NETFUTURE

                    Technology and Human Responsibility

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Issue #109     A Publication of The Nature Institute        August 3, 2000
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
          Editor:  Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)

                  On the Web: http://www.netfuture.org/
     You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.

NetFuture is a reader-supported publication.


CONTENTS
---------

Quotes and Provocations
   Of Vision Quests, Gender, and Boredom
   Image Ascendent, or Descendent?

Tech Knowledge Revue (Langdon Winner)
   Hot Property in Leedsville: The Mumford House Up for Sale

DEPARTMENTS

Correspondence
   Golden Genes Article Proves Too Much (Peter Shapiro)

About this newsletter


==========================================================================

                         QUOTES AND PROVOCATIONS


Of Vision Quests, Gender, and Boredom
-------------------------------------

In her recently released Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the
Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech, Paulina Borsook takes up,
among other things, the John Perry Barlow / George Gilder view of
"cyberspace and hightechlandia" as the place "where the buffalo roam and
dogs run free":

   Never mind that many people working in high tech are most likely grunt
   programmers doing stuff like maintaining inventory-tracking modules for
   construction-management accounting software, or working at ghastly huge
   man-in-the-gray-easy-care-twills places such as Ross Perot's own data
   processing feudal kingdom, Perot Systems, or at former defense-
   aerospace contractors such as Lockheed-Martin.  Manning their computers
   like Kiowa braves on vision quests, most high tech droids ain't.

In an idle moment I tried to jot down some of the most basic reasons I
could come up with for the public's infatuation with digital technologies
despite the kind of daily reality Borsook points to.  There's nothing
original about my list (and you will doubtless want to add to it).  But
it's useful to take a moment every so often and glance over the large
picture.  So here's what I have so far:

** Mystery:  people don't understand what's inside the box.

** Eliza effect:  the technology seems intelligent.

** Reverse-Eliza effect:  we often find ourselves struggling helplessly
   with these machines, so obviously we're dumber than they are.

** The illusion of precise control (and who doesn't want to be in
   control?).  Closely related to this:  the sense of power and capability
   associated with carrying all these sleek, miniaturized gadgets around.

** Fashion:  with every newspaper and magazine now having a consumer-goods
   "news" section promoting digital gadgets, the fashion quotient of this
   stuff has become irresistible.

** Sense of progress and destiny in the inevitable march from one
   generation of technology to the next, more sophisticated generation.
   How can these devices keep getting better if there isn't a fundamental
   evolutionary imperative at work?

** Distraction and escape.

** Computers are "solutions" -- the favorite word of high-tech ad
   copywriters.  Computers do provide solutions to problems in an
   extremely narrow sense, and it is much easier to glorify the narrow
   accomplishments than to realize how the very narrowness tends to
   subvert the larger picture.  (See "The Trouble with Ubiquitous
   Technology Pushers" in NF #100, 101.)



Image Ascendent, or Descendent?
-------------------------------

Am I the only one whose eyes glaze over at this kind of rhetoric? --

   The real world of digital reality has always been post-alphabetic.
   Probably because the letters of the alphabet were too slow to keep up
   with the light-time and light-speed of electronics, the alphabet long
   ago shuddered at the speed of light, burned up and crashed to earth.
   Writing can't keep up to the speed of electronic society.  The result
   has been the end of the Gutenberg Galaxy and the beginning of the Image
   Millennium.  Images moving at the speed of light.  Images moving faster
   than the time it takes to record their passing.  Iconic images.
   Special-Effect Images.  Images of life past, present and future as
   culture is fast-forwarded into the electronic nervous system.  Images
   that circulate so quickly and shine with such intensity that they begin
   to alter the ratio of the human sensorium. (Arthur and Marilouise
   Kroker, CTHEORY, vol. 23, no. 1-2)

The best I can figure is that the authors wanted to submit their own
illustration of an alphabet that has crashed and burned.

But I do seriously wonder how long we are going to keep hearing this
strange mix of sense and nonsense about images.  Did we take in fewer
visual stimuli before now?  From morning till night we've always been
confronted with a visual world -- one that didn't need to travel through
digital channels at "light speed" to reach us because it was already here,
minute by minute, hour by hour, incessantly, as long as our eyes were
open.  If we didn't consider it particularly noteworthy, it was because it
held together in a natural way, so that our attention was focused on what
our surroundings meant for our lives.

Yes, something is changing, but it's not that we are increasingly exposed
to images.  What's changing is the kind of images we are exposed to.  They
are ever more arbitrary, incoherent, removed from the meaningful contexts
of our lives, manufactured by a machinery of abstraction, scientifically
calculated to subvert conscious intention, and designed to serve the
narrowest commercial interests.  What they mean for us in any serious
sense is often not much at all.

If all this has an impact on the role of print in our culture, again it's
not because we have so much imagery to cope with.  The problem is with the
features of imagery I've just cited -- and, in particular, the
arbitrariness, incoherence, and subversion of conscious intention.  It's
hard to attend deeply to a page (or screen) of print if you have been
reduced to a bundle of reflex reactions produced by meaningless
distractions.  But the alphabet is not the only thing that crashes and
burns in the presence of this reduction; so does thinking.

(Thanks to Ron Purser for forwarding the CTHEORY article.)

SLT

Goto table of contents


==========================================================================

        HOT PROPERTY IN LEEDSVILLE: THE MUMFORD HOUSE UP FOR SALE

                              Langdon Winner
                             (winner@rpi.edu)

                                                      TECH KNOWLEDGE REVUE
                                                      2.2   August 3, 2000

It was about a year ago that I learned the old place had been put on the
market.  The realtor's listing described its features in terms meant to
attract upscale home buyers:  "charming side hall colonial farmhouse ...
restored to preserve its historical integrity ... wideboard floors ...
living room with exposed beams ... New Country Kitchen with working
fireplace and brick oven; Pantry; Dining Room and Family Room with
fireplace.  French doors leading to private landscaped garden; Full bath;
Master Bedroom; 3 bedrooms ... ideal as a horse property."

Located on tree-lined Leedsville Road just outside the village of Amenia,
New York, the dwelling is just an hour-and-a-half's drive north of
Manhattan -- a perfect spot for a young couple who've made money from Wall
Street or Tech Valley to establish a weekend retreat or even a wired
cottage for telecommuting.  When compared to big-city rents, the asking
price is an absolute steal:  $375,000 dollars, including house and 13.58
acres.


A House of Realities
--------------------

What makes this particular piece of property notable is that for six
decades it was the home of Lewis Mumford, historian, social philosopher,
public intellectual, and visionary of an era of social renewal yet
unachieved.  It was here that Lewis sought refuge from the noise,
pollution and stress of New York City, arriving first in 1929 for a series
of summer vacations, and moving to the house as permanent resident several
years later.  It was here that Mumford wrote most of his great books on
architecture, the city, war, art, science, technology, and the dilemmas of
the human condition.  It was here that he and his wife Sophia raised two
children, entertained visitors from all over the world, and reflected on
both the promise and deep-seated ills of modern civilization.  And it was
here that Mumford died in 1990 at ninety-five, leaving behind a body of
work in cultural history and social criticism as significant as any
produced in the twentieth century.

I had known Lewis and Sophia since the middle 1970s, but had never made
the journey to their Leedsville home.  When I learned from a friend that
the house was being renovated and prepared for sale, we decided to drive
there, hoping to walk the grounds and see the rooms before they became
someone's private property.

We were met on the front lawn by Shane Strauss, a local carpenter who had
bought it from the Mumford estate following Sophia's death in 1997.  He'd
spent months fixing it up "on spec", putting up sheet rock, repairing
stairs, refinishing floors, and painting all the rooms.  He was more than
happy to show us around.  Although the house was in fairly good condition
for a structure built in the 1830s, it was clearly not equipped in ways
that would make it comfortable by today's middle-class standards.

"The rooms were wall-to-wall bookshelves just nailed together from simple
boards," he explained.  "It took me days to tear them down and haul away
the wood."  I cringed.  The bookshelves in Mumford's study carted off to
the dump?  Indeed, the refurbished house gives no sign that Mumford's
study ever existed.  "The kitchen," he continued, "was old fashioned, a
pantry, sink, and stove.  I took nine layers of linoleum off the kitchen
floor.  When one layer wore out, they just put down another."

There is certainly nothing ostentatious about the dwelling, just an old
farm house that became a literary workplace.  Although, in his studies,
Mumford surveyed the most exotic achievements of modern architecture, his
personal preference was to live simply.  In his last published work, the
autobiographical Sketches from Life, Mumford affectionately
describes the Leedsville house, stressing its connection to its environs,
and noting how the building had subtly infused and enriched the life of
his family:

   The transformation of the ramshackle house and our first weedy acre
   into a densely cultivated tract constitutes a vital part of the story
   of our marriage .... Without any set intention on our part our acres
   became, at the climax of cultivation a small cross-section of the
   potential environment, with a woodlot, a swath of cleared meadow, a
   vegetable garden, two asparagus beds, encircled by a miniature woodland
   walk -- a Philosophenweg, as our German friends call it -- that leads
   to what was once an open view across the valley to the exposed flanks
   of Oblong Mountain, some twelve hundred feet high .... we gradually
   fell in love with our shabby house as a young man might fall in love
   with a homely girl whose voice and smile were irresistible.  As with
   faces -- Abe Lincoln bears witness -- character is more ingratiating
   and enduring than mere good looks.  No rise in our income has ever
   tempted us to look elsewhere for another house, still less to build a
   more commodious or fashionable one.  In no sense was this the house of
   our dreams.  But over our lifetime it has slowly turned into something
   better, the house of our realities.  In all its year-by-year changes,
   under the batterings of age and the bludgeonings of chance, this dear
   house has enfolded and remolded our family character -- exposing our
   limitations as well as our virtues.


A Place for Ideas and Personal Interaction
------------------------------------------

Unfortunately, the carpenter's admirable effort to retain much of the
historic character of the house has made it more difficult to sell.  As
the realtor who handles the listing told me recently, "It's not attractive
to our customers because it lacks many of the features people expect in a
home these days."  I suppose she means that well-to-do house hunters are
looking for a Jacuzzi, microwave oven, satellite dish, swimming pool,
broadband DSL connection, and all the amenities of Martha Stewart
consumerism.  After all, a "country kitchen" these days is more than just
a kitchen in the country; it takes dozens of sophisticated appliances to
cook those strawberry rhubarb muffins.

As I wandered through the rambling structure, it struck me as odd and more
than a little offensive that a house of such historical significance
should be up for sale at all, just another land deal in the booming
Dutchess County real estate market.  In light of Mumford's accomplishment
and in recognition of the living presence of his ideas, shouldn't his
house be preserved as a place of spiritual retreat, a center where people
could gather to reflect upon the intellectual, spiritual and practical
issues of our times?  Why haven't those of us moved by his writing and his
example stepped forward to secure the grounds that Lewis and Sophia
carefully tended for so many years?

By comparison, about an hour's drive farther north is Arrowhead Farm just
outside of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the home of Herman Melville where
most of Moby Dick was written.  Today the house is fully restored, tended
by a devoted crew of curators and tour guides.  On the second floor one
finds a recreation of Melville's writing desk and its view of the humps of
Mt. Greylock, which (especially in the winter snows) resembles the form of
a great white whale. Museum exhibits and the bookshop remind visitors of
Melville's work and vision.  In my case, a visit to Arrowhead Farm got me
reading Melville again, one of the most rewarding experiences of the past
several years.

Of course, Mumford never achieved the prominence of Herman Melville
(although neither did Melville himself during his own tragic lifetime).
But how much acclaim does it take to merit having one's home become a
place of lasting memory?  Is there a Richter Scale for literary and
philosophical impact that determines what is kept and what is discarded
and forgotten?

I am not suggesting that the Mumford house become a museum.  Lewis and
Sophia would have hated the idea; their home was a place for lively ideas,
intense personal interactions, and ambitious projects.  At the same time,
wouldn't it make sense to preserve the place in ways that make that
vitality available to visitors, especially to writers, artists,
architects, activists, and everyday citizens who wish to keep Mumford's
spirit alive?


Focusing Energies of Remembrance
--------------------------------

Walking through the house and gardens, I was haunted by the way things
that have great meaning eventually shed their meaning to become dumb,
senseless objects.  Unless we find a coherent way to remember a
significant artifact or place, it slowly moves toward oblivion.  The
ancient Greeks realized much more clearly than we how the meaning of our
existence is threatened by the same fate, a ghastly futility that envelops
a person's life and deeds unless they can somehow be recalled in a story.

At a certain point in our tour, Mr. Strauss mentioned that while he was
cleaning out the barn next to the house he'd come upon a jar of snakes
preserved in formaldehyde.  "It was evidently something that Mumford's son
Geddes collected when he was a boy."  The comment hit me with a certain
sting.  Geddes was Lewis and Sophia's only son, killed on the battlefields
of Europe during World War II.  As a way to come terms with his grief,
Mumford wrote of Geddes' childhood in Green Memories, a book that
describes the boy running through the fields, fishing in the stream out
back, climbing nearby mountains, and collecting specimens.  Geddes' death
was doubly tragic for Mumford because he had urged America to actively
resist fascism and the threat it posed to world civilization.

But for the carpenter, an old bottle of snakes was just an old bottle of
snakes, something to throw out, not a lens to focus energies of
remembrance.  Who's to blame him for thinking so?  And perhaps an old
house is just an old house, regardless of who lived there or what meaning
the place had for them, their friends, and American letters.

In important ways, of course, Lewis Mumford is already well remembered.
His personal papers are archived at the University of Pennsylvania; his
personal library is on display at the University of Monmouth.  The Lewis
Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research at the State
University of New York in Albany, keeps alive his way of thinking about
the city and environment. The Leedsville house has been placed on the
National Register of Historic Places and now bears a commemorative plaque.
Most importantly, of course, many of Mumford's books are still in print,
widely read and discussed throughout the world.


Toward a High-minded Embrace of Technology
------------------------------------------

But something is missing in our remembrance of the man and his life's
work.  Among Mumford's key concerns was to provide a systematic, useful
understanding of technology and the human prospect, a vision of the future
illuminated by a thorough grasp of world history.  From the early 1920s
until his last days Mumford sought to elucidate the potential for genuine
well-being in a variety of technical, scientific, cultural and economic
developments, a potential he believed was often overlooked in the rush to
develop military and commercial applications.

Equally important to him was the need to describe the darker side of
technological systems, their origins in power fantasies that have recurred
from the kings of ancient Mesopotamia to today's global corporations,
their consequences in crippling society and destroying ecosystems wherever
these fantasies and their agents have achieved dominance.  One of
Mumford's enduring accomplishments was to offer an ambitious, coherent
vision of a technological civilization in which the best human impulses
could be realized and the worst tendencies recognized and restrained.

Mumford's approach addresses one of the more vexing problems of our time.
For although we live amid dynamic, rapid-fire technological innovation,
the thinking that surrounds this innovation is now shockingly small-
minded.  Profound discoveries and inventions are pressed into service by
people inspired by little more than gadget-lust or the hope of a fast
buck.  Among leading writers on the new economy, what passes for a
brilliant insight is seldom much more than the banal suggestion that high
tech labs, entrepreneurs, and capital markets be brought into more
intimate connection.  Journalists writing commentaries on technology and
social choice are reduced to agonizing about whether children of the dot-
com wealthy are stressed out by having too much money to spend on cars,
drugs, and electronic toys.  Although everyone recognizes that world-
altering changes are involved in electronics, digital communications,
genomics and the like, the prevailing modes of reflection on these matters
struggle to rise to the level of triviality.

At the heart of Mumford's writing is the idea that practical, material
means are always more than that; they involve deep-seated cultural and
spiritual commitments that tend to be forgotten.  His best known example
is the demonstration that the clock was first developed as a way to
structure the hours of work and religious devotion within the medieval
monastery, and only centuries later spread to offices, factories, and
society as a whole.

Countless revelations of this kind inform Mumford's research.  He
identifies the spiritual sources of risk-taking, invention, engineering,
investment, social regimentation, advertising, consumerism, and other
economic and technical practices that have shaped modern life.  In
contrast, today's tendency is to disregard origins, to discount choices
made in the past, to forget where the bodies are buried, and to ignore the
consequences of taking one path rather than others possibly more fruitful.
A thoroughly impoverished view of innovation prevails in our time:  the
belief that new things flow from nothing more than ingenious teamwork in
corporate and university laboratories and are then delivered to a grateful
public by the workings of a free market.  This explanation of
technological and social change carries our social amnesia, the mentality
of "born yesterday," to breathtaking extremes.


Preserving the Freedom to Change
--------------------------------

Mumford's hope was that by reclaiming the history of how things came to be
and what alternatives exist, each generation would be able to change
direction in fundamental ways, creating a better future than the one
always (mistakenly) proclaimed as "inevitable."  It is that part of his
vision that needs to be remembered and refocused for our time.  But no
current institution even comes close to doing it.

In no part of the world is the lack of an intellectually resourceful
vision of the future more noticeable than in Mumford's own home, the
Hudson Valley.  During the past year leaders in business and government
have proposed a program of reckless reindustrialization, supporting the
rapid construction of megaplants in electricity generation, cement
manufacturing, chip fabrication, and other forms of intensely polluting
production.  This is precisely the kind of short-sighted "economic
development" that the valley and its residents do not need and many
communities are rising up to resist.  So desperate is the situation that
the National Trust for Historic Preservation recently listed the Hudson
Valley as one of America's "Eleven Most Endangered Historic Sites." At
issue here is a rebirth of the environmentally and socially destructive
systems characteristic of an earlier period of high-testosterone
entrepreneurialism -- the "Brown Decades" Mumford decried in his portrait
of the last half of the nineteenth century.  The amnesia deepens.

Mumford offered a hopeful vision of an advanced technological society in
which wholeness, balance, and respect for multiple sources of creativity
were central to building sociotechnical patterns.  His criticisms of the
dominant paths of the twentieth century were never "anti-technology" (as
some detractors have claimed), but predicated on the quest to create
technically sophisticated means that were just, sustainable, democratic,
ecologically sound, and nourishing to the human spirit.

This outcome, he believed, would require sweeping reform in material
culture and people's sense of personal fulfillment.  The mission of a sane
civilization, he argued, was to "unite the scattered fragments of the
human personality, turning artificially dismembered men -- bureaucrats,
specialists, `experts,' depersonalized agents -- into complete human
beings, repairing the damage that has been done by social segregation, by
over-cultivation of a favored function, by tribalisms and nationalism, by
the absence of organic partnerships and ideal purposes."

At this writing the property in Leedsville is still for sale.  The hour is
late, but isn't it worth trying to preserve the house as a gathering place
for study, reflection and debate in Lewis Mumford's tradition?  Welcome to
the Center for Technology and the Human Prospect.  It has a nice ring to
it.  I wonder what could make it happen.


                          ---------------------

Tech Knowledge Revue is produced at the Chatham Center for Advanced Study,
339 Bashford Road, North Chatham, NY 12132.  Langdon Winner can be reached
at:  winner@rpi.edu and at his Web page:  http://www.rpi.edu/~winner .

Copyright Langdon Winner 2000.  Distributed as part of NetFuture:
http://www.netfuture.org/ .  You may redistribute this
article for noncommercial purposes, with this notice attached.

Goto table of contents


==========================================================================

                              CORRESPONDENCE


Golden Genes Article Proves Too Much
------------------------------------

Response to:  "Golden Genes and World Hunger" (NF-108)
From:  Peter Shapiro (jpshapiro@home.com)

This is an interesting and worthwile article.  But in some ways, it proves
too much.  It is impossible for humankind to rationalize the ultimate
outcome of its efforts.  Industrial revolution raises "standards of
living" but = greenhouse gas.  Smallpox vaccines = AIDS.   "Conquering
disease" = "overpopulation."    So what to do?  Stop trying?  Or try the
best we can?


                          ---------------------

Peter Shapiro --

Of course we should try the best we can.  No one is asking for perfect
knowledge before we act.  The point is only that we should not act in
ignorance of the knowledge we have.  When we approach problems that are
deeply contextual as if they were not, then we prepare the way for
unnecessary disasters.  When we manipulate organisms based on our habits
in manipulating machines, we can be sure that the organisms will turn
around and bite us.

Steve

Goto table of contents


==========================================================================

                          ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER

Copyright 2000 by The Nature Institute.  You may redistribute this
newsletter for noncommercial purposes.  You may also redistribute
individual articles in their entirety, provided the NetFuture url and this
paragraph are attached.

NetFuture is supported by freely given reader contributions, and could not
survive without them.  For details and special offers, see
http://netfuture.org/support.html .

Current and past issues of NetFuture are available on the Web:

    http://netfuture.org/

To subscribe or unsubscribe to NetFuture:
    http://netfuture.org/subscribe.html.

Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #109 :: August 3, 2000

Goto table of contents