NETFUTURE

                    Technology and Human Responsibility

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Issue #124                                                October 30, 2001
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                 A Publication of The Nature Institute
            Editor:  Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)

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

NetFuture is a reader-supported publication.


CONTENTS
---------

Editor's Note
   A Lot of Unease about Email

Quotes and Provocations
   Technology and the Larger Picture
   An Entomologist's Killing Fields
   Double-edged Technologies
   Readers Strike Back
   More on Email

About this newsletter


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                              EDITOR'S NOTE


A Lot of Unease about Email
---------------------------


NetFuture reader and New York Times staffer, Lisa Guernsey, had a nice
story in the Sept. 26 Times about the various ways people are coping with
email overload ("Why E-Mail Is Creating Multiple E-Personalities").  The
variety of experimentation going on among the famous and not-so-famous is
encouraging to see.

Unfortunately, there has been widespread misunderstanding about my own
stance toward email — misunderstanding I doubtless encouraged by heading an
announcement "Why I have Disconnected from Email".  The Times article was
actually incorrect when it said that I no longer check my email account.
My aim — very successfully achieved — has been to reduce my time engaging
in email correspondence to less than five percent of what it had been.
But I do still take care of essential business that cannot conveniently be
handled by other means, and I actually encourage people to send me
relevant, polite, and well-considered email.  Here is an excerpt from my
auto-reply message:

   If your intent is merely to send something to me (or to NetFuture),
   thank you.  I will see your message eventually and I, or an assistant,
   will take care of any necessary business.  But if you require
   interaction with me (and I would welcome this), it will have to be via
   one of these channels:

      Phone:  518-672-5049 (9am-1pm EST); 518-672-0116 (3pm-5:30pm EST)
      Postal service:  101 Route 21C, Ghent NY 12075

   Or, if I am to contact you, I will need your phone number or postal
   address.

   If you are outside the U.S., I may try to respond via email.  If you
   are in the U.S. and your message can be answered in a line or two, I
   may also try to respond via email.  But my computer time will be
   extremely limited, so I am unable to make any promises.

I expect this message to evolve with time, and if you are ever curious
about it, feel free to "ping" my account (stevet@netfuture.org).  For
further comments, see "More on Email" below.

SLT

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                         QUOTES AND PROVOCATIONS


Technology and the Larger Picture
---------------------------------

A while back Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was widely quoted as saying,

   If you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of
   nuclear [energy] is really very good.

It's true, if not profound:  set aside the main safety failures of any
technology, and its safety record begins to look a lot better.  O'Neill
came in for a lot of well-deserved ridicule for his empty observation.
But its emptiness has an additional aspect not so often noted.  Even if
you discount in this way the very incidents that are decisive for your
claim, how do you cite the "record" of a novel, several-thousand-year
process that has so far run a few decades, with the crucial, long-term
storage phases not even begun?  Leaving aside the terrorism potentials
that are so much on our minds today, nothing penetrates, corrodes, leaks,
and threatens unrecoverable harm like radioactive waste.  O'Neill might
just as well have said of a bullet that has as yet barely cleared the
gun's muzzle:  "So far, its safety record looks pretty good".

Artificially separating what cannot in fact be separated — and
especially separating long-term consequences from immediate benefits
— has always been the besetting temptation of the technological mind.
This narrowing of vision might seem odd in the age of systems theory,
globalization, and universal connectivity.  But, actually, these are the
very features of our era that make the fragmentation of our thought
processes almost inevitable.  Our understanding of global systems and the
connections of things has been formulated primarily in terms of our
experience with machines, and the whole idea of the machine is to abstract
a precise, well-defined process from the continuum of life so as to
perfect its productivity in splendid isolation.  This encourages us to
ignore all the machine's "inessential" and unproductive interactions with
its environment.

Machines, as we conceptualize them today, give us an easy and
aesthetically satisfying way to reduce our thought to the most precise
and quantitative terms possible.  Their operation gains the clarity
and automatic character of a chain of logic — quite explicitly so in the
case of the computer.  In analyzing a logical and mechanical activity,
we can let our thought processes coast.  The logic flows along by itself.
It is hard to give up the easy satisfaction we gain from analyzing such
well-behaved processes for the muddy complications of the real contexts
in which we employ the machines.

But when we coast along, resting content with convenient simplification,
we bump into unpleasant surprises.  For in reality the machine does not
merely perform its narrow, clearly defined task; it remains embedded
within the larger contexts of life.  We discover this, for example, when
we incur occupational ailments such as tendonitis or black lung disease,
or suffer the loss of meaning and elevated levels of psychic stress, or
find ourselves increasingly distant from family and community, or try to
cope with waste products that cannot be reconciled with the environment.

Our main challenge in a technological age is to free the precise but
constricted vision that is technology's most fateful gift.


An Entomologist's Killing Fields
--------------------------------

Jeffrey Lockwood makes his living by plotting the death of grasshoppers
— countless grasshoppers, whose Biblical-scale plagues would
otherwise devastate the rangelands of the American west:

   I flatter myself that I make substantial contributions to science by
   refining the use of insecticides.  But the bottom line is that I am an
   assassin:  my job is to extinguish life.  I am expected to do it well
   — efficiently and professionally.  This year I will direct the
   killing of no fewer than 200 million grasshoppers and more than a
   billion other creatures, mostly insects.  Their accumulated bodies will
   weigh over 200 tons and fill twenty dump trucks.  That's a lot of
   killing, and each year it gets harder.

An entomologist at the University of Wyoming, Lockwood has made
substantial contributions to science.  Insecticide applications, he points
out, have been reduced by more than ninety-nine percent compared to ten
years ago.  But the aim is still to kill, and Lockwood's problem is that
he has learned to love grasshoppers.  Unlike most entomologists, he has
spent a great deal of time getting to know the insects one-on-one by
observing them in their natural habitat.  This does not make it easy to
watch millions of sprayed grasshoppers molt into "deformed monsters" whose
hind legs fall off, leaving them to stagger around in a daze until they
die days or weeks later.  "Each summer", writes Lockwood, "I walk the
prairie after spraying to see the gruesome results of a control program,
so that I never forget what I have made possible".

Lockwood, whose essay, "To Be Honest", is in the summer, 2001 issue of
Orion, cites the practice by indigenous peoples of asking
forgiveness from the animals they hunt.  In the same spirit he says that

   I justify killing grasshoppers because my intentions are purified by
   love for them.

The statement is either outrageous or sublime, depending on the innermost
truth and ongoing restless search of the person who utters it.  I am
reminded of the comment by a friend who is a Vietnam veteran (not,
incidentally, the veteran I cited in NF #122):  it is at least possible,
he said, to look at an enemy soldier through the sights of a rifle and
then to squeeze the trigger — all while loving him.

Even more outrageous.  Or, perhaps, more sublime?.  I am not sure how true
the claims of love and purification really can be.  But, given the
inescapable fact of life — given, that is, what Lockwood calls "the
universal dilemma that we must kill to live" — then whatever truth
may be achievable in these claims is of transcendent importance.  It is
important because the inner resources being striven for by the one who
speaks this way are the very resources — the only possible resources
— capable of redeeming the conditions that produced the conflict
(between persons or between species) in the first place.

Lockwood is by no means complacent about his attempted self-justification.
It does not give him rest.  He finds a home neither in Earth First! nor in
the Chemical Manufacturer's Association.

   I sometimes wish I could throw myself at one of the extremes —
   environmentalism or anthropocentrism, mysticism or rationalism,
   religion or science.  But to do so is to become truncated, half human.
   Some people can choose one or the other, but living and working with
   grasshoppers, knowing their beauty and innocence while being deeply
   responsible for their deaths, has shown me that both of these ways of
   knowing must be honored for our agriculture and our civilization to
   flourish....

   For me, the data of "percent mortality" has given rise to the knowledge
   of how to control grasshoppers with minimal harm.  My wisdom, however
   nascent, comes from seeing the death of grasshoppers and the integrity
   of their biotic communities (including the human elements), and
   realizing that we are all one, that we are diminished by their deaths
   and uplifted by their lives.

Lockwood suspects that many scientists retreat into the "illusion of
objectivity" in order to spare themselves "the unsettling whisper of
spiritual insight" that so easily confuses rational analysis.  Scientists
could nevertheless cultivate "a respectful, caring, even loving
relationship with the creatures they study":

   But they would end up like me — attached to the creatures I kill,
   with all of the unrest that this entails.

Lockwood is, in part, talking about technology — the technology of
insect control — and the unrest he speaks of should, I think, be
allowed to disturb all our technological endeavors.  For there is almost
always a death-like element in these endeavors.  At each step we find
ourselves removed a little further from the life matrix that nurtured us.
We subject ourselves to the artificiality of a life support system.  We
risk becoming, like the sprayed grasshoppers, deformed, unable to function
in the manner for which we were made.

But if death is inseparable from life, this death, too, may be
essential.  There is at least the possibility that it will lead us, not to
the destruction of the nurturing matrix of life (and of ourselves with
it), but to our own re-birth in wisdom through which we will be able to
accept a higher responsibility for all life.  And facing squarely our
responsibility for death — without flinching and without shallow
excuse, struggling to bear the full weight of the unbearable — may be
the first step toward this re-birth.

I wouldn't expect to find much of this struggle in the Chemical
Manufacturer's Association.  But I'm not sure we would find much of it in
Earth First! either.


                          ---------------------

Orion magazine continues to be one of the best things around.  You
can check it out at http://www.orionsociety.org.  Incidentally, the
companion publication, Orion Afield (which subscribers to
Orion automatically receive) ran a cartoon in the summer, 2001
issue relevant to my comments above.  It shows a father reprimanding a
recalcitrant child at the dinner table:  "Have you any idea, young man,
how much water was polluted, energy consumed, top-soil eroded, and
pesticides pumped into the atmosphere in order for those beans to be on
your plate?"


Double-edged Technologies
-------------------------

Recent events have highlighted the usefulness of cell phones, elevating
them to a rather more dignified stratum within the public consciousness.
And quite apart from their value during crises, cell phones can be seen as
sharing the virtues of other communication technologies.  If they were
properly integrated with these other technologies, they could (in Phil
Agre's words) help us to "maintain awareness of the many people and
institutions with which we have ongoing relations:  the kids at day care,
the public personae of our professional acquaintances, the ball scores,
the bus we hope to board, the discussion groups we monitor, and so on"
(RRE News, Oct. 7, 2001).

All this is unexceptionable.  Yet the balancing thought — often
voiced in this newsletter — is still almost completely absent from
the public discussion.  Yes, these communication technologies help us to
bridge distances and keep in touch — but for this very reason they
contribute crucially to the centrifugal tendencies of society.  For
example, the tools enabling distributed work groups to coordinate their
efforts are the same tools that made the far-flung distribution of work
possible in the first place and that will encourage its further dispersion
in the future.  When Grandma rejoices in the email connecting her with her
offspring on the other side of the world, she is employing a suite of
technologies that make it ever more likely her offspring will be on
the other side of the world instead of in her own town.  As a result,
narrower channels of social interaction with her loved ones replace richer
channels.

This is not an argument against cell phones and their kin.  We need to be
on the other side of the world more often today, and Grandma does well to
rejoice in her email account.  The problem arises only from our failure to
recognize the truth about the technological forces we are dealing with,
a failure that prevents us from bending them more effectively to our
own ends.  The very simple point still awaits widespread acknowledgment:
our commitment to distance-collapsing technologies is substantially
responsible for the ever greater distances we must cope with.

I do not doubt that some of the centrifugal movement is necessary.
But if we came to terms with the double significance of our technologies,
a lot would be different.  We would not so routinely speak of cell phones,
email, and the like in terms of the single virtue of connectivity.  We
would recognize that the underlying forces of disconnection at work in
these tools are fully as powerful as the forces bringing us together.

Actually, the balance favors disconnection unless we remain keenly
aware of the double potential and consciously resolve to strengthen those
inner powers through which we can overcome distance.  After all, the
relations between distributed work groups will tend to be thinner and more
one-dimensional than those between individuals working within a complex
social microcosm under one roof.  But, if we recognize and accept the
challenge, we can, where we choose, recoup from within ourselves
the depth and intensity of connection that otherwise the technology takes
away.

Practically speaking, I think society would be healthier if we all carried
at least a minimal bias against adopting the newest gadgets.  Then,
only when a certain threshold of need was exceeded would we go ahead and
buy.  (I am very glad, for example, to see airport guards well wired.)  In
the breathing space below the threshold we would find ourselves encouraged
by a certain creative tension to consider exactly those social and
technological trade-offs that need considering.  This more wakeful
relation to technology would be a wonderful thing for society.

The idea of a bias is hardly novel.  We already have a bias; it just
happens to push us in the wrong direction.  It says:  if you can't think
of a strong reason not to buy the gadget, then go ahead and buy it.  This
aggressive stance depends on the one-sided misunderstanding of
technology's benefits I mentioned at the beginning.

The events of September 11 made it more difficult for us to watch a low-
flying airliner without imagining how it could be a destructive
weapon.  But this imagination exemplifies a truth about nearly all
technologies.  It's a truth we can reasonably hold in mind not only as we
climb aboard our next flight (thereby making the flight a little safer),
but also when we use our cell phones and other conveniences of the day.


Readers Strike Back
-------------------

Several readers responded to "Terror on Film" in NF #122
(http://www.netfuture.org/2001/Sep1801_122.html).  In that piece I doubted
whether video images of the World Trade Center attacks added much of value
to the widely available print images.  But, counters Andy Hook, "There is
something compelling about the moving image".  And Herb Safford
elaborates:

   Since my wife and I have not had a television set for about ten years
   now, and make every effort to avoid television's incursion when we are
   forced into circumstances such as "waiting rooms" where the assumption
   is that watching ANYTHING is preferable to reading or talking, I would
   have expected to agree with you that moving images could not add to the
   still photos of the WTC disaster I had been seeing over the past week.
   However,  just yesterday I watched, on the CNN Internet site,  the
   "video" of the second aircraft flying into one of the World Trade
   Center towers.  For me, at least, this provided a different perspective
   on the act of suicidal terrorism than any still picture had,
   heretofore, done.  The motion of the plane across the frame toward its
   destiny brought home to me the sheer intensity of intent of those
   "flying" into the tower.

My remark that I had not seen any moving images of the attack brought this
from Bob Gaughan:

   It sounds like your approach to a subject may be one of purposely not
   gathering available information on that subject.  I can see how in some
   cases this may be helpful, but to ignore a relatively objective view of
   an occurrence and then come to conclusions about that occurrence, does
   seem to tread on ground that might lead one off to "la-la" land.

I chuckled upon realizing how my comments about the video images I hadn't
seen must have sounded, on their face, rather like the classic know-
nothing stance:  "This book is despicable!  I haven't read it and I never
will!"  Yet the truth of the matter is quite otherwise.

In the first place, the suggestion that I made it a policy to avoid
television exposure after the terrorist attack is incorrect.  Human nature
being what it is, I'd probably have jumped at the opportunity to sate my
morbid curiosity upon video images.  It just happens that I live in a
community where televisions are hard to find.  (Offhand, I can't think of
any friends who have one.)  Nor have I been traveling during the past
couple of months, so I've been spared the usual video assaults in public
places.  I'd have had to go out of my way to find a television, and, with
my time greatly pressured these days, it never seemed quite worth the
bother.  In fact, I still haven't seen those moving images.  As time
passes, the loss feels slighter and slighter.

But don't think that I therefore had no basis for saying what I did!  I
knew all too exactly and well what the coverage was like.  You can hardly
live in our society without gaining a head for television.  Long before
September 11 I had seen virtually the same images the rest of you saw on
that day.  There's a reason, after all, why everyone reported "it was like
watching a movie".  (And how about video games?)  What gave the pictures
more impact than a routine movie or video game was the knowledge of the
reality of the attack — and I was certainly not deprived of this
knowledge either.  (For what it's worth, I also spent some time
listening to network television coverage on my FM radio, and I can
assure you that I had no difficulty "filling in" the missing images —
something I was quite happy to be left free to do for myself.)

Certainly, as readers point out above, you can gain new and forceful
experiences when you look at moving images — just as when you look at
unfamiliar still shots or listen to eyewitness accounts or do most
anything at all.  But my point was that I saw nothing particularly
important (in a positive sense) about what the omnipresent televised
footage could add to the public consciousness.

Moreover, all those compelling experiences that viewers have reported
easily become my own experiences simply by being reported.  The
unsettling, vaguely sinister quality of a jetliner flying too low and too
fast; the deadly, determined grace of the smoothly banking final turn in
the sky; the earth-shakingly fateful finality of a collapsing monument of
civilization — does anyone really doubt that, aided by a few
photographs and my own store of experience, I have these images as vividly
as any others who were not there in person?

Perhaps I have them more vividly.  Every event is fully "given"
only through an infinite number of mutually complementary, revelatory
perspectives, and video images all too easily narrow these down to a
handful of rigidly fixed perspectives that tend to overpower and abort the
imagination.  That's why, for example, I will not go to watch the
forthcoming cinematic version of The Lord of the Rings.  Tolkien's
work is too deep and valuable for me to want to see it impoverished in
this way.  Moving images are a much poorer representation of the world
— a narrower and less open-ended communication channel — than
the printed page refracted through an adequate imagination.

It's worth mentioning that even eyewitness experiences can be unhealthily
constraining if we do not bring a lively, inner mobility to them,
always working to transcend the limitations of our private vantage
points.  I wonder whether traumatic stress syndrome is related to the
(understandable) inability to escape the single vantage point that is
centered on oneself.  Other, more healing perspectives on the traumatic
event are shut out.

Anyway, another reader, Bob Fox, offered this:

   Allow me to share with you one of the realisations I came to as I
   watched the endless repeats of the events of September 11th:

   You see the nearer tower burning, you see the plane approach from the
   right and hit the other tower, and you see the ensuing fireball, and
   you find yourself thinking, "That's not a good camera angle..."

   Then, later, there is more footage, this time taken from the other
   side, and you get a wonderful view of the plane approaching from the
   left and hitting the building, and you think, "Ah, that's better...".

   Then they show it to you again, this time with the point of impact in
   slomo...

And, finally, Jeff Dieffenbach drew my attention to a Washington
Post story about ABC News deciding to cut back on its repeating film
footage because "some small kids believe each showing represents a new
attack".  That exceptional little news item is just one small reminder of
our society's overall criminal inattention to the child's distinctive
world.  The ubiquitous TV is, of course, a prime instrument of our attack
upon childhood....

 ... which brings up my remark about people becoming angry and defensive
when they hear you do not have a television in your home.  This prompted
Mark Schumann to write:

   Heck, I've gotten that response from people who find out I just don't
   have cable TV.

   But wait until someone finds out you're a vegetarian, or (in my case)
   someone who just doesn't eat very much meat.

   Or that you live in an old city neighborhood by choice.

   Some of the shock and guilt is related to technology, to be sure; but
   some of it is just plain old conformity.


More on Email
-------------

On the topic of my "disconnection" from email, Mathew Gregson expressed
puzzlement:

   I do not understand what life situation could bring one to a state
   where email, of all things, could be a major negative influence in
   one's life!

Well, I don't know what to say except that I in turn find the
incomprehension incomprehensible.  Can't anything become a negative
influence, if it is out of place, out of harmony, out of balance with
one's particular circumstances?  I've taken to disconnecting my phone at
times lately, because of a serious illness in the household.  Should I
feel guilty for that?

Gregson goes on to suggest nicely that readers may be insulted

   because you, a man whose thoughts they have learned to respect, imply
   you wish less contact with the very people you attempt to get
   communicating in a more meaningful way each NetFuture issue.

But look at it this way:  my replacing email with phone and letter is my
own way of encouraging more meaningful communication, not less.

There's one truth that people accustomed to email seem reluctant to
accept:  in the most important respects, networking technologies do not
increase our capacity to communicate.  We increase this capacity only
through the inner disciplines leading to stronger concentration, deepened
interest in others, strengthened verbal skills, and so on.  There are
maybe sixteen hours in the day I could spend communicating.  Suppose I use
all of them today to interact with my wife or a close friend.  Then, by
contrast, suppose I work tomorrow at engaging every possible person all
around the globe via email.  Will I have achieved greater depth or meaning
or importance in my outreach on this second day?  Will I have done more
communicating?  Not at all.  In fact, I will very likely have done less.

In reality, one looks for a balance in one's social intercourse, giving
proper emphasis to the deep challenges presented by those nearest and
dearest, while remaining open to a larger world of acquaintances and
strangers.  But email does not give us more time.  And if its net effect
is to tilt the balance badly away from the most significant relationships
to the more casual ones, then, for me at least, this is the point where
I've allowed it to become a negative influence in my life.

SLT

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                          ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER

Copyright 2001 by The Nature Institute.  You may redistribute this
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Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #124 :: October 30, 2001

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