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SPEAKING FREELY
Technological illiterates and
WMD
By Jonathan Larson
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click here
if you are interested in contributing.
 In spite of the fact that
almost everyone has to take a few science courses in the
process of getting an education, and virtually all
Americans live in an ocean of technology, technological
illiteracy is now nearly universal.
The only
regular exceptions to the rule of technological
illiteracy these days seem to be farm kids, construction
workers and builders, the folks in technical maintenance
such as auto repair, engineers, advanced computer geeks,
and folks with technological hobbies such as drag
racing.
Notice that none of these groups are
over represented in forums where foreign policy,
education, law, monetary direction or media decisions
are made.
In the world of media or government or
academe, technological illiteracy is so widespread, it
could be termed "fashionable". This is not an
exaggeration. The best example of "fashionable
technological illiteracy" (hereinafter FTI) might have
been the enormous popularity of the movie 2001, A
Space Odyssey. In 2001 an evil computer named
HAL takes over and threatens innocent Dave with all
sorts of disasters. This view of the future was taken so
seriously, classes at known universities that charged
money and issued grades and credits came to include
studying this "cinematic classic".
Of course,
2001 - the year - came and went and there were no
computers remotely like HAL to be found anywhere on
planet earth. Far from being a threat, a computer is
more like an infant - in constant need of care and
attention and seemingly irrational about when it decides
to cooperate.
This is the case for all
technology. It is fragile. It is in perpetual
need of some level of human attention. If the film
professor at a snooty liberal arts film department could
have talked to the guy down the street who raced
dragsters, he would have been regaled with the stories
of how brutally unforgiving technology is to
carelessness of the slightest kind - the failure of a $5
bearing destroying a $5,000 motor. Folks are truly
technologically literate when they can cite numerous
personal examples of why they believe that Murphy (of
Murphy's Law fame) was an optimist.
There are
millions of folks who really liked 2001 - for
whatever reasons, including the quality of the drugs
ingested before viewing. Those snooty film professors
are a minor annoyance in the larger world of FTI.
Unfortunately, the damage they cause by helping to make
fashionable a form of ignorance is very real.
When some bubble-headed TV newsreader admits on
camera that he hasn't "figured out how to set my VCR",
the FTI-meter goes to full-tilt. There is almost no way
to measure the perceptual difference between the people
who invented television and someone who would make such
a remark. Ironically, they are both in the same business
(TV) so we have the situation where beautiful
techno-illiterates appear in everyone's life - a feat
made possible by some of the finest techno-geniuses of
history.
It actually gets worse. In many ways,
FTI drove the economy of the 1990s. For example, Jack
Welch became a Wall Street darling of the era with his
management of GE. Virtually everything GE makes, from
jet turbines to power plants, is technologically as
sophisticated as anything on earth. GE's customers are
usually governments or regulated industries. GE was as
close to pure socialism as anything we had in USA - and
smart folks actually endorsed this arrangement because
"big tech" as represented by GE was of such value it was
worth taxpayer subsidies and protection from some of the
practices of finance capitalism.
Welch became
Wall Street's man because he was able to return, with
mathematical regularity, increases in "shareholder
value". His method, which earned him the nickname of
"Neutron Jack", was to close down plants in the US that
usually represented a couple generations of
technological genius, and ship the tools to some Third
World location where labor was cheap. He was called
"Neutron Jack" because like the proposed Neutron bomb,
it destroyed the people but left the buildings standing.
For executing this plan, he was rewarded with wealth
beyond wretched excess.
In the meantime,
questions as to what was really happening as Welch
exported the know-how and tools of "big tech" to the
rest of the world never got asked. In the world of
technology, there is a huge difference between being
able to make the tool as opposed to merely operating it.
For much of the 20th century, the guys who made tools
had empires, the folks who only used tools became
colonies - is it really a good idea to squander such a
lead?
The trouble with wealth through plunder is
that the damage caused far exceeds whatever is
gained by the plunderer. A kid throws a rock through
your car window and wrecks your expensive dashboard to
steal a $600 stereo for which he may possibly get $25 -
and you are out four grand and the car is in the garage
for two weeks. Andrew Fastow creates some crooked
accounting schemes at Enron that net him somewhere
between $25 million and $100 million - and when it
collapses investors lose over $60 billion. It is
almost impossible to estimate the damage caused by
"Neutron Jack" as he plundered GE in the name of
"shareholder value", but it is reasonable to assume that
it is at least 100 times as much as reported
profits for GE on his watch.
Welch was
"exceeding expectations" in the capital markets - why
would anyone want to question his methods? And who would
do it? The TV "journalist" who got college credit for
watching 2001 and writing a report and thinks
that technology is evil because occasionally his
microphone doesn't work? Could this journalist ever
understand why Welch's successor is having a tough time
"making the numbers" out of the technological wreck left
him by a professional plunderer?
The FTI media
failed us again in the runup to the US invasion of Iraq.
In order to have had the weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) claimed for Iraq, they would have had to have a GE
- pre-Welch - in their country. Technology needs
all the parts to work. If an essential part is
missing you have to make it or buy it.
Before we
blew it to smithereens, Iraq had many areas where they
had a "first-world"/state-of-the-art infrastructure. But
they had bought rather than made it - which meant that
they were dependent on outside suppliers for spare
parts.
As the embargo stretched out, the chance
that an irreplaceable part had gone missing somewhere
along the technological "food chain" became practically
infinite. So even if we "knew" that they had everything
to make WMD at one time, (after all, went the joke, we
had the receipts) we could not know what had been lost.
Technologically we "knew" nothing - but every
missing piece of information would have been further
evidence that WMD production had become impossible. So
all the predictions that Iraq had the capability of
making WMD in anywhere near the quantities
claimed had less basis in fact than the Sunday morning
football betting lines.
Incredibly, we are
talking about people who truly believed their own FTI
voices. US military teams took along bunny suits, gas
masks and antidotes. You would think that they
would have known better - the military being one of "big
tech's" customers, after all.
There seems to be
a gap in consciousness between buying, maintaining and
ultimately destroying technology and building the stuff.
In the army, talking tough will get you into the very
inner rings of power; talking about the nearly infinite
ways that technology can be reduced to uselessness will
get you stationed in Greenland.
And so a
fashionably technologically illiterate groupthink
replaces reason in the corridors of power. Questioning
the existence of Iraqi WMD at the Pentagon in mid-March
2003 was a good way to get yourself called "French",
even though the whole idea of WMD production by Iraq had
become technologically preposterous.
Jonathan Larson is the author of
Elegant Technology.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click here if you are interested in
contributing.
(©2003 Asia Times Online
Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
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