NETFUTURE

                   Technology and Human Responsibility

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Issue #50       Copyright 1997 Bridge Communications          June 4, 1997
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            Editor:  Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)

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


CONTENTS:
*** The Ultimate Worker (Stephen L. Talbott)
      What happens when everyone is looking down?

*** About this newsletter

Somewhere at this moment there is a computer sitting unattended on a desk in a small, bare room. It's screen is dark. It's apparent passivity is belied only by the occasional whirring of a disk, and its isolation only by a thin, gray cord running to a phone jack. Nothing much about the room changes from one day to the next.

But this computer is no slacker. It happens to embody the entire working operation of a profitable business. Buying and selling financial instruments, it employs abstruse mathematical algorithms to wring a slim, but admirably certain gain from the "inefficiencies" of the market. Its capital requirement is almost nil, its overhead is low, it never suffers labor troubles, no time is lost in meetings, and the profit-making goes on around the clock. Here, courtesy of the computer, we see the modern business enterprise stripped to a kind of essence.

What sort of essence is it? Most obviously a highly mathematical one. The work consists of a trafficking in numbers, and its result, the achievement of the corporation, can be wholly captured numerically as well. The operation is also automatic. Once the programmed algorithms are set in motion, there is no need for difficult judgment calls, delicate communications, disciplinary actions, or a periodic reassessment of values and goals. The only change required is the occasional, purely technical upgrading of the algorithms themselves. Everything is cut-and-dried, efficient as only a business of pure abstraction can be.

The Corporation As Abstraction

Wherever tools and muscle power were freely used, at the command of the workers themselves, their labors were varied, rhythmic, and often deeply satisfying, in the way that any purposeful ritual is satisfying. Increase of skill brought immediate subjective satisfaction, and this sense of mastery was confirmed by the created product. The main reward of the craftsman's working day was not wages but the work itself, performed in a social setting. In this archaic economy there was a time to toil and a time to relax; a time to fast and a time to feast; a time for disciplined effort, and a time for irresponsible play. In identifying himself with his work and seeking to make it perfect, the worker remolded his own character (Mumford, p. 238).

• First, it was necessary to develop effective methods of bookkeeping and accounting. Such methods were first formalized and published in fifteenth-century Europe. Only then did it become possible to manage complex mercantile operations with any reliable sense for what was profitable and what was not.

• Second, the era of organizations, and more particularly, the business corporation, had to arrive. Two centuries ago only a miniscule proportion of the citizens of western societies worked as "employees." As Peter Drucker points out, the concept of the "organization," as distinct from "community," "society," "class," and other collective notions, was not raised to full consciousness until the latter half of our own century (Drucker, pp. 49-53).

• Third, our growing skills in analysis and abstraction had to be applied to these business organizations. Time and motion studies, pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915), led to greater efficiency on the part of the individual worker. But this sort of analysis did not stop with the individual's physical motions. Eventually, ever more complex processes and systems were analyzed out of the "chaos" of organizational activity, and the disciplines appropriate to these processes and systems were imposed by the newly emerging class of managers. It was the task of these managers to track the organizational activity at a high level of abstraction, guiding the entire, orchestrated effort toward an ideal of maximum productivity and profitability. (Neither "management" as a business discipline, nor "productivity" as the economic measure with which we are so familiar, was a known term much before the middle of the twentieth century [Drucker, pp. 37, 43].)

Working Precedes Consuming

And yet, we are given pause by the corporation-on-a-desk. Here, after all, is the most exquisite bookkeeping, kept up-to-date moment by moment and transaction by transaction. Here, too, is a precise disposition of time and motion beyond anything Taylor could have dreamed: time crisply allotted in nanosecond increments, and motion conserved all the way to the vanishing point. And here are the most perfectly articulated processes and systems, driven by the frictionless gearwheels of digital logic.

There is only one thing missing from this perfected abstraction of work: the human being. Our work, after all, is not merely an external fact about the transformation of material, nor is it the numerical abstraction of the economist. We work above all to express our creative potentials. We need to work -- not just for the economic "output," but for the work itself. We would be lost without work -- which is always, in the end, work upon ourselves.

This is forgotten by those who, focusing solely upon output, and upon the efficiency and productivity that gives us the output, celebrate every improvement in our status as consumers. We do not gain our most essential human fulfillment by consuming; we gain it by working creatively upon the stuff of the world, upon society, and upon ourselves. That is why we need to create corporations.

The economist's abstractions may serve well when our concern is some measure of consummable output -- and even when we are interested in job creation in the abstract. But they do not help at all when the question is, "Why am I doing this particular work -- what is worthwhile about it, what is the value of the effort itself, and what is the social gain of the result?"

The profound thing about that computer on the desk is that it has quite naturally and speedily found its place as the embodiment, the culmination, of a view of work in which these human questions have no place. This is a remarkable development, and an example of how the computer can reflect back to us what we look like becoming.

Erasing the Human Being

He told me how investors would soon be moving billions of dollars in capital from Tokyo to London to New York in seconds, that number systems would become the new currency of public values, and that the economic future of millions would be determined by people hunched over computer screens, peering at a collective simulation of reality.

"They're all going to be looking down, Norman," he said. "No one is going to have to look up anymore!" The implications in his prediction were clear. And they have become reality. The number-crazed world he foresaw was a world with no sanction for vision, no view of the long term, no sense of anything but that which can be quantified. As we define our values by SAT scores, Nielsen ratings, box office grosses, public opinion polling, throw weights, cost benefit analyses, quarterly reports, bottom lines, we can see the iron grip that these numbers have on our sense of the possible -- our sense of our inner selves.

Numerical surrogates for reality do not begin to take account of the rhythms of life or the rich dynamics of the human spirit, so that values, human values, begin to seem like relics of a simpler, more naive time. (Lear, p. 10)

I wonder how long it will be before the technical excitements of the computer industry -- for example, the drug-like rush provided by breakthrough programming achievements -- will give way to a quiet assessment of the human significance of the achievements. One thing is sure: if the assessment is to happen at all, it will have to happen where it looks least likely -- in the corporation. For we are now a society of organizations. "Can there be any doubt," asks Lear, "that business, however unwittingly, has become the fountainhead of values in our society? ... Where we drift as a culture is determined more by the decisions of corporate managers -- and the values that dictate their decisions -- than by any other single influence."

Judging from the blind, technically determined onrush of the computer industry, this does not leave us with an awful lot of hope. But still, I suppose, with slightly more hope than is held out by that corporation-on-a-desk.

Bibliography

Lear, Norman. "The Cathedral of Business: The Fountainhead of Values in America Today." New Oxford Review, April, 1993, pp. 6-13.

Mumford, Lewis, Technics and Human Development New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966.

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