Archive for the ‘ Technology ’ Category

A Society that is Everything and Nothing at the Same Time

I am referring, of course, to American society – where the technology keeps getting better and better, and the social situation keeps getting worse and worse.

This is a followup to my posting yesterday From a Religious Society to a Money Society – where I pick up on Mark C. Taylor’s idea of a virtual society (or it could also be considered a complex society, there are many ways of looking at it). He develops this idea in his book Confidence Games , in the final chapter Rustling Religion. But he doesn’t take it any farther – as no one else does, because this seems to be forbidden territory.

We have been preparing for the Apocalypse forever,  but now it is upon us, we cannot see it.

2010
09/24
CATEGORY
Economy
Sociology
Technology
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First Human-Powered Ornithopter

The Toronto Star

Yes, I have strange tastes – and this is one of them – planes that flap their wings! I had no idea things had progressed this far.

In a previous life, I had my own planes, and spent a lot of time in them. They made a heck of a racket – but this thing is whisper-quiet. Almost like flying yourself.

2010
09/23
CATEGORY
Technology
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John Dewey: The Lost Individual

John Dewey was a philosopher, and sometimes he writes as one – carefully and logically. The following passage , which I am copying from the book Classical American Philosophy, page 383, has this same lucid, calm, academic style. Bear in mind, however, that what he is describing is our modern version of Hell.

The development of a civilization that is outwardly corporate – or rapidly becoming so – has been accompanied by a submergence of the individual. Just how true this is of the individual’s opportunities in action, how far initiative and choice in what an individual does are restricted by the economic forces that make for consolidation, I shall not attempt to say.

It is arguable that there has been a diminution on the range of decision and activity for the many along with the exaggeration opportunity of personal expression for the few. It may be contended that no one class in the world in the past has the power possessed by an industrial oligarchy.

On the other hand, it may be held that this power of the few is, with respect to genuine individuality, specious; that those outwardly in control are in reality as much carried by forces external to themselves as are the many; that in fact these forces impel into a common mold to such an extent that individuality is suppressed.
—
Stability of individuality is dependent on assured objects of belief to which allegiance firmly attaches itself. But the loyalties which once held individuals, which gave them support, direction, and unity of outlook on life, have well-nigh disappeared.  It would be difficult to find in history an epoch as lacking in solid and assured objects of belief as the present. Individuals vibrate between a past that is intellectually too empty to give stability and a present that is too diversely crowded and chaotic to afford balance or direction to ideas and emotion.

Judged by this standard, even those who seem to be in control, and to carry the expression of their special abilities to a high pitch, are submerged. They may be captains of finance and industry, but until there is some consensus of belief as to the meaning of finance and industry in civilization as a whole, they cannot be captains of their own souls – their beliefs and aims. They exercise leadership surreptitiously and, as it where, absent mindedly. They lead, but it is under cover of impersonal and socially undirected forces.

This is not only true of those at the top. It is also true of the many specialists on whom they depend. They are the ones who create the new techniques and new technologies that enable it all work together. They are valuable when the have the special skills in demand at the moment – but these never last long.

2010
09/18
CATEGORY
Business
Technology
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Technology is Not Human

A stone tool, for example is not human. That is obvious.

But technology has a way of integrating itself into our lives so naturally that we become the same thing, in some mysterious way. For example, agriculture. It was obvious, as it happened, that we and our domesticated plants and animals were entirely different things. We owned them. But, taking a larger view, say the view of an archeologist, it was equally obvious that agriculture owned us – because we couldn’t get along without it.

The same could be said of any successful technology whatsoever. We end up identifying with it – and the power of identity is profound. We both become part of the same human-technology complex - where humans influence their technologies, and their technologies influence them.

“So,” you might say, “what’s the problem?” The problem is that when we focus too much on technology, we lose the ability to tell the difference between them and us – and they take over.

Consider the automobile. It has taken over our lives and we now serve it as much as it serves us. We are both part of the same complex, which includes roads that cost us a fortune. But, as with every other successful technology, we cannot live without them.

But the newest complex (computers/internet on the technical side and completely integrated global organizations on the social side) have a new emergent quality, to use a term from complexity science. We are now living in a whole new world, where the rules have changed completely – and most of these rules are unknown to us (our carbon footprint, for example). Our stone-age social skills and technical skills, are simply not up to the job.

The net result is hard to believe, but easy to state – human society has itself become inhuman.

2010
09/10
CATEGORY
Sociology
Technology
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Computationalism

I have already written about this in Distractions That Enslave Us

Now I am at it again, from another perspective – a book review in American Scientist. A subscribe to three science magazines – New Scientist, Scientific American, and American Scientist and this one is the best – possibly because it doesn’t have any flashy full page advertisements.

In his cautionary new book, The Cultural Logic of Computation, Golumbia argues that we are in thrall to our computers, to their apologists and—most perniciously—to the corporate sponsors of those apologists.

The liveliest chapters are devoted to skewering The World Is Flat, Friedman’s paean to technology as the great leveler, the bearer of economic opportunities to the world’s poorest laborers, the supporter of prodemocracy uprisings against oppressive regimes. Friedman’s techno-evangelism—his conviction that we are serving the desires of the “people on the ground” around the globe by teaching them the language of the computer—comes at a time when we in the West are telling ourselves “that the era of colonialism has passed,” says Golumbia. Bursting that self-satisfied bubble, he illustrates the ways in which computationalism concentrates power in the transnational corporation, which uses the business software that Friedman extols to establish the most refined, most granular form of “colonial oversight” that the world has ever known.

I have mixed feelings about the Americanization of Costa Rica myself. Every day, I see how sociable my neighbors are – and how much they love their children – and can’t help contrasting it with life up North.

At the same time, however, I see how difficult it is to get the simplest things done. I do as much shopping as I can with the tiny local markets – but have to go the the nearest large town to buy everything else at a Wal-Mart conglomerate – where they have taught their workers one thing – that the customer is important!

They see it just the opposite – the customer needs them, and this makes the organization more important. And they deliberately make the customer suffer.

2010
08/31
CATEGORY
Business
Life in Central America
Technology
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Distractions That Enslave Us

As a species, we have outsmarted ourselves - deliberately. We have created clever distractions that made us forget ourselves.

I started to entitle this posting GUI – for Graphical User Interface. This clever technology made the computer interesting for us – but perhaps addictive would be a better word. Originally, the computer/human interface was incredibly boring – just some black and white text on a screen – nothing else. Or you could get reams of printouts of tables and things like that. The computer was just a fancy computer, and was treated as such.

Then someone realized computers could also draw pictures – and graphics computer terminals were invented. You would not believe how crude these originally were - just static monochrome images that took several seconds to draw. This was the state of the art when I graduated from engineering school in 1959. But by the time I became a programmer in 1980, things were changing rapidly.

Color graphics terminals that could portray moving images became available! You have no idea how exciting ( and profitable) this was. I was right in the thicket of it all – coming up with clever ways of displaying information and soliciting user input. We were making the computer appear human – and we succeeded all too well.

A whole new industry had appeared and we assumed it would last forever – but we could not have been more wrong! It practically vanished overnight – because the technology evolved so quickly. The first graphics terminals were very expensive, but ten years later they were so cheap every desktop computer could have one.

This was followed by computer-generated sound – and then by the whole mess – computer-generated video. And then by hand-held devices (such as smart cell phones) that could do everything. Heaven on earth had arrived!

Or maybe hell on earth had arrived. Because we had forgotten to include ourselves in the equation. And power-mad people (as always) had taken advantage of these new technologies to enslave us.

But we were so entranced by our new toys that we never noticed.

2010
08/31
CATEGORY
Technology
1 comment

The High-Tech World is Not Interested in People

As a matter of fact, based on my work experience there, I would say it hates them. This is amazing enough, but even more amazing is the fact that the people affected by this didn’t seem to notice it. They had believed that technology would save the world for so long, that the idea of criticizing it seemed like a heresy – which, in reality, it was. A heresy against the dominant religion of the time. Which was even more dominant than any time in the past because this religion only exists in the collective unconscious.

I am sitting here, reading over my opening paragraph. It doesn’t seem too bad. My life in the past few months, in the coffee country of Costa Rica, has been a process of unlearning the lessons I learned in high-tech America. One lesson I have learned is that no one is interested in the amazing things I have learned. I seem to be living in a world of my own.

For example, I have listened to an amazing course, from the Teaching Company, of Christianity in the Reformation Era. This formative event has been turned into a fantasy, which varies depending on the group telling it. The result is not what happened at all – but who cares!

I do, and I wonder what kind of Wonderland I have been born into.

I am also listening to Oliver Twist, and here again I am transported into another era, the Victorian. The audible book is excellent, and I am sure Dickens, if he were still alive, would be pleased with it. But no one else is interested, because it says too much – about us and about them. Over and over, I am struck by two things: how much they liked to read and write, and how much time they had to do this. And one more thing: how much they were interested in people – of all kinds, from the best to the worst.

An entirely different world!

2010
08/29
CATEGORY
Business
Technology
1 comment

How did the Computer Make the Powerful More Powerful?

Easy: it digitized everything – which made everything the same, as far as it was concerned. A stream of data bytes can represent anything. This homogenization of information made the homogenization of social organizations relatively easy. The result is power on a scale never before seen – but nearly impossible for us to detect – because it is all-pervasive.

Does this mean that everything is the same? Of course not, basic reality has not changed, but human reality – which has adapted itself to computer reality, has changed fundamentally.

I am sure you have objected “Not me, I am not a computer! I am just the same as I have always been.” I am sure you are well-meaning – but you are wrong. You are not the person you were yesterday – let alone what you were in your childhood. The world of our childhoods was so different from our present world, they might as well have existed in another planet.

Do a thought-experiment: magically transport the person you were –  as a child, an adolescent, or even a young adult –  into the world you now occupy as a senior citizen. That person from a previous life would not be able to comprehend what is going on now. Nothing would make any sense. His world had raced into to the future at such a speed, he would be in complete future-shock.

“Yes,”, you will say. “But we did not get here instantly, we had 50 years, or so, to get used to it.” True, but ask yourself another question: “Was life better for you then, or now?” This will require some thinking, no doubt some things have improved, and some have not. I am asking for an overall reply. And I am confident of your answer – the same answer old folks have been giving for some time: the old times were better – no doubt about it.

We now have many new things, but a poorer quality of life. And that is what really matters. TV, Computers, and the Internet, have made the powerful more powerful, but left the rest of us holding the bag.

2010
08/23
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Technology
2 comments

Google, From Another Perspective

Stanford Social Innovation Review: Do No Evil

One thing Google is good at is self-promotion. And Americans have made this easy for them with their desperate need for successful new companies – or actually, successful companies of any age. The American landscape is littered with the remains of departed companies – mainly because they were poorly managed. Surely, we think, there must be some exceptions!

It is true that Google has done many things right – starting, of course, with its basic search technology – which gave it a head start, and which they have continually improved. That is their cash cow, and they have taken good care of it.

But, as more and more people are discovering, most of their other projects have not been so impressive – and can only be described as timid and mundane – not the stance one expects of an aggressive startup. And in some of them they have simply been incompetent.

This has nowhere been at true as with their philanthropy, dubbed DotOrg. The SSIR article summary says:

DotOrg, launched in 2004 with bold ambitions and almost $1 billion in seed funding. But the corporate culture built by engineers proved challenging for the development experts brought in to run DotOrg. Six years later, the philanthropy’s leadership has been replaced and its ambitions have shrunk.

And this is putting it charitably. If you read the details, you will see why. As it says, saving the world is not easy – and Google’s performance here has been miserable. They talked big, but delivered little. Something all too common in the high-tech world.

2010
08/20
CATEGORY
Business
Technology
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The Latest From Source Forge

Source Forge is an open-source organization that sponsors various open-source projects. I use one of them: Keepass Password Safe every day. It is the first program I boot up in the morning. I am very interested in network security, and take it seriously. I have a different password, a long thing that Keepass generates for me, for every Internet service I use – including, most obviously, my Wells Fargo banking account.

The momentum behind open source is amazing. I quote from their latest newsletter:

SF 2.0 Beta: Your Toolbox for World Domination

Last time we talked the SF.net 2.0 beta had just come out, and now it is
making like a freight train burning rocket fuel to the two-point-oh release
station.  While we are probably going to have to convert it into a mag-lev
just to handle this velocity, here’s some of the high points of the trip:

Costa Rica ought to get on this bandwagon and become the open source leader of Latin America. Their tech schools produce some fine programmers, I have been told. But sadly, they have no feeling for what is going on in the larger high-tech world – which requires a good command of English – such as the Finns have, who are clearly leaders here.

What about me? I still dream of updating my programming skills, to be part of the New Wave. Every once in a while, I buy a new, thick book to show me how to do it – and then realized it is somehow beyond me, and remains a dream only.

Still, I like to dream. Who doesn’t?

2010
08/14
CATEGORY
Technology
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