NETFUTURE

                    Technology and Human Responsibility

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Issue #138                                                November 7, 2002
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                 A Publication of The Nature Institute
           Editor:  Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)

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

Can we take responsibility for technology, or must we sleepwalk
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CONTENTS
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Quotes and Provocations
   High-Profile Doubts about Classroom Computers
   Ellen Ullman on Artificial Unintelligibility

Mindlessness and the Brain (Stephen L. Talbott)
   Have you been nice to your two hemispheres today?

DEPARTMENTS

Correspondence
   Technology Does Not Make Us More Vulnerable (Michael Goldhaber)
   Response to Goldhaber (Langdon Winner)

About this newsletter


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                         QUOTES AND PROVOCATIONS


High-Profile Doubts about Classroom Computers
---------------------------------------------

That eminent news weekly, the Economist (Oct. 26, 2002), has now
pronounced editorially -- and emphatically -- on the billions of dollars
spent in order to "clutter classrooms with terminals and keyboards".
These billions, the editors note, were "spent on a hunch", and the hunch
turns out to have no apparent justification.  In an accompanying story
about a new study in Israel (which purports to show, among other things,
"a consistently negative relation" between computer use and math test
scores for fourth graders), the magazine writes:

   Back in 1922, Thomas Edison predicted that "the motion picture is
   destined to revolutionize our educational system and ... in a few years
   it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks".
   Well, we all make mistakes.  But at least Edison did not squander vast
   quantities of public money on installing cinema screens in schools
   around the country.

Actually, I wouldn't trust that Israeli study any further than I trust all
the other studies supposedly elucidating the role of the computer in the
classroom.  Social science research, in general, remains primitive when it
is undisciplined hackwork, and even more primitive when it tries to ape
the "hard" sciences.  And, in any case, the proponents of wired classrooms
will hardly be fazed by the latest report.  They will doubtless respond
(with some reason) that, in order to get a really good education out of a
computer, you can't just drop the machine into a conventional classroom.
The computer imposes its own distinctive requirements upon the entire
educational context, so that everything needs to change.  This
takes time.

But if this is true, then what in the world were we thinking when we
immediately decided that, given the availability of the networked PC, it
was urgently required of us to re-found education upon program logic, web
access, and email?  Wouldn't the natural thing have been to look into that
"total change" a little bit before committing huge resources to the
computerization of education?


Ellen Ullman on Artificial Unintelligibility
--------------------------------------------

A few notes from my reading of Ellen Ullman's "Programming the Post-Human"
in the October issue of Harper's Magazine:

** Struck by how radically computers have infected the natural sciences,
Ullman quotes Lucia Jacobs, a Berkeley professor of psychology studying
squirrel behavior:

   I am an ethologist and know virtually nothing about computers,
   simulations, programming, mathematical concepts, or logic.  But the
   research is pulling me right into the middle of it.

Jacobs is still interested in squirrels, but today she also works with
robots.  "It is now standard scientific practice", writes Ullman, "to
study machine simulations as if they were indeed chipmunks, or squirrels
.... Psychology and cognitive science -- and indeed biology -- are thus
poised to become, in essence, branches of cybernetics".

** The faith buttressing this work is what Ullman refers to as
"engineering empiricism".  It is the conviction, long prevalent within
artificial intelligence, that we should abandon "sterile philosophizing"
and just get down to the practical business of building minds.  "You don't
have to understand thought to make a mind", as computer scientist Douglas
Hofstadter puts it.  And Rodney Brooks, director of MIT's artificial
intelligence laboratory, told Ullman, "The definition of life is hard.
You could spend five hundred years thinking about it or spend a few years
doing it".  Breathtaking statements.  What we see here, in Ullman's apt
phrase, is "anti-intellectualism in search of the intellect" -- a mindless
search if ever there was one.

It rarely seems to occur to researchers like Hofstadter and Brooks that
our powers of making must be entirely distinct from any of the
things we have made or could make, or that a little intelligent
understanding might reveal gross misconceptions at the heart of the entire
AI project.  Moreover, the irony in their anti-intellectualism, as Ullman
brings out, is that years of over-expectation and disappointment have now
driven researchers back to the deeper questions -- for example, What is
consciousness?  Pick up many journals of cognitive science and you will
find endless discourses on this question -- discourses, incidentally,
whose philosophical naivete and conceptual inadequacy will make you yearn
for the good old days of concise medieval hairsplitting.

** Ullman's primary concern in the essay is to combat the disembodied view
of life and intelligence that takes hold wherever the computer model
prevails.  The logical extreme, she observes, is "pure software, unsullied
by exigencies of carbon atoms, bodies, fuel, gravity, heat, or any other
messy concern of either soft-tissued or metal-bodied creatures".

But, she counters, we need more than abstraction.  The organism's
sentience

   is integral to the substrate from which it arose, not something that
   can be taken off and placed elsewhere.  We drag along inside us the
   brains of reptiles, the tails of tadpoles, the DNA of fungi and mice;
   our cells are permuted paramecia; our salty blood is what's left of our
   birth in the sea.  Genetically, we are barely more than roundworms.
   Evolution, that sloppy programmer, has seen fit to create us as a wild
   amalgam of everything that came before us:  the whole history of life
   on Earth lives on, written in our bodies.  And who is to say which
   piece of this history can be excised, separated, deemed "useless" as an
   essential part of our nature and being?

It is surely important to recognize the importance of embodied existence
for our mental life.  But there is a problem here that Ullman does not
address.  The abstract, softwarish view of mentality is the conclusion and
crown of a long development in science and technology.  This development
is now presenting us with a strange outcome:  having focused single-
mindedly upon what they think of as the "solid, physical world",
scientists have found themselves sacrificing, not only mentality, but even
materiality itself.  That is, "hard" science has proven itself unable, in
the last analysis, to reckon with anything but numbers, algorithms, and
other airy abstractions.

So it does Ullman little good to appeal to "the whole history of life on
earth ... written in our bodies" -- not if, when we turn to examine these
bodies, we find ourselves driven to reconceive them as manufactured from
the disembodied equations of particle physics, or as machines governed
computationally by genetic and evolutionary algorithms.  We are right back
with all those software abstractions.  Ullman herself buys into this when
she refers to evolution as a "programmer".

If, as some physicists would have it, "its are bits", then there's not
much use in saying (in the words Ullman borrows from linguists George
Lakoff and Mark Johnson), "the very structure of reason itself comes from
the details of our embodiment".  This is merely to say that "these bits
come from those bits".  The body behind all this talk has disappeared,
except as a kind of virtual machine capable of running software.  Reified
algorithms take the place of real bodies.

** When you buy into the general drift of modern thought, as Ullman seems
to do, the results are not always pretty.  For example, she quarrels with
those who posit a disembodied essence of life, as if

   these messy experiences of alimentation and birth, these deepest
   biological imperatives -- stay alive, eat, create others who will stay
   alive -- were not the foundation, indeed the source, of intelligence;
   as if intelligence were not simply one of the many strategies that
   evolved to serve the striving for life.  If sentience doesn't come from
   the body's desire to live ... where else would it come from?

But what good does it do to explain intelligence as a strategy that
evolved to serve the striving for life, when the idea of striving already
includes intelligence?  What good does it do to explain sentience as
coming from "the body's desire to live", when desire is itself a form of
sentience?  This is simply to posit the thing you are trying to explain.

You will find a similar explanatory strategy endemic in the literature of
cognitive science, wherever the attempt is made to explain mind in terms
of what is conceived as wholly other than mind.  One way or another, the
explanations smuggle in the very thing they are trying to explain, often
in the guise of such terms as "information", "message", "code", "program",
"algorithm", "tendency", and "pattern" -- none of which can be defined
without assuming an unexplained thought-element.  How could it be
otherwise when you make it your task to get mind from something that is
supposed to be wholly devoid of mind?

** It is her failure to overcome this confused state of affairs, I think,
that leads Ullman to the disappointingly weak conclusion of her essay.  In
trying to find a positive basis for understanding the mind, she offers a
few thoughts about how mammals form societies based on mutual recognition,
which she takes to be the crucial thing.  (She quotes Rodney Brooks as
saying, "None of our robots can recognize their own kind".)  And so:

   Uniqueness, individuality, specialness, is inherent to our strategy for
   living.  It's not just a trick:  there really is someone different in
   there.

Yes, someone unique is "in there", and this is doubtless central.  But I
don't see how Ullman has made a case in any way that clearly separates her
view from that of the AI researchers she is criticizing.  In fact, she
finally just throws in the towel:  human sentience is "too complex to
understand fully by rational means, something we observe, marvel at, fear.
In the end, we give up and call it an 'act of God'".

That's the conclusion, I think, of someone who is standing outside her own
consciousness, trying to understand it as an objective thing rather than
observe her own activity of understanding from within it.  But despite its
shortcomings on the positive side, Ellen Ullman's worthy article frames a
vital set of issues, and is well worth checking out.

(Thanks to Thomas Tommi for bringing Ullman's article to my attention.)

SLT

Goto table of contents


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                        MINDLESSNESS AND THE BRAIN

                            Stephen L. Talbott
                          (stevet@netfuture.org)

You have by now most likely read dozens of science news stories playing on
the fact that researchers can watch areas of the brain "light up" as test
subjects perform various activities.  What the lighting up of a particular
area means, stated more or less exhaustively, appears to be:  "something's
going on there".  But in this field things are happening so fast that
excited researchers can't afford to be slowed down by mere hopeless
ignorance.  One almost suspects a psychedelic element must reside in those
glowing, multicolored, instrument-produced images of cerebral tissue,
since most of the news reports carry the same howling absurdities.

Here's a typical example.  The New York Times (June 22, 1999)
reported on research thought to confirm "a theory that the fear of pain is
worse than the pain itself".  The confirmation lay in the fact that
particular areas of the brain lit up during the anticipation of pain, and
these were mostly different from, though situated close to, areas that
usually light up during the actual experience of pain.  That's just about
the entire substance of the story, which begins this way:

   It is a common reaction:  fear of the dentist's drill.  Now scientists
   say the feeling is not only real, but they can show just what happens
   in the brain to cause it.

And to think that all this time I mistakenly thought my fear was caused by
what the dentist's drill was about to do to me!  I guess I should really
have been fearing that ominous glow in my brain.  At least I can take
comfort in the researchers' conclusion that my fear is "real", although
it's too bad they didn't give me, for comparison, an example of a fear
that is not real.  It would have been nice to know which fears of
mine weren't really there.

It's difficult to decipher what this article (like most others of the same
ilk) is actually trying to tell us.  But of one thing you can be sure: the
chief scientist on the case hopes, as the article tells us, "to use this
research to help people with chronic pain".  According to the prevailing
canons of journalism, every science story needs such a warm and fuzzy
benediction, suggesting how the human estate may benefit from the work.
This is decidedly not an equal opportunity affair, however; you rarely see
such routine statements about the risks of such research.


On Reforming Gray Matter
------------------------

For all I know, the brain investigations may indeed lead to chemical or
other interventions that "work" in one way or another.  But progress
toward this end will not be aided by the acute conceptual confusions
plaguing this kind of research.  And the human pain resulting from these
confusions may dwarf anything experienced in the dentist's chair.

Given a vague grasp of the fact that "we are psychosomatic organisms",
many people -- scientists among them -- seem content to flop blithely back
and forth between a brain vocabulary and a mental vocabulary as if there
were no distinction between the two.  What makes this an inexcusable lack
of discipline is the simple fact that, as these vocabularies now exist, no
one has the slightest idea how to translate a single term of the one
language into a term of the other.

It's certainly true that we can correlate elements of brain physiology
with elements of mentality.  But this fact is fully consistent with
opposite extremes of interpretation -- consistent, that is, with the
idea that our thinking and other mental activities somehow "arise"
as effects of brain matter, and also with the idea that thinking
constructs and employs the brain for its own manifestation.  However,
which alternative we prefer is irrelevant to the point I'm making, which
is that the sloppy shifting between different vocabularies results in
the most shameless nonsense.

What, after all, are we to make of references to the brain as if it were
the stuff of mind?  Should we try to "reform" those brain tissues that
light up when we don't want them to, perhaps admonishing them or
administering a slap to some recalcitrant gray matter?  When researchers
say they've found in the brain the "cause" of our fear of dentists, should
we work to remove the cause by altering the physiological conditions
responsible for the glow?  To be a little more topical, are we to remedy
the "cause" of our fear of terrorists by tweaking our brains, or do we
need to look elsewhere?


Locating Consciousness
----------------------

We are being swamped by this illuminated-brain craziness.  A New York
Times headline (Sep. 25, 2001) has researchers "Watching How the Brain
Works as it Weighs a Moral Dilemma", while a science article in the
Economist (May 25, 2002) talks about "how the brain actually makes
decisions".  Presumably, if the brain is really doing the decision-making
and moral weighing, then the buck stops there and all moral education
should be in the form of chemical or surgical "instruction".

As for another article in the Times, "Looking for That Brain Wave Called
Love" (Oct. 28, 2000), you might think it's pure jest.  But, no, Rutgers
anthropologist, Helen Fisher, has run madly infatuated test subjects
through an MRI machine to record their brain activity.  Which could be a
perfectly interesting thing to do, except that she seems to think she is
investigating the nature of love.  In fact, she complains about the
slowness of those who fail to see the value of her work:

   It's amazing how scientists don't regard depression or anxiety as a
   mystery but want to relegate romantic love to the realm of the
   supernatural.

I'm not sure how the supernatural gets in there, except as a cheap way to
declare her own point of view sane and rational.  But if you want to
consign love (or depression or anxiety) to a realm offering no hope of
meaningful and non-mysterious understanding, I can't think of any better
way than to equate it with physiology.  Respond to your advice-seeking,
lovesick friends by explaining how they should interact with or modify
appropriate brain tissues, and I guarantee you'll produce a great deal of
mystification.

Another article in the Economist (Sep. 21, 2002) tells us that
"neuroscientists think they may have pinned down the source of out-of-the-
body experiences".  The guilty party?  None other than the right angular
gyrus -- and if you want to fix it, I should warn you that it is not,
after all, near the pineal gland, but rather located above and slightly
behind the right ear.  An odd place, perhaps, for out-of-the-body
experiences to lurk, but if an experience has to hide out somewhere, I
suppose that's as good a place as any.


Harmonizing the Hemispheres
---------------------------

As I was mulling over a pile of science stories like the ones mentioned
above, I chanced upon a 1977 Owen Barfield essay.  It concerned the 1976
Reith Lectures, entitled "Mechanics of the Mind", by neurophysiologist
Colin Blakemore.  Back then brain hemisphere research was becoming
popular, and so Blakemore discussed it in his lectures.  Picking up on
this, Barfield began by noting that "if we know something about the
physical structure of the brain, we can either make physical use of that
knowledge (surgery, drugs, and so forth), or we can decide that
another way of approaching our problem is more appropriate.  Let us call
it the 'consciousness' way".

   Take the two hemispheres, for instance.  If a movement is set on foot
   for "liberating the right hemisphere", that is the imaginative, and
   relatively feminine, one (and according to the lecturer, there is such
   a movement), then the campaigners must mean by "liberation" one of two
   things -- either direct action on the brain itself, or indirect action by
   the ordinary means of agitation, argument, propaganda; by "the spread
   of ideas" in fact:  in which case no difference whatever is made by
   calling it "liberation of the right hemisphere", instead of something
   like freeing the imagination, or liberation of women.

Barfield goes on to "doubt whether the lecturer is capable of grasping
such an uncomfortably disjunctive proposition".  Which of the alternatives
did Blakemore have in mind, for example, when he said,

   What we should be striving to achieve for ourselves and our brains is
   not the pampering of one hemisphere to the neglect of the other
   (whether right or left) or their independent development, but the
   marriage and harmony of the two.

It's not that we should disavow either fork of Barfield's disjunctive
proposition; both physical intervention and the attention of consciousness
to its own contents have their place.  It's just that we should not
confuse the two or refuse to be clear regarding which one we are talking
about.  When Blakemore advocated the "marriage and harmony" of the two
hemispheres, was he suggesting something like a surgical interweaving of
tissues into a more artistically unified physical tapestry, or was he
urging certain conscious disciplines?  Or was he, through lamentable
vagueness, implying the equivalence of the two approaches despite the fact
that subjecting yourself to a scalpel doesn't seem to be quite the same
activity as, say, participating in the discussions of a gender sensitivity
group?

In the actual case, Blakemore disavowed the surgical approach as
impossible -- and also as crude compared to direct, cultural influences
upon consciousness.  And yet (as so often happens in these matters), he
immediately flip-flopped.  As Barfield puts it, "Dr. Blakemore was not
going to let a tedious bit of logical consequence stand in the way of his
march towards a peroration".  So the scientist rose to the occasion by
telling his audience:

   without a description of the brain, without an account of the forces
   that mould human behavior, there can never be a truly objective new
   ethic based on the needs and rights of man.

So there we go again.  If we want an understanding of our needs and rights
and the influences upon our behavior -- things we might once have related
to our families and workplaces, our social institutions and personal
experiences -- now we see that what we really needed all along was a good
description of the brain, presumably so we can whip those tissues into
shape.

No wonder Barfield gives way to near-despair:

   How much longer will it all go on?  For how much longer will educated
   men go on being allured by the ignis fatuus of a "consciousness"
   accessible to physical experiment and investigation?  How much longer
   will they go on spending untiring energy in pursuit of it?



A Koan
------

Well, we've now gone on for another quarter century -- and things have
only gotten worse.  I will not bore you further with recitations from the
many contemporary reports on brain research that are simultaneously passed
off as reports on mentality.  But I do wish to cite Barfield's wonderfully
concise statement of the root of the confusion:

   Perceiving, and every other mode of consciousness, is categorically
   other than being perceptible, and therefore [is not] accessible
   to a merely physical investigation.

That is, we cannot understand perceiving -- the inner reality of
perceiving -- in terms of the kinds of outer things given through the act
of perceiving, such as brain tissues.  We cannot understand the act as the
result of its own results.  We cannot understand as just another object
the activity that constitutes things as objects.

I will leave you with those puzzling remarks, hoping they might serve as a
koan of sorts, worthy of some perplexed reflection.  I am fully aware that
these statements will mostly provoke disbelieving resistance, if not
outraged rebellion.  They can carry little force for anyone who is still
struggling to reconcile the impossible Cartesian notion of mindless matter
with the impossible modern notion of mindless mind -- a struggle that
yields, as we have seen above, just plain mindlessness.

The real need, I'm convinced, is for us to overcome the entire Cartesian,
mind-matter dualism, between the pincers of which our culture has been
trapped for the past few centuries.  "Overcome", I say, not "accept the
original terms of the split and then claim to have overcome it by
effectively denying just one of the two domains produced by the false
cleavage" (which is the standard tack taken by those legions today who
fervently disavow the "Cartesian dichotomy").  The idea of purely
objective matter, uninformed by, and genetically unrelated to, the mind
that perceives it is just as impossible as the idea of mind unrelated to
the matter it informs.

But we will make progress in all this only insofar as we begin to gain
vivid experience, within consciousness, of our own activity in
perceiving and thinking.  The effect of this will be rather like turning
much of modern thinking inside out.  The exercise, however, is a long and
difficult one.  I do hope to write about it before long.

Meanwhile, we are left with a view that leaves no room for the human being
as anything other than a machine among machines.  More alienation, pain,
and suffering have flowed from this conviction than anyone could ever
tally.  If you want to meliorate this pain, you may watch the brain
light up until the cows come home, and you can attempt to comfort, bathe
in drugs, or otherwise manipulate the cerebral tissues to your heart's
content, but you will never by these means touch the actual problem.  It
is a problem of consciousness, not a problem of the brain.  Despite the
confused rhetoric coming at us from all sides today, they are not the same
thing.

Goto table of contents


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                              CORRESPONDENCE


Technology Does Not Make Societies More Vulnerable
--------------------------------------------------

Response to:  "Technology, Trust and Terror" (NF #137)
From:  Michael Goldhaber (mgoldh@well.com)

Langdon,

I was frustrated by your piece "Complexity, Trust and Terror".  Normally I
like what you have to say.  But this time, your main point that
technological complexity leaves us particularly vulnerable -- say, to
terrorism -- strikes me as cliched and mistaken.  While it is no doubt the
case that the complexities of our society, technological and otherwise,
present a great many problems ranging from global warming to lack of
active political involvement, the truth is we are far less vulnerable,
even to these worries, than less sophisticated societies.  Complex
systems, among other things, tend to have great redundancy built in or
simply lying around ready to be utilized if need be.

History doesn't teach what you say.  The example of the Goths' attack on
Rome's aqueducts in 537 misses the context.  After lasting for many
centuries, and then undergoing centuries of decline, probably brought on
by its inability to find a political form that could handle its size and
diversity, the Western Roman Empire finally fell in 476.  Sixty years
later, it had been briefly reconquered by the remaining Eastern Roman (or
Byzantine) Empire, which then failed to hold it.  But by then Rome was far
from being the technically sophisticated and advanced capital it had been
centuries earlier.  The aqueducts had survived, but not the engineers who
had built them.

The post-World War II Strategic Bombing Survey of Germany revealed that,
contrary to its intent, the unprecedented level of allied bombing had not
significantly reduced Germany's output of war machinery and materiel.
Compare how quickly the less technologically complex Taliban fell when
subject last year to American bombing at a much smaller scale.  Or
consider how Sierra Leone's society collapsed from an onslaught of ill-
armed rebels a few years ago.

As a more homely example, I offer my own experiences after the 1989
magnitude 7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake, which killed about a hundred people
in and around the heavily populated San Francisco Bay Area.  I was living
in San Francisco at the time, and with the Bay Bridge out was concerned
that food might not get into the city.  My worries evaporated however,
when I realized that the artisanal Acme Bread Bakery of Berkeley, which
had only recently started supplying one store in my neighborhood, was
sending its trucks around the Bay via San Jose to keep up deliveries.  We
were not only not going to starve, we would still have our luxuries.
Contrast that to less technologically complex parts of Turkey, Iran,
China, or Central or South America hit by similar magnitude quakes.  The
death toll is often in the thousands or tens of thousands; food and water
supplies disappear; disease runs rampant.

Your explanation, "modern, complex technologies succeed by wresting
enormous stores of power from the natural realm, seeking to direct these
powers in ways that are controllable and useful", is simply inapt.  The
Internet, complex as it is, ought to be subject to that definition, but
just isn't.  Even as a description of a skyscraper, the thought seems
tortured, at best.  The World Trade Center might well have been ugly and
dehumanizing, but the reason it collapsed had to do less with its
"wresting stores of power from the natural realm" than an inadequate fire-
proofing system, inadequate concern for safety, etc.

To some extent these problems and some others that you mention can be
ascribed to trust.  On the other hand, as you hint, our normal trust that
mild levels of security are all that are needed for our safety from
terrorists have mostly proved accurate.  But the system just is not as
vulnerable as you claim to the kind of attacks we witnessed. Saying
otherwise feeds into the anti-terrorist hysteria.  (I'm not saying no one
will die, but even thousands of deaths, though horrible, are not the same
as system breakdown.)

If you were to argue that the complexity of modern life dumbfounds the
electorate I think you would have something.  Part of what you call trust
is simply inattention resulting from the simple impossibility of taking
seriously all the issues, etc., that seem to call for attention.

(Some of the pieces, including those about terrorism, on my website
http://www.well.com/user/mgoldh/ might be relevant.)


Response to Goldhaber
---------------------

From:  Langdon Winner (winner@rpi.edu)

Michael Goldhaber seems perfectly comfortable with the level of security
that our complex technologies offer.  Evidently, he sees no need for any
fundamental change in the way we design, build and operate the complex
systems that support our way of life.  Even  after a major earthquake, he
notes, we can still rely on these helpful mechanisms of production and
distribution to click into operation, allowing us to "have our luxuries."

As he makes his case, Goldhaber engages in selective misreading of my
piece.  My comment about Rome, for example, explicitly avoids speculation
on the ultimate causes of the fall of the empire and its timing.  It
highlighted the fact that the idea of attacking links of a crucial
material infrastructure was not a new idea; Vitiges was aware of the value
of this strategy and did, in fact, employ it successfully against the
city.  Perhaps I went a bit over the top by including Gray Brechin's
colorful comment on the fate of the Roman caput mundi.  Brechin's book is
all about the strategies of imperial control and how they eventually come
to grief.  At a time in which techno-imperial schemes of military might
and economic globalization are precisely the ones favored by American
leaders, an echo of vulnerability from ancient times seemed worth noting.

Goldhaber objects to my emphasis that "modern technologies succeed by
wresting enormous powers from nature."  He says that neither the Internet
nor the skyscraper fit that definition.

What is he thinking?

Has he forgotten that equipment of computing and communication that
comprise the Internet are produced from natural materials transformed
through energy- and resource-intensive processes of chemical, electrical
and industrial fabrication?  What about the vast amounts of coal, gas, and
oil burned, as well as atoms split, each day to transmit those trillions
of bits of information?  During my stay in southern California during the
blackouts of February, 2001, my Internet connection certainly went down.

As regards skyscrapers, is not the widely admired feat in their
construction a mastery of nature expressed in the materials and
ingeniously balanced structures that defy the force of gravity?  In the
wake of 9/11 architects and engineers are thoroughly reexamining the
assumption and methods that were previously state of the art.

My point was that arrangements of energy and resources that make large-
scale systems apparently stable and useful also makes them precarious, a
fact overlooked in the glory days of American modernism.  As our
dependency upon these technologies grows, protecting their structure and
operation could well emerge as society's most urgent priority, even when
that involves the sacrifice of key social and political ends.

The alarm sounds repeatedly.  A recent report by the Council on Foreign
Relations, "America Still Unprepared -- America Still in Danger," warns,
"The homeland infrastructure for refining and distributing energy to
support our daily lives remains largely unprotected to sabotage."
Stressing many of the areas I mentioned in my piece -- containerized
cargo, transportation, food supply -- the report recommends an intense
build up of police, surveillance, the National Guard, as well as the
nation's public health and agricultural agencies.  Spend more money!
Mobilize all of society!

Perhaps Michael would agree that we should reject this obsession and begin
seeking other paths to security.  My own view is that local, resilient,
relatively small-scale, community-based technologies that rely upon
renewable energy and resources provide the best solutions in the years
ahead.  In the short run we need to ask whether the sense of emergency
requires dismantling central features of the Constitution and erecting
fierce new institutions that endanger our freedoms far more than they
threaten Al Qaeda.

I appreciate Michael's response, but do not share his feeling that
technological systems as we find them are probably good enough.  In these
dark and darkening times we need a much broader debate about what safety
and security require.

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Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #138 :: November 7, 2002

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