George, a great article in Upside,naming you the lead technoreactionary absolutist,it names Esther Dyson,and Postrel.
It links the future to the past.
June 29, 1998
By Michael S. Malone
For this crowd, the great visionary is George Gilder and his defining work--his Wealth of Nations Road to Serfdom and Das Kapital all rolled into one (no small irony for a legendary conservative)--the book Microcosm (Simon & Schuster, 1989). Gilder is brilliant and passionate, and Microcosm is no different. Most of it is devoted to a superb history of the integrated circuit and the microprocessor, and how these devices changed institutions and the economy. But the last chapter is different. There, Gilder drops all pretense of narrative balance or subtlety and goes for it with everything he's got: Now the chip is not just a landmark invention but a transcendent vehicle for reordering human nature. This is no longer admiration but worship. And coming from a devout Christian, it approached heresy.
At the time the book was first published, Valley leaders jokingly said, "Poor George stared so long at an IC that he saw the face of God." They don't joke about it anymore. In the intervening years, they, too, have been on the road to Damascus and been blinded by the light reflecting off a 12-inch wafer. Like George, they have found redemption in Moore's Law--and they aren't alone. Nobody is immune. Consider the following:
The microprocessor is propelling humanity into an era of change the likes of which we have never known. It is not merely an invention, but a metainvention, an inventor of inventions ... It is time to celebrate the microprocessor and the revolution it created, to appreciate what a miracle each one of those tiny silicon chips really is and to meditate on what it all means to our lives and those of our descendants ... For thousands of years, mankind has searched for the philosopher's stone, the magical object that turns ordinary metal to gold. Who would have thought it would turn out to be a little sliver of glass with scratches on the surface? The microprocessor, in the span of a single human generation, has evolved from a clever technical novelty to a tireless, almost invisible partner to mankind.
Gilder's Microcosm gave the first public voice to the absolutism that has always been the dark shadow of high tech. But the idea of perfectibility through high tech is as old as the vacuum tube. Seventy-five years ago, Lee De Forest composed goofy manifestos claiming that messy mankind had sullied his invention by using it to broadcast baseball games and "Fibber McGee and Molly," when it was supposed to spread enlightenment and usher in a golden age.
Dyson's comment has given us a preview of what the future may hold. In recent years, there has been much talk about the fact that traditional political alignments of Republican and Democratic, left and right, are no longer tenable--that some new bipolar alignment will emerge that will more accurately reflect the fears and desires of people living in the new Digital World. You can see the disintegration of traditional boundaries as common cause transforms old enemies into allies.
Thus, under the sheet of technological absolutism we are seeing some strange bedfellows. On the right, among what might be called the technoreactionaries, are Gilder and Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard, whose Wall Street Journal editorials epitomize the belief that technology will set us free. On the left, among the technoutopians, are Vice President Al Gore, with his obsession to drive every school kid down the information superhighway; Fast Company, the fantasy magazine for middle managers waiting to man the ramparts of the tech revolution and overrun executive row; and Slate, which brings the moral arrogance (and good writing) of the old left to the new media.
To leftists, the tech revolution is the great equalizer, tearing down institutions and giving voice to the dispossessed. Among libertarians there is Virginia Postrel, the estimable editor of Reason magazine, who is working on a book with the emblematic absolutist title The Future and Its Enemies. The book, to be published by Free Press this year, divides the world into the technologically allegiant and everybody else. Libertarians are perfect candidates for technoabsolutism because mass customization and PC proliferation play to their love of anarchy, and the billions of hiding places on the Net fulfill their dream of a playground without grown-up authority.
It was an exercise in re-education that has proved wildly effective. We still teach this Stalinist rationalization to our schoolchildren as fact. And thus, while former Nazi leaders took turns dangling from ropes in a Nuremberg gymnasium, unrepentant old Soviet functionaries today drive their Volgas past Lubyanka prison on the way to lunch at the Moscow Mickey D's.
None of them could have predicted the horrors they were unleashing. But that doesn't spare them the blame. Their fantasies became our nightmares. The sea of blood washes back in time to splash their hands. They refused to let any practical understanding of human nature intrude on their perfect dreams; they refused to consider that, to paraphrase British newspaperman and novelist Malcolm Muggeridge, the only true human perfection--equality and peace--is found in the graveyard. In that respect, their dreams came true.
What then of today's technoabsolutists? Good intentions may one day prove their greatest crime. After all we've been through in the 20th century, can there be any excuse for yet another quest for human perfection in the 21st? Sure, the spit and sperm and sweat of real human existence is messy and troublesome, especially when compared with the clean, orderly ranks of integrated circuits on a motherboard. And, compared with the sweep of Moore's Law, human "progress" seems like a bad joke, an oxymoron. Yet in the end, it's all we've got. We're doomed to be the toolmaker and never the tool. And the further we stray from a healthy appreciation of our contradictory selves, the more we stretch toward the latest grail of perfection, the more likely we are to leave the back door open to the darker, Dionysian part of our nature.
They're out there waiting: the stepchildren of technoreactionaries such as Gilder, of technoimperialists such as Barlow and Dyson, of technoanarchists such as Postrel, of legions of technofailures, and of technoutopians like Gore and, God help me, myself. All those happy children are now good technofascists, genetically pure technojugen in their chip-embedded brown shirts, marching in lockstep on the Sudetenland of the computer illiterate, the unbrilliant and the imperfect. Singing songs of freedom through technology. Joyfully building the 1,000-year Digital Reich.
upside.com
George a quick comment, did you see the new computer chips that are not perfect,but mimic the human brain? They find new paths,new ways around errors,and link information much like the brain does.
Do you think we are moving in the wrong direction towards computer perfection,when we should be moving towards imperfection,and more forgiving computer technology. Should we not as a society be moving towards more forgiving ways of thinking and adapting information that allows for imperfections in technology and people?
This story has been edited by me.
Hiram |
