Digital barbarism, p.17
Digital Barbarism, page 17
Which is precisely the point. What is required, balance and careful consideration, demands in turn effort, control, and restraint. When in 2008 hundreds of children were seized by the state of Texas and removed from a Mormon faction that has more than dabbled in polygamy and child marriage, two principles were contending. The first, that society cannot allow the abuse of innocent children, and, the second, that the state must refrain whenever possible from interfering with the family, much less taking away children. To honor both principles correctly and in balance, all actions had to be considered in case-by-case determinations, which was exactly what the state failed to do.
When there is power, it must be accompanied by discrimination, control, and wariness. It is not enough simply to resist power or simply to accept it. All my life I have been involved with machines—taking them apart, putting them together, making them, repairing them. A large part of Winter’s Tale is concerned with their role, their beauty, and their fascination. But although I embraced them in the book and have embraced them in my life, never have I surrendered to them, and nor should you.
Nature is not a machine. Rather, the machine is a part of nature, a hybrid of sorts, in full thrall to nature’s laws. It has evolved with the mind of man as catalyst and intertwined itself with the landscape as if it were a natural force. The trick is not to subject man and nature to the laws of the machine but rather to control the machine according to the laws and suggestions of nature and human nature. To subscribe to this does not make one a Luddite. They, like their modern-day opposites, had no inkling of such a thing, but simply were afraid of looms. Their contemporary antitheticals are unaware that machines can exercise their own forms of tyranny, and, unaware of this, they appear not to know that it is possible to use machines to escape the tyranny of machines, although it must be done with exceeding care, like setting a backfire or using venom in medicine.
To understand the origins and implications of the Espresso Book Machine, first consider the protection of civil aviation from terrorism, not for the sake of the question itself, but to the extent that it is a model of production. Production in this case is the extraction of threats from a predominantly benign background. It is relevant because it illustrates how pervasive is the lust for bespoke data and customization of all sorts now that these have been made possible on a mass scale by machines with certain qualities that ape intelligence.
In the case of civil aviation, there are complementary approaches, each of which should be pursued in its fullness and bound inextricably to the others, although that rarely happens. The first is hardening and passive defense: the strengthening of cargo holds against the force of small bombs, increased fire protection, fortified cockpit doors, further redundancy in control systems, basic anti-aircraft-missile defense, and the like. The second is threat targeting: the detection of terrorists or their destructive artifacts via various methods of categorization, profiling, selective identification, and investigation, so as to stop them before their intended actions. And the third is screening: preventing any and all means of attack from penetrating an assiduously defended perimeter.
The American tendency has been to focus on the second approach, because it is cheaper and easier than the other two. It should not be surprising that we deal with mortal peril by turning to systems analysis born of the computer age and entirely reliant upon probabilities rather than upon hard-won certainties. This has become our way of life, and its advocates, drunk on the bureaucratic elixir of information-getting, believe in it as if it were religion. Which they must, for in light of its fundamental ineffectiveness continual support requires nothing less than blind faith.
To trust the strategy of allowing preapproved passengers to board aircraft, with less or no security, one would also have to believe in the impossibility or high improbability (neither of which is reasonable to expect) of either a terrorist who has no trail but does have comforting bona fides; someone with comforting bona fides who has a radical change of heart; or someone of a splendidly trustworthy nature and background, whose family is held hostage or who unwittingly carries aboard a device that will destroy his conveyance.
To trust in the effectiveness of spot checks, whether of passengers or cargo, one would have to be not only a person of faith but a player of Russian roulette, as are, if only metaphorically, the executive branch, the Congress (of the judiciary it is hard to tell), and, ultimately and most significantly, Americans themselves. Falsely comforted by cost-benefit analyses, we forgo most passive defense as too costly, and, inversely, we favor threat-targeting. What is done least, although we make a show of it, and because it is difficult and exasperating it looms large in every air passenger’s mind, is screening. The excuse for incomplete screening is that the same benefits can be had more easily with “smart” targeting. But in contradiction of this a slogan from the interwar period is unfortunately apt: “The bomber will always get through.”
When these points are made to officialdom it recoils into the bosom of probabilities. In the mid-nineties, it recoiled from the possibility of a revived national air defense, despite the country’s many tall buildings and dense urban concentration, and the attractiveness to Islamic suicide terrorism of large cities like New York and Chicago. Now it recoils perhaps a little less, but we still lack comprehensive screening.
Almost forty years ago, I was in the Israeli army, seconded to the Air Force. I spoke imprecise but fluent and colloquial army Hebrew, and carried valid military identification and documents as well as American and Israeli passports. Hardly did I or my blonde, blue-eyed, Wellesley-educated wife resemble the Palestinian terrorists who had begun to target civil aviation, their richest prize and obsessive focus being El Al. But upon boarding an international flight at Lod, I was questioned and inspected to the extent that the heels of my army boots were prised off; my suitcase was deconstructed almost to the point of ruin; everything in it was pierced, squeezed, and eyed to death; and the Israeli army girl doing the inspection questioned me for more than half an hour about my history, views, plans, and friends. El Al combines this approach with both passive defenses and threat targeting, and although there is no absolute guarantee of safety, it has been for decades at one and the same time the most desirable target for terrorists and the one they have been unable to hit.
We can’t institute such thorough measures in this country because of the size and throughput of our commercial air networks. True enough, but we can take enough trouble and spend enough of the greatest cumulative wealth of any country in the history of mankind to make an almost totally impervious barrier, the price of which would be the acceptance of hard work and expense rather than evading it via the supposedly magic channels of data processing.
This would demand, however, not merely extra care and expenditure but an adjustment of prevailing attitudes sufficient to be a retreat to an earlier time in which machines and industrial processes worked according to general applicability rather than a tailored approach, which was left to craftsmen like tailors. Machines were generally comprehensive and indiscriminate. The cotton gin goes through all the cotton and blindly removes the seeds: it does not identify them. Nor does it miss them. Its action would be exactly the same if the cotton were infested with seeds or had not a single one. In fact, its action would be the same if it were combing through polyester or wool. The combine does not seek out and identify an ear of corn, it takes in everything and because of their characteristics the ears of corn are blindly stopped by its selective filter. Even something so apparently able to “scribe” contours as an apple-or potato-peeling machine of the nineteenth century accounts for variation only by the constant application of a single pressure following the shape of the apple as unconsciously as a wheel takes a dip in the road.
In regard to this characteristic of manufacturing processes and the action and design of machines, we are now between eras. Day by day, machine methods are revised and the preponderance of one approach shifts to the other. The household thermostat no longer depends upon the expansion or contraction of a coiled wire that tilts a mercury-phial switch, but reads the temperature exactly and issues a digital command. Though temperature, like time, is analog, it may be expressed numerically, and the modern thermostat not only measures more precisely but acts or refrains from action in a process of complex decision making.
Moving from analog to digital, from the general, unmodulated application of force to its controlled and targeted application—as in precision-guided munitions in contrast to a blind artillery barrage, or in individually targeted advertising in contrast to roadside billboards—we are adjusting the processes of industrialization to bring them more in line with those of the pre-industrial era. This has always been the motivating factor in the design of machines such as the Jacquard loom (which can do what the most skillful weaver can do), or the sewing machine, or the Cuisinart.™ We build mechanisms either to do what we are incapable of doing—flying, communicating across the seas, shattering mountains, lifting 100-foot trees—or to relieve us of what we can do. The machines of the first category have far outperformed those of the second, until now, when we are approaching a kind of critical mass that will usher-in the eventual predominance of mechanization’s new phase.
The combination of miniaturization, striking advances in materials science, and exponentially improving information storage and processing will allow things never thought feasible even in the most hopeful blushes of the machine age. The theme newly made possible is particularization, the goal of the federal bureaucrat who wants to stop a hijacking not by making it unachievable for anyone but by finding the hijacker, just as it is the goal of the bureaucrat overseeing a container port, who would forgo inspection of each container for the presence of nuclear weapons, in favor of finding out by investigation who might put a nuclear weapon in a container and in which container he might put it.
Explanatory analogies are abundant, such as, for example, a method of shaving that (unlike a razor blade, which runs along an entire front without making distinctions) would select and cut each hair. To Ptolemy this might have seemed as impossible as it might have to Francis Bacon or even to Einstein, although probably any one of them could have drawn a good map to the end result, identifying in terms of its simplest elements that which, though missing, if present would allow the “miracle” in question to occur—a miracle that is now only a matter of time. Strong nano-structures, nano-gearing, subminiature power storage, and the progress of information-processing compression must lead to such things: perhaps a thousand nano-lawn mowers applied to the face, each one chopping one hair shaft at a time, close to the surface, after gripping it like a logging machine, and then returning to base as a magnet is swept over them, the machines thus retrieved and simultaneously recharged by induction. Or perhaps, and for this you may pray without embarrassment, there will be cancer excision cell by cell, and patrols within the body to detect pathological irregularities in more or less real time.
The possibilities are so many that they call for a new Jules Verne to write about their wondrous application; a new H.G. Wells to view them with a more jaundiced eye; and new Huxleys and Orwells to warn darkly of their carelessly or maliciously cultivated potential. But along the way, during the transition, many conveniences will arise, not so miraculous even if hailed as such, but, even if short of miracles, clear departures that will be the cause of great changes. Take, for one example, tailoring.
A most interesting and disappointing phenomenon that one must witness day after day is the belief of so many people in their own importance. Fly across the country or overseas and in almost any seat is someone who is convinced that what he does and who he is makes him superior to everyone around him. The construction worker looks down upon the Harvard professor, who looks down upon him in return. The sculptor thinks middle managers are no better than ants, and middle managers think the sculptor a pathetic fool. The combinations are endless. Once, a powerful financier, knowing that my mother was an actress and my father was in the film industry, turned to me at a dinner as if to share a presumed superiority, and began to demean the intelligence of people in show business. “Can you imagine,” he asked, expressing his contempt, “an actor!”
Had I the presence of mind at that moment, which I did not, my answer would have been, “Why don’t you imagine yourself on a stage in front of a thousand people poised to hear a pin drop and about to spend the next three hours closely and critically observing as you play Hamlet. Or Willy Loman. If you have the chance to do either you might instead jump the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle, because it’s easier.” Other people always are less worthy, contribute less, and have it easier than we do, we think, as part of our human nature. We take things so much for granted—such as clothing, which we wear every day and usually possess in great abundance—with little regard to the skills required and the difficulties in making it.
In the nineteenth century, my grandmother was a seamstress who, in kerosene and gas light, made shirtwaists. When I was young, she tried to teach me how to sew, and ever since I have had great respect for tailors. There are competent tailors and there are great tailors, not to mention designers and pattern cutters, even if so many people in so many other lines of work fail to understand, from ignorance and lack of sympathy, the intensely difficult requirements made upon such people, and the nature of their skills. This ancient profession now is figuratively in the curve of the wave. You can still see it, and it is still breathing air, but it is nonetheless soon to go under, subsumed in the change that will roll through almost all things.
For, not long from now, most clothing will be bespoke, not by tailors and seamstresses but by machines. A person who wants to be clothed will submit to a scan that will sense and then store his measurements in a digital pudding of algorithms and solid geometry. Overlying algorithms will adjust, if necessary, for the big dinner he had the night before, or the ten pounds he hopes to lose in the summer. Then he will choose the clothing he wants, specifying variations in cut, material, color, fasteners, or placement of buttons. And somewhere, perhaps in Hong Kong, Russia, or the room next door, a machine will lay out the fabric, laser-cut the patterns into the material, and then baste, sew, knit, hem, or stitch the cloth, quickly making a garment that previously would have cost a great deal more and taken many times longer to complete.
We have already entered the new paradigm that will bring us such things, and it can only strengthen. It will work upon almost anything manufactured, including the scribed objects that since the beginning of time have required hand and eye. The first things to have fallen—a long time ago—were those that early invited industrialization because of their easy replicability: sugar cubes, bricks, pig iron, stamped parts. Then came the things that required the complicated, if blind, direction of precise machines: filling and capping bottles, baling and tying hay, weaving patterns into cloth. The last stage will be machines that seem almost to think, that will build a house, make a custom-tailored suit, or travel through your colon to scout out and snip polyps that it will give to another machine to deliver to yet another machine for diagnosis.
Printing and publishing fit into this hierarchy very near the bottom, because their essence and utility from day one have been derived from the quality of replicability. The printing press is a masterwork of the old paradigm, and to rationalize the old paradigm economically it was necessary to have large print runs, and, thus, centralization, and following from that an immense and ponderous distribution network. If, however, it were possible to dispense with large print runs, neither centralization nor the trucks and rail cars for transport would be required, nor warehouses in which to store books in the downtime during fluctuation in demand, nor the large bookstores, inventory, and personnel with which to move stock. All of this apparatus and trouble is now rapidly becoming vestigial, and as in most great shifts in industrialization, and so often too in presidential nominating contests, the front-runners early in the competition, that which and those who seem inevitable, are often replaced by a compromise candidate or someone or something that appears to have come out of the blue.
In the case of books and publishing, for decades the front-runner as heir apparent to the printing press was the computer screen, whether (and at first) on the desktop, laptop, e-book, or i-book. A whole book—indeed, a whole library—can be sent over copper, fiber-optic, or the air, and at its destination manipulated, reproduced, searched, displayed, and stored with ease and speed heretofore unheard of. But there has been so much understandable resistance to this that the old ways, long vulnerable to replacement, are still with us.
As often happens with new technologies, digital technology being a rich example, its stewards become so intoxicated with the adventure they are living that they forget that mechanism must adjust to man rather than vice versa. Much of the alienation and failure of the electronic age is due to the fact that its enthusiasts lack education in the humanities, and, like Soviet planners, value the design they have come to worship over the people they claim to serve. They tend to overlook and ignore human needs and preferences, which seldom run parallel to the powers and tendencies of machines, because in their careless mania they have been easily educated out of them, never having been well educated in them.
Thus it was widely assumed—and it may yet happen—that books would be replaced by the magnificently efficient digibook, which can accomplish miracles, if you allow that miracles are manifested in quantities rather than qualities. Although I am sometimes accused of being a kind of anti-Christ ignorant of and hostile to technology, this is hardly the case. I have had a lifelong interest in technology, and in physics half-theoretical, half-empirical, and entirely amateur. Starting a long time ago with my parents, I have made my family suffer through sincere disquisitions on horsepower, electrical engineering, thermodynamics, and much else. As an undergraduate, I took Professor Bode’s course on communications theory and thus heard directly from a recently retired director of the Bell Labs what, had I been a courageous investor rather than an investment chicken, I could have parlayed over the last forty years into perhaps a billion dollars.
