Michael H Goldhaber on Sun, 10 Nov 2002 17:47:20 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> COMPLEXITY, TRUST AND TERROR (Langdon Winner) |
Below is my letter that will be mostly published in the next Netfuture in response to Langdon Winner's piece. Jon Lebkowsky wrote: > NETFUTURE > > Technology and Human Responsibility > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Issue #137 October 22, 2002 > -------------------------------------------------------------------------- > A Publication of The Nature Institute > Editor: Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@oreilly.com) > On the Web: http://www.netfuture.org/ > > COMPLEXITY, TRUST AND TERROR > > Langdon Winner LETTER TO NETFUTURE by Michael H. Goldhaber Langdon, I was frustrated by your piece "Complexity, Trust and Terror." Normally I like what you have to say. But this time, your main point that technological complexity leaves us particularly vulnerable — say to terrorism — strikes me as cliched and mistaken. While it is no doubt the case that the complexities of our society, technological, and otherwise , present a great many problems ranging from global warming to lack of active political involvement, the truth is we are far less vulnerable, even to these worries, then less sophisticated societies. Complex systems, among other things, tend to have great redundancy built in or simply lying around ready to be utilized if need be. History doesn't teach what you say. The example of the Goths' attack on Rome's aqueducts in 537 misses the context. After lasting for many centuries, and then undergoing centuries of decline, probably brought on by its inability to find a political form that could handle its size and diversity, the Western Roman Empire finally fell in 476. Sixty years later, it had been briefly reconquered by the remaining Eastern Roman or (Byzantine) Empire, which then failed to hold it. But by then Rome was far from being the technically sophisticated and advanced capital it had been centuries earlier. The aqueducts had survived, but not the engineers who had built them. The post-World War II Strategic Bombing Survey of Germany revealed that contrary to its intent, the unprecedented level of allied bombing had not significantly reduced German's output of war machinery and materiel. Compare how quickly the less technologically complex Taliban fell when subject last year American bombing at a much smaller scale. Or consider how Sierra Leone's society collapsed from an onslaught of ill armed rebels a few years ago. As a more homely example, I offer my own experiences after the 1989 Magnitude 7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake, which killed about a hundred people in and around the heavily populated San Francisco Bay Area. I was living in San Francisco at the time, and with the Bay Bridge out was concerned that food might not get into the city. My worries evaporated however, when I realized that the artisanal Acme Bread Bakery of Berkeley, which had only recently started supplying one store in my neighborhood, was sending its trucks around the Bay via San Jose to keep up deliveries. We were not only not going to starve, we would still have our luxuries. Contrast that to less technologically complex parts of Turkey, Iran, China, or Central or South America hit by similar magnitude quakes. The death toll is often in the thousands or tens of thousands; food and water supplies disappear; disease runs rampant. Your explanation, "modern, complex technologies succeed by wresting enormous stores of power from the natural realm, seeking to direct these powers in ways that are controllable and useful," is simply inapt. The Internet, complex as it is, ought to be subject to that definition, but just isn't. Even as a description of a skyscraper, the thought seems tortured, at best. The World Trade Center might well have been ugly and dehumanizing, but the reason it collapsed had to do less with its "wresting stores of power from the natural realm" than an inadequate fire-proofing system, inadequate concern for safety, etc. To some extent these problems and some others that you mention can be ascribed to trust. On the other hand, as you hint, our normal trust that mild levels of security are all that are needed for our safety from terrorists have mostly proved accurate. But the system just is not as vulnerable as you claim to the kind of attacks we witnessed. Saying otherwise feeds into the anti-terrorist hysteria. (I'm not saying no one will die, but even thousands of deaths, though horrible, are not the same as system breakdown.) Certainly it is true that the response to 9/11 especially in the days immediately afterwards was hysterical, a hysteria deliberately fueled and used by the Bush administration as well as by the media. Anti-terrorist hysteria has had much less horrendous effect on civil liberties so far than long-lasting, carefully nurtured anti-drug hysteria, with its low technological component. Apathy on this score is nothing new. Polls have repeatedly shown most Americans don't support the Bill of Rights, when its contents are described. (That of course is precisely its value.) Bush was against much of the Bill of Rights before 9/11, except as it affected his wealthy supporters. Politics has been shanghaied by the monied elite, in part as a consequence of widespread apathy, in part as a cause of that apathy. If you were to argue that the complexity of modern life dumfounds the electorate I think you would have something. Part of what you call trust is simply inattention resulting from the simple impossibility of taking seriously all the issues, etc.,that seem to call for attention. (Some of the pieces, including those about terrorism, on my website http://www.well.com/user/mgoldh/ might be relevant) # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net