In Industrial Revolution II, Information Rules

About 15 years ago, the executives of IBM got together the biggest academic and intellectual mandarins they could find, best hotels, all expenses paid, to discuss the question of the long-term implications of the computer for American society.

After a week of discussions, the experts threw up their hands and said they couldn’t possibly foretell the range of impacts the computer would have in even the short run, much less the long. As one of the historians there pointed out, if Henry Ford in 1910 had assembled the best minds of his age to ponder the implications of the automobile in America, they could not possibly have predicted even one of the personal, familial, social, architectural, cultural, industrial, economic or environmental effects that it actually has had--and, he said, the computer is far more versatile and intrusive than the car.

Indeed, since then, the computer has allowed a profusion of so many other technologies and functions--think only of faxes, robots, microwaves, photocomposition, credit cards, airline reservations, word processors, supermarket scanners, compact discs, lasers, supertankers, spacecraft, CAT scanners and satellites--that it is no wonder there is a widespread sense that, in fact, technology is in the saddle and rides humankind; as the sign above the portals of the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago put it presciently, “Science Explores: Technology Executes: Man Conforms.” But that, as it turns out, is highly appropriate, for cybernetics, the science of computers, comes from the Greek kubernete s, “helmsman” or “governor,” meaning simply that the machine is in charge.

More and more, it seems, human decisions get made because of technology, rather than the other way around. As, for example, when Chrysler engineers invent power steering because they have stuffed so many new gadgets and parts into their car that it is too heavy to turn; as when microcomputer “notebooks” are created not to meet any known or expressed need, but because miniaturization at some point has made it possible to put immense amounts of information on a very tiny silicon chip; as when space shuttle missions are repeatedly launched, at a cost of $6 billion a year, not for any remotely scientific purpose (missions have been devoted to the study of jellyfish, slime mold and frog eggs in zero-gravity for want of anything else to do), but because NASA has the capability of doing so.

Once again, it is the technological imperative, expressed by Robert Oppenheimer as “when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”

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But the kind of technology shaping the second Industrial Revolution has its own special and inescapable logic, just as the one wrought by the steam engine had its, that goes beyond the proliferation of its machines and methods. Automation, for example, is an inevitable consequence of computerization and robotics, and serves to replace human endeavor in more and more ways in more and more settings. Simplification and routinization are similar consequences in tasks where humans are still involved, de-skilling and often dehumanizing the operatives and making them subject to minute monitoring and discipline. Massification and quantification are also built-in biases of the computer, indeed were probably the reason computers became so important in the first place, as necessary adjuncts to a mass society and its mass production, mass marketing, mass consumption, mass communications, mass education and mass culture. Add to these such other attributes of high technology as centralization, order, speed, uniformity, regularity, linearity and passivity, and it becomes clear that when a civilization buys into the computer’s logic, it buys much else besides. In the words of the Canadian philosopher George Grant, “Computers do not present us with neutral means for building any kind of society. All their alternative ways lead us toward the universal and homogenous state.”

Indeed, it is the imperative to control, whether by the state or other institutions, that may be the most decisive characteristic of computerization, since the possibilities of amassing information on such a large scale over such a wide population, and using that information then to identify, follow, manipulate and regulate, are so clear. Information (or at least data-supply--whether it “informs” anything is another matter) is the fodder of the computer maw, and as more bits are fed into the machine, the more it can know and use and administer. If what is in store for us, as many say, is an “information age” with “information highways” and “information supermarkets,” then it is the computer and those who feed and handle it who reign supreme: In the country of the sighted, the all-seeing one is king. Control of information is control of power.

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That is disturbing enough, and unprecedented, but what seems to generate even more anxiety is, paradoxically enough, the lack of control throughout our technological society, the fragility of the systems, the constant uncertainty and instability. Computers are always “down” when you need them, automated teller machines go blank, savings-and-loan banks are suddenly bankrupt, longstanding corporations no longer exist, no one around knows how to program the VCR, nuclear missiles are almost triggered by a full moon, the stock market collapses because of computerized institutional trading, men who spent their boyhood under the hood of a car are baffled by new computer-diagnosed automobiles.

It is not just that the machines seem to be beyond our individual control, though that is demeaning enough--nothing is fixable, everything says “No serviceable parts”--but that, separately and collectively, they seem to be beyond anyone’s control, operating at such speed and complexity that it defies human competence to manage them regularly and infallibly. As we are repeatedly reminded, not only by the many technological disasters of our age (Chernobyl, Bhopal, DDT, Times Beach, the Challenger, Three-Mile Island, chlordane, Exxon Valdez, Love Canal, Mars Observer, PCBs and on and on) but by the less-dramatic technological malfunctions that recur (acid rain, radiation leaks, ozone depletion, environmental cancers, airplane crashes, electricity blackouts, oil spills and the like).

But ultimately it is not even a question of whether late-industrial technology is stable or fragile: The point is that it dominates and pervades, it is imposed throughout our lives in such a way that it mediates experience to a degree no society before has ever undergone. Less and less is human life connected to other species, to natural systems, to seasonal and regional patterns; more and more to the technosphere, to artificial and engineered constructs, to industrial patterns and procedures, even to man-made hormones, genes, cells and life forms. In one of the profound insights of one of the profound minds of the 20th Century, Herbert Read paused at the end of “The Grass Roots of Art” to say:

“Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines. Only such people will so contrive and control those machines that their products are an enhancement of biological needs, and not a denial of them.”

This society serves no such apprenticeship, alas, nor does there seem much hope that it would ever know how to do so, so immersed is it in industrial culture that it has difficulty understanding experience in any other form than the technological.

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Book Assesses Role of Technology in Lives

In “Rebels Against the Future,” social critic Kirkpatrick Sale recounts and reassesses the history of the Luddite movement of the early 19th Century in light of the changes technology has sown in our own time.

The original Luddites were English rebels against the machines that were transforming textile making from a cottage industry into a large-scale enterprise. They saw not just their work but their very place in the world being undermined by technology.

Sale, who has also written books on the environment and the New Left, endorses the Luddites’ skepticism about conventional definitions of “progress” and urges reflection on the ways technology is recasting modern life.

Reprinted from “Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution,” by Kirkpatrick Sale.

Copyright 1995 by Kirkpatrick Sale

Reprinted by permission of Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.