social effects, that
the universities labor to solve the problems of the corporations (with taxpayer
money, this pales before the fact that it is the big corporations that decide
which will be the content and the
kind
of scientific research that is conducted in the universities.
The
second “offering” of the university to the corporation, that is the human
one, was the need of the corporation for people to apply the results of the
research. Thus, a new “race” of men emerged, the
engineers.
This happened around the middle of the nineteenth century, when the polytechnic
schools were founded. Although the ancestor of the polytechnics, France’s
Ecole Polytechnique, had been founded already since 1794, we should agree that
the founding of MIT offered the environment for
the “genesis” of the engineer and of modern technology.
At this
point one is bound to raise the question about the relationship of the
polytechnic schools to their students and about the role of these students as
engineers after their graduation. We thought that the best way to answer these
questions would be to cite, in chronological order, the opinions of some of the
leading figures in the training of the engineers during the last one hundred
years, as we singled them out of the excellent book by David F. Noble,
America
by Design. It will be worth for the reader to find the patience (and the
self - control) to go through the citations that follow:
1886: “The dollar is the final term in every engineering
equation.” Nearly a century later A.A.Potter,
the dean of American deans of engineering would say: “Whatever the numerator
is in an engineering equation, the denominator is always a dollar mark.”
1896: “The financial side of engineering is always the most
important; the sooner the young engineer recedes from the idea that simply
because he is a professional man, the position is paramount, the better is for
him. He must always be subservient to those who represent the money invested in
the enterprise.”
1907: “(The engineers) do not realize that until they have learned
to work first for the success of the corporation, and only secondarily to
consider themselves, and also have learned to subordinate their own ideas and
beliefs to the wishes and desires of their superiors, that they can really be
efficient [sic].”
1911: “An educational institution resembles in some respects, a
manufacturing concern...The goods produced must be of such design , finish,
material ,etc. as to satisfy its patrons; likewise , the graduates of the
educational institutions must meet the requirements of the concerns which are to
employ them...”
1919: “Scientific men are only recently realizing that the
effective power of a great number of scientific men may be increased by
organization just as the effective power of agreat number of labores may be
increased by military discipline...The prizes of industrial and commercial
leadership will fall to the nation which organizes its scientific forces most
effectively.”
1922: “If producers and users of steel rails were in conference
they would discuss the uses which the rails are to serve, classifying the kinds
of service, considering wherin past products had failed, inquiring as to the
chemical analysis and metallurgical treatment. They would see improvement in
production and discrimination in use. But the more difficult problem of the
human material for technical and administrative leadership has received less
attention...; how seldom do representatives of engineering industry and of
enginneering education meet together for conference! Yet they are users and
producers of a vital product. Let us try to agree on what we want and then
determine how to get it and how to use it . How many boys of differing kinds can
be individually developed and fitted to varying needs.”
1928: “there is some analogy between the college and the
manufacturing plant which receives partly fabricated metal, shapes it and
refines it somewhat, and turns it over to some other agency for further
fabrication. The college receives raw material...The type of curriculum is in
the last analysis not set by the college but by the employer of the college
graduate.”
(These words belong to Alfred H. White, professor of chemical engineering
at the Universityof Michigan.)
1949: “Of course, in a broad way you are working (as an engineer)
for society, the company, the department, your family, and yourself; but
directly and primarily you are working for and through your boss, and, as a
rule, you will best serve your own and all other interests through this
channel.”
1978: In a conference at the National Academy of Engineering in
Washington whose subject was Education to
Meet the Nation’s Engineering and Related Technical Manpower Needs, the
view of the academic teachers, as expressed by the president of one of the large
Midwestern universities, was that “his institution was merely turning out the
product that was most in demand - competent technicians to fill specific job
slots...”
Although any comment on the above cited passages is redundant,we feel
that it is our duty to cite a remark by Noble himself, which seals the matter:
“Decades later (during the 60s) when rebellious students and professors began
to rail against the ‘knowledge factories’ - machines that produced them and
then employed them to produce others like them - few suspected how consciously
those factories had been designed; because thay could not share the larger
corporate persrective which comes with being on the top of the process and
looking down, few could perceive themselves...”as those at the top perceived
them, namely that “‘The research men of a nation are not isolated
individuals but an organized and cooperating army’”.
To
further clarify the relationship between the big corporation and the university
we return to MIT. In 1920 MIT prepared and announced the so - called
Technology Plan. Up to that year the assignment of research to the
school was done in a not systematic way, so it was decided to put some order in
this matter, with an ultimate goal of improving the financial situation of MIT.
The plan aimed to accomplish this by adopting a standard contract to be agreed
upon between the school and each of the various corporations. Beyond the fact
that MIT’s doors were open to offer any help or service to the corporations,
according to the contract the school agreed to “maintain a record of the
qualifications and special knowledge of its alumni” and “to advise and
assist [the companies] to obtain information regarding men for permanent
employment.” (Noble, footnote,p.142).The Technology
Plan was succssesful and “within a very short time over 150 companies had
signed contracts with the Institute.”
After
the Second World War, MIT’s Division of
Industrial Cooperation was reorganized, renamed as
Division
of Sponsored Research “ and expanded to administer research programs with
the government and the military as well as with industry”! Thus, began for the
benefit of humanity the “golden” era of the Pentagon, which continues to
this date.
-
Management
The big
corporation, which was continuously expanding to gigantic dimentions,
inevitably, faced a huge problem, that of the organizing of the production
process. This organizing had two aspects, that of organizing production in the
work place and that of the control of the behavior of the workers as individuals
not only in the work place but also away from it.
The big
corporation in some way dealt with the first problem. The second problem, the so
- called “man problem”, has rather never been solved by the big corporation,
in spite of the tremendous efforts that it exerted. Perhaps, therein, in this
failure, rests the hope of men and women all over the world.
In
order to deal with this two - pronged problem the need arose for the creation of
the “science” of management. Creator of the science of managment was the
engineer, who transfered the scientific way of thinking, that he had been taught
in the polytechnic schools, not only to the purely technical matters of the big
corporation but also to its organizational problems. Thus, the engineers started
to introduce in the educational and the research material of the polytehnic
schools the study of social and psychological problems. Also, they started to
incorporate these subjects as variables in their purely technical designs.
It is
revealing that most of the literature of what was named the “management
movement” from its beginning, in 1880, to the decade of the 1910s “is found
exclusively in engineering journals”.
Later management became a separate descipline with its own publications. Also
revealing, as to the relationship of the engineers to the management of big
corporations, is the fact that “in the 1920s the chief executives of General
Motors, General Electric, DuPont, and Goodyear - four of the largest
corporations in the world - had been classmates at MIT a quarter - century
earlier.”
An
attempt to deal with the first aspect of the problem, that of organizingn
production at the work place, was made by Frederick Taylor, who in 1903 proposed
a comprehensive system of “shop management”. In 1911 Taylorism died away,
mainly through the refusal of the working people to conform to its barbarism.
Also it is charachteristc that the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, of
which Taylor was elected as president, in 1906, never published Taylor’s
famous work, Principles of Scientific
Management. In contrast to this, Lenin in 1918 would say: “We must
organise in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and
systematically try it out and adapt it to our own ends.”
The
engineers tried to deal with the second aspect of management, the “man
problem”, through the “science” of psychology. Indeed, management and
psychology linked from the first steps of their history. Whether an engineer was
succssesful was not judged any more only by his technical knowledge and his
abilities, but also in relation to how effectively he
used
the working men and the working women.
The
worker is an irrational being, the manager is a rational being. Goal for the
manager is to buy off the loyalty of the (irrational) worker. For example,
“‘The executive who, by facilitating promotion...makes marriage a
possibility for a young man’ - therby dealing with the ‘Sex Impulse’ -
‘stands to receive large dividends in increased loyalty and length of
service...’” (Noble, p.314).
However,
as expected, things were not and still are not that simple. Already by 1931
Harlow Person the director of the Taylor Society (during the 1920s) warned:
“Stabilization of material forces is not enough; human relations must be
stabilized...Stabilization of one industry is not sufficient; all industries of
a nation must be stabilized...Stabilization of national industry alone is not
sufficient; international economics must be stabilized,” (Noble, p.284).
This kind of exhortations, as expected, lead logically to the use of the
state and of military power to protect the interests of the big corporation.
Which is a statement that describes very acurately the present era.
To
complete this recording of the course of technology in the present era, we shall
try to examine some concrete forms of present technology that we think play an
important role in people’s lives.
Concrete Forms
of Technology
- The
Automobile
The
automobile came into the world in a very unfavorabl era, the end of the
nineteenth century.
At that time people had
solved their transportation problems in a quite satisfactory way. In the cities
people moved by means of streetcars and between cities by means of railroads.
For example, in the US, around 1916 the streetcars transported 11 billion (!)
passangers per year.
At this point one should note that “one of the most sound inventions that the
human brain ever made, about 150 years ago”
,
was that of the rolling of a steel wheel on a steel rail, that is, the invention
of the railroad.
Therefore,
at the start of its history the automobile was useless to the mass of the
population. However, the automobile was “useful” to the elites as a means
for showing off and as such was used in the first decades of its history. As a
matter of fact, in 1901, “Mercedes Benz estimated the ultimate world market
potential to be no higher than 1 million cars”.
Today there are over 400 million cars on the surface of the earth. Any
discussion of the wordwide traffic problem, that the western civilization has
created, is superfluous. In any case, it is a given that we cannot get rid of
the carbon dioxide that comes out of the axhaust pipe of the internal combustion
engine. That is a matter of physics. Therefore, the “greenhouse” fate is
inevitable, if we continue our present way of moving from place to place. The,
usually proposed, long term solution is that which has hydrogen as fuel.
However, this solution is thought to be feasible only through the production of
hydrogen by means of the electrolysis of water with electric current obtained
through solar energy.
Conclusion:
the future “life” of the automobile does not seem to be very rosy. Of
course, the life of people (in meny parts of the earth) “concides” to the
“life” of the automobile. Is there a solution?
To the
above problems one should add two fundamental
problems that the automobile has created for modern man. The first is the
“social pollution” that the automobile has caused together with the material
pollution. As an example we offer the words of a modern Polish Roman Catholic
priest, who using two Fiats as an altar “blesses” thousands of cars
congregated infront of him is saying: “God is the driver of this World and
puts traffic signes that nobody can change”.
However, it may be that the worst effect of the automobile on humans is the
feeling of hate that accompanies men and women, when they get into their cars,
but especially when they come out of their cars after driving on roads that are
filled with other cars to the point of insanity.
The
second problem is the highway, which was a consequence of the invention of the
automobile. In the coming centuries, if there are still humans around, people
will see the highway as one of the most irrational and barbaric constructions in
the history of technology. Each year 200,000 humans die on the highways of the
world; more than the number of dead in Hiroshima. Each year!
- The steel
reinforced concrete
If an
observer from an other planet could observe the material and social changes that
appeared on the face of the earth during the last one hundred years, he would
come to the conclusion that one of the most important factors for the existing
material and social reality was steel reinforced concrete.
In
modern times (if we ignore the work of Davidovits on the pyramids) cement was
invented after a series of attempts that started since 1756, mainly in France
and in England. In 1842, an Englishman, Joseph Aspdin, invented what today is
called Portland cement (which was given that name because it resembled the stone
that was used in masonry buildings and came from the English Isle of Portland).
Around 1850, Joseph Aspdin, another Englishman, gave cement its final form.
Thus, since 1860 began the era of the application of Portland cement.
As
usually happens, with admirable frequency in the course of the history of
technology, also the invention of steel reinforced concrete was made by a common
man, a French gardner, Joseph Monier (1823 - 1906), who, in 1867, was the first
man to place reinforcement of steel wire to the flowerpots of concrete that he
was making. Ten years later, in 1877, a New York lawyer (!), Thaddeus Hyatt
(1816 - 1901), solved the theoretical broblem of the behavior of reinforced
concrete, which Monier had invented.
With
the coming of the 20th century reinforced concrete starts to write its own
history. In 1908 Edison predicts that the concrete will revolutionize the
construction of buildings. He himself constructed eleven experimental all -
concrete houses with the same forms. Each house was poured in a single day.
These houses are still in existence.
The
ease and speed with which man can make the reinforced concrete frame of a
building enabled him to construct multistory buildings in infinit numbers.
Before the advent of the reinforced concrete, the construction of multistory
buildings was very difficult and time consuming. The vast majority of the
pre-concrete multistory buildings had two stories or at the most three to four
stories. Buildings with more than four stories were rare and (dangerously)
extreme cases.
From
the moment of the arrival of the concrete frame multistory buildings, life
changed for the mass of 20th century men and women.
The
ease of construction of multistory concrete
frame buildings, mostly buildings with
6
to 10 stories, allowed the state to cram a great part of the population into
miserable apartment buildings. This happened not only in the capitalist
states of the West, but also (mainly) in the socialist states of the East.
This
could not have been done, to the vast extend that it was done, if it were not
for the reinforced concrete. The craming of millions of people into
“buildings - machines”, in the cities, was the beginning of a huge number of
social problems. At least two generations of men and women have grown up in
these multistory apartment buildings, already, and they seem to have become a
new kind of human, that of the apartment building, the human of the “building
machine”. The social, political, psychopathological and even anthropological
aspects of the problem of the crammed millions in these buildings has yet to be
seriously addressed. And, as expected, the state, in spite of the, by now
apparent effects, continues to cram the millions, as there is no reaction. So.
once more, the question arises, who decided to use the technology of concrete in
order to cram a considerable part of the human race in these “machines”? Had
the men and women had the power to decide for themselves, would they have
decided to “imprison” themselves in them?
The
social problem of the multistory apartment building is multiplied to a fatal
degree in the parts of the earth that are hit by earthquakes. And these parts
are numerous. From the beginning of this century the newspaper archives,
worldwide, are full of innumerable photographs of multistory concrete buildings
in which their occupants were crushed to death, when they collapsed during an
earthquake.
Concrete
is an intrinsically brittle material,
even when reinforced with steel ( chalk is another brittle material). A
multistory concrete building, even with steel reinforcement in the concrete,
cannot survive a big earthquake, if hit
directly by the earthquake. The damage to a building is
site specific. And the site might be determined by dimentions as
small as a few meters! These are facts, consistently ignored by the state and
its technical “commissars”. Which should be the reaction of, at least, those
engineers who have by now
understood the
problem?
Concrete
is an excellent material that enables man to construct rational, useful, and
beautiful structures. One wonders, which would have been the picture that the
man from another planet would see, if the technology of concrete was in the
hands of the people and the decisions of what to construct and how to construct
it, were made collectively in the spirit of direct democracy?
-
Medicine
Following
the spirit of the era medicine took a course that was parallel to that of the
two other science - based corporate activities; the electrical and the chemical.
Up to
the middle of the nineteenth century man was afraid of the doctors and disliked
them, for the simple reason that the doctors not only were unable to cure
people, but were extremely dangerous,
given that they were using bleeding (to the death), arsenic, mercury, burning of
open wounds with a red hot iron to ...disnfect it, etc. Ordinary people in the
end understood that the doctors caused the death of many of their patients. By
the middle of the nineteenth century cholera victims were given an even chance
of being done in by the disease or by the doctor.
From
the middle of the nineteenth century medicine started to invesigate disease on
the basis of science, mainly in France and in Germany. However, in spite of the
discoveries of Pasteur and of Koch in relation to microbes, etc, again there was
no great benefit for the patients. Some people claim that the first time a human
was really cured was in the midle of the 1940s, when the use of the antibiotics
started. The “tecnological” way of dealing with disease was transplanted
from France and from Germany to the US chiefly by William Henry Welch, who was
trained in Leipzig of Germany in 1884. Welch through the Johns Hopkins
University and the help of the “philanthropy” of the Rockefeller family,
established the turn of modern medicine towards technology.
As with electricity and chemistry this development affected not only the US
medicine but that of the rest of the world.
The
involvement of the Rockefellers with medicine is entirely understandable, given
that the managers of the big corporations “believed that scientific medicine
would improve the health of society’s work force and thereby increase
productivity.”
The opinion of the Rockefeller men, who were asigned to handle the matter of
medicine, was that medicine was “an engineering task”.
After
the Second World War the role of the “philanthropists” in “guiding”
medicine was taken over by the state. This, from above guided, turning of
medicine towards technology resulted in a situation in which today the
physician, without realizing it, “perceives his patient more and more
indirectly through a screen of machines and specialists; he also relinquishes
control over more and more of the diagnostic process. These circumstances tend
to estrange him from his patient and from his own judgment.”
It is
not only the physician who believes in technology, but also the patient, who
trusting greatly the information that the machine is providing, feels that the
physician is not doing his job correctly if he will not use all the tools
available to him through medical technology. So, “Everyone who has a headache
wants and expects a CAT scan...roughly six out of every ten CAT scans...are
unnecessary. Why are they done? As a protection against malpractice suits.”
Also, it has been documented that 40% of all surgical operations are not
necessary. The list of similar statistics is quite long and quite depressing.
Perhaps one of the more disturbing (and ironic) statistic is the one which
documents that, “wherever doctor strikes have occurred, the mortality rate
declines.”
All
these are consequences of the fact that at the turn of the twentieth century an
amazingly small number of men (close to the “philanthropist” Rockefellers)
decided which kind of medicin people should have.
Even
more depressing is the situation in the emerging sector of biotechnology. Beyond
the sensational ethical - religeous pseudo - problems, that disorient the
population, especially after the cloning of a sheep by Dr. Ian Wilmut, the
dominant factor that appears in this matter is again that of intellectual
property, that is of profit by means
of the patent.
Referring
to the billions of dollars that US biotechnology is to profit through engineered
animals and seeds, Noam Chomsky writes: “We are now speaking of control of the
esentials of life. By comparison, electronics deals with mere conveniences...
One cynical researcher remarked that as government-industry efforts are
proceeding, some day parents might have to pay royalties for having children.”
The first thing that Dr. Wilmut did, after the cloning of the sheep, or better
the company that employes him, was to secure the intellectual rights before the
scientific results were published in Nature.
As for the ethical - religious posturing: why are not these people bothered
by all these children that are living among us, as a result of a
biotechnological intervention in some laboratory, but they are bothered by
whether or not during the cloning process a “xerox” copy of the “Holy
Spirit” (of which we all partake, according to the scriptures) is reproduced?
Perhaps,
one of the, unbelievably, most dangerous problems in biotechnology “is that
research is being done with an organism (E.
coli) that naturally inhabits the intestines of all humans. (I)f one of
these newly created bacteria, actualy a variation of
E.
coli, were to accidentally get into the human digestive tract, there is no
way of foretelling the possible consequences. It could mean the extinction of
the human race.”
Already, in September of 1978, from a high security US federal animal disease
center on an island close to Long Island a virulent virus escaped and infected
cattle on the island. (This is one of the reasons that made us place a question
mark after the word “future” in the title of this article.)
These
are very serious matters and should be
faced by all of us immediately and vigorously. There is already an encouraging
example in the case of the protest movement against the construction of nuclear
power plants. A few thousand men and women succeeded in virtually stopping the
construction of nuclear power plants worldwide. No nuke plants are being built
anywhere in the world (except those few ones that were left over to the US,
which now they are sold by the US to the “socialist” China. And China buys
them!). The anti-nuke movement has shown that there might be hope.
- The Computer
The
first question one should ask in relation to the computer is: where is the
computer used. The answer is: “No one, in fact, seeme(s) to know much about
the broader uses and impacts of the computer.”
From the available information the picture vis-a-vis the computer is the
following: The use of the computer in banking, retail business,etc supposedly
brought faster service for the consumer. However, it seems that on the one hand
most banks are in an unstable condition, because of debts from credit - card
holders, and on the other hand the consumer pays for the use of the computer. In
general, in the companies that the computer is used heavily, the quality of
service has fallen and the effects on the productivity, the health and the pay
of the working people have been negative. A similar picture of instability
appears in the stock market, where, according to 1988 data, the number of stock
exchange acts had reached 300 acts per second. This speed made it decisively
easy for huge parts of capital, during the last two decades, to be involved
almost completely in stock market “gambling”and not in investments in
industry.
Concerning
the Personal Computer, it seems that half of those that own a PC never use it.
Of those that use their PCs about 53% spend their time trying to learn how to
use them or play video games.
As for
the Internet, Chomsky’s remark that “The Internet is an elite organization.
Most of the population of the world has never even made a phone call.”, seems
to be quite true. The Personal Computer is used mostly by people between 35 to
44 years of age, who are college graduates and have incomes over $50,000 (at
least in the US).
Finally,
what has been rather settled in relation to the use of the computer, is that the
biggest user of the computer are the military with their modern weaponry
systems. “The proportion of electronics in the Pentagon’s budget is rising
from 34 percent in 1980 to a projected 41 percent in 1997. By 1988 the
(computer) industry boasted over $81 billion in military electronics.”
Also,
for the developed countries, especially for the US, the computer made it
possible for the economy to move from heavy industry to the corporations that
deal in services ( beyond the “gambling” at the stock market, that we
mantioned).
At this
point, as this article nears the part that will deal with the future, we thought
it appropriate to insist somewhat on the effects of the computer on man.
Especially on the men and the women that make the computers. After all, we are
told that the computer is the future.
Micrographics
systems are now commonplace peripherals to computerized systems. “Employees
over the age of 50 are frequently regarded as ‘visually handicaped’ and
unsuitable for long term work with these systems.” Also, “ many companies
will not recruit an electronics engineer over the age of 23”!
What is more, “an International Federation of Informaton Processing working
party recently suggested that mental hazzards ‘caused by inhumanely designed
computer systems should be considered a punishuble offence just as endangering
the bodily safety’.”
The
problems that people face when working with computers should be considered as
rather mild compared to the problems that overwhelm the people that make the
computers. “In any honest estimation, electronics production work must be
counted among the most dangerous of occupations...”
One
never finds in History “social experiments” which have been set up in a real
1:1 scale. However. one such “social experiment” which describes the future
(if we do not take our lives in our own hands) began and is continuing in the
area where the computer started to “flourish”, in Silicon Valley, at the
southeast of San Francisco. What happened in Silicon Valley is more or less
this:
The
heart of the computer industry is the “clean room”, where workers make the
most sensitive computer components, the cips, disk surfaces, etc. This rooms are
clean not for the protection of the
workers that work in them, but for the protection of the microchips even from
the particles that are found in the breath of a human (usually a female worker).
Many compare the clean rooms to the intensive care units of hospitals. This time
not for the care of a human. In the clean rooms there are toxic substances which
in Silicon Valley have already caused women workers, that work in them, to give
birth to babies with impaired hearts, lungs and livers, caused shrunken
testicles to male workers, induced “chemical hypersensitivity”, an AIDS-like
condition (that has alarmed the medical community, among whom immunological
knowledge is still primitive), and a long series of other illnesses. In this
“clean room” environment in Silcon Valley and other parts of theUS “Nearly
one million women currently work in electronic production...; and hundreds of
thousands more work for US companies in places like Mexico, Taiwan, and the
Philippines.”
The
computer industry dealt with this problem in a very “simple” way. It
recorded the illnesses caused by
working in the clean rooms as injuries
at the work place. With the assistance by a rule adopted by the Reagan
administration the industry found this arrangement as a very “satisfactory”
solution. Actually, the computer industry has shown an admirable talent in
relation to the meanings of words. For the computer industry there are
“agents”, “chemicals”, “gases”, or perhaps ‘aggressive fluids”.
These same substances for hydrology are “contaminants’, “poisons”, and
“toxic wastes” (Hayes, p.65).
This
has been a very sketchy recording of the effects of the computer production
processes on the human body. Effects that one finds also in other industries,
even if, there, they do lesser damage. What is “new” in Silicon Valley is
the psychological annihilation of the men and the women that work there.
“Life” in the Valley, as we know it, started around 1980. By mide-decade
“(a)t some companies, over 80 percent of the employees were non-alcoholic
substance abusers.”
People in the Valley from the lowly workers to the top management spend annually
$ 500 million in illegal drugs!
The
unimaginably high frequency of divorce and the notorious wilting of relations
between the two sexes introduced a new term in psychopathology the “Silicon
Syndrom”. This situation is described quite accurately by the message on the
T-shirts of Apple employees which proclaimed: “working 90 hours a week and
loving every minute of it”. (A normal person, in general, works around 40
hours a week). “By 1988, Apple was soliciting bids for an
onsite psychotherapy
facility.” Already “at least 65 percent of Apple employees were ‘in
therapy’.”
The
psychotherapists say that since the people of the Valley cannot control their
life in and out of the work place, the only activities left to them, that they
can comtrol, are (health) food, exercise (aerobics and running), and “Shop
Till you Drop” shopping sprees. The problem of irrational (compulsive)
shopping has become one of the most serious problems in Silicon Valley. “When
researchers asked over 34,000 mall shoppers their primary reason for a visit,
only 25 percent responded that they had come to shop for a specific item.”
Another study revealed that “four out of ten shoppers admitted that their
closets were filled with unopened items.”
Finally,
one of the most negative charachteristics of life in the Valley and of the
quality of the work itself (i.e. of the final product), especially for those
involved in military related work, is secrecy, which reaches the limits of
paranoia. In the Valley the “need-to-know” rule of the secret services is
supreme. This rule dictates that “... no agent is trusted (by his bosses) to
have more information than those he ‘needs-to-know’ in order to carry out
his official duties.”
In the
Valley the aim of this rule is for the men and women working there not to know
which is the final use of the computers
they design and produce! This is the second time in human history that the
state succeeds in keeping secret an object from the men and women that
produce
this very object. The first time was that of the Manhattan Project for the
production of the first atomic bomb. In that project worked 150,000 people, but
only a dozen people had the complete picture of
what
it was being produced and for what purpose.
To the
logical question, how is it possible for people to produce an object without
these people knowing what that object is and where it is going to be used, the
answer is that you simply compromise
the
final quality of the object. Which is what happened in the production of the
first atomic bomb, as there was no contact between the teams that tried to solve
the various partial problems. Nobody knew what his neighbor was doing. Also,
that is why it took them so long to make the bomb.
Similarly,
the Silicon Valley computers that are incorporated in the nuclear warheads of
the missiles, the “smart bombs”, and the other “objects” of the military
are full of defects. It is not dificult to guess who will suffer the
(collateral) effects of these defects.
This is
the picture of modern electronics technology, as it appears in the place that
it emerged, in Silicon Valley. Yet, “electronics technology has become
so powerful that its control is now crucial to the outcome of any sweeping
social change.”
That is, the technology that created the transistor and then the microchip will
decide what the future will be. Or, to be more precise, those that will decide
which the evolution of the present electronics technology will be, will,
actually, decide which the future will be.
(- The Future?)
If we
assume that there is going to be a future for humanity, then taking into account
the steps that man has already made in technology we might be able to estimate
(not predict) which will be the probable tendencies
in technology, in (at least) the near future, under the present (globalized)
social system.
- On
the basis of the up to this day history of the microchip, one can estimate that
it is possible that the microchip’s performance will continue to double every
18 months or so. Which means that by the year 2,020 a small computer could be as
powerful as all the computers in the
Valley today put together.
The matter of who will use this powerful computer and to what purpose remains
open.
It’s
up to us that it should not be used for “gambling” in the stock market or in
the “smart” bombs of the Pentagon.
- It is
by now confirmed, as previously mentioned through Noam Chomsky’s remark about
the Internet, that “about half the people alive today have never made a
telephone call.”
Satellites
coupled with the powerful computers will make the transfer of information even
easier and faster than today. Again the question that is raised is: will this
satellite technology be used to saturate the earth with propaganda,
disinformation, and entertainment “garbage”, as is done today with the older
technologies of radio and television, or will it be used so that also the people
in the poor countries will partake in
the human knowledge?
- If
the visions of the big car-making corporations materialize, that is the
construction of a car that “thinks”, again with the help of the powerful
computer, then that computerized system “may well involve the kind of
technology and intelligence gathering once reserved for tactical warfare.”
If we let the people that aim to such kind of technologies to decide that the
dead on the highways, that each year number one Hiroshima, are not enough, then
we should be to blame.
The
alternative solution, sought by rational humans who decide collectively, should
be to
reduce
the need to travel. To this end the realization of the irrationality of the
automobility
of the last 100 years versus the rationality of the
accessibility
( through mass transportation) will help. In addition the “philosophy” of
the “neo-traditional”
small town, which, little by little, appears on the horizon, could bring
about a vast social change in the gigantic gehttoes of the apartment buildings.
-
“Our society went into the age of nuclear energy blindly, and we went into the
age of DDT and other pesticides blindly. But we cannot afford to go into the age
of genetic engineering blindly. Instead we must move into this exciting new era
with an awareness that gene therapy can be used for evil as well as for good.”
These are not the words of a radical leftist intellectual but those of a
mainstream academic who spent 27 years at the National Institute of Health, of
the USA.
- On
June 11, 1976 there was a hearing before a subcommittee of the House of
Representatives of the US Congress. The title of the subject of the hearing was:
“Converting Solar Energy Into Electricity: A Major Breakthrough?”
The
subcommittee discussed a proposal by the US physicist Joseph C. Yater for the
conversion of solar energy into electricity. Beyond the theoretical basis of the
proposal, the need arose to prove its practical applicability, by establishing
the ability to fabricate devices (circuits) of very small dimensions.
From
the minutes of the hearing before the subcommittee
one
can realize that “among the scientists of the last quarter of the twentieth
century the opinion is that the solution of the problem of production of energy
from the sun will be found through micro-electronics (again the microcomputer).
This , the physicist Richard Philips Feynman (1965 Nobel Prize in Physics)
expressed with the phrase ‘There is plenty of room at the bottom’. The
‘bottom’ being the area of the atom and microcircuits.”
This was written in 1986. Today, in 1997, only eleven years later, we see that ,
already, the fabrication of devices that are called “Microelectromechanical
systems” (MEMS), which combine miniaturized mechanical and electronic
components, has began. MEMS are fabricated by methods similar to those of the
production of the microchip. Already MEMS have being fabricated which measure
200 microns, that is the size of two hairbreadths.
In the
meantime, research on the so-called “self-assembling materials” is
progressing. One can understand the concept of self-assembly by observing for
example a raindrop on a leaf. The liquid of the raindrop assumes a spherical
shape spontaneously by following the laws of physics. The idea, in relation to
micro devices, is to use the self-assembling process to, in a way, have the
microdevices fabricate thamselves, because man cannot make he himself so small
devices
Whether
or not the MEMS technology will be used to convert solar energy into
electricity, as discussed before the subcommittee of the House of
Representatives, depends on who will take the decisions in relation to
technology during the coming decades. If things remain as they are today, then
the suspicions of Subcommittee chairman Leo J. Ryan,
as expressed toward Dr. Robert L. Hirsch of ERDA, might come true. We
cite the appropriate passage from the minutes:
Mr. RYAN. ... , I am of a suspicious enough nature to believe that there
are elements which would rather not see Mr. Yater’s invention become too succssful.
This leads to my next question.
Do
you believe or feel there are outside pressures placed upon you and your
agency in regard to this kind of discovery which you would
charachterize as unhealthy or uncomfortable?
(Emphasis added.
Dr. HIRSCH.
Absolutly not.
How could the
answer of (ERDA employee) Dr. Hirsch be different? How could he accuse the oil
companies? Conclusion: once more the matter is open, who will decide about the
use of this technology? The oil companies or the population?
- The
problem of the poisoning of the environment could be the most dificult problem
that man has faced since his appearance on earth. We can avoid to become extinct
as a species by a variation of E. coli through
political and social resistance. The problem that humanity cannot solve is the
disposal of the nuclear waste that has being accumulating
from the early 1940s untill today. No one knows what to do with them. It
seems that the predicament is non-reversible.
And it is us that allowd this to happen.
Epilogue
Following
technology in its course through history, one observes that up to a point in
time (that rather cannot be exactly determined) there was a measure of
rationality that guided technology towards the satisfaction of essential human
needs. After a certain era an element of irrationality started to charachterize
technology (the pyramids,etc). Up to the Second World War technology was not a
very important factor in the life of human societies. This can be inferred from
the fact that society alloted a very insignificant percentage of its resources
for scientific purposes. After the Second World War technology acquired an
enormous influence on society (mainly through its relationship to the
military-industrial complex), that is why it absorbs a very big percentage of
the resources of society.
What
one might call big technology has a
history of no more than 50 years! The charachterization as “big” attempts to
describe the, generally considered as big, three basic discoveries: the nuclear
breakthrough, the transistor and the DNA. This big technology was used chiefly
“to fulfill the needs of asociety that is warlike, competitive, hierarchical
and unequal.”
Today
society is at a crossroads (which is a rare opportunity) to start to change this
present society into a rational society without wars, without competition,
without hierarchies and without barbarous inequalities. To change it into a
society based, for example, on an “inclusive democracy” as it is thoroughly
treated in the book of Takis Fotopoulos Towards
an Inclusive Democracy.
And this, perhaps for the first time in history, is feasible through the
rational use of the existing (and future) technology.
Whether
this will be realized or not is in our hands.
Nikos
Raptis is managing co-editor of the Greek language edition of Democracy and Nature
. He wrote the books: Let Us Talk about
Earthquakes, Floods and the...Streetcar, Athens, 1981 and
The
Nightmare of the Nukes, Karre, Athens, 1986. Also he translated and
published Noam Chomsky’s books, Year
501, Topos Press, Athens, 1994, and
Rethinking Camelot,
Topos Press,
Athens, 1994.