The Individual and Modern Technology

Both pieces assigned for this week deal with the theme of the threat technology poses to individuality — a theme that has run through several of our readings this, most notably in Neuromancer and Modern Times.  I found Jaron Lanier’s article, Digital Maoism: The Hazards of Online Collectivism, very interesting even if I’m skeptical of his overall argument.  I think the issue is one of perspective and perhaps the intended audience of his article.  Lanier seems to be writing to a technology focused subculture that is enthusiastic about the potential of wikis like Wikipedia and data aggregators (maybe because they are frequent wiki contributors, as well?).  My perception of the culture at large is that the accuracy of Wikipedia serves more frequently as the butt of an easy joke.  Some of my favorites:

• From the Onion: “Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence”
• Michael Scott on The Office: “Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information.”
• From 30 Rock:

Frank: Oh hey, you should do your Janis research on Wikipedia.  It’s online so anyone could update it.  You know, cause people are finding out new things about Janis Joplin every day.
Jenna: Really?  Oh thank you Frank!  [Imitating Janis] I’m going to check that out!

[later] Frank: Ok, I’m on Wikipedia.  Edit page.  Did you know that Janis Joplin speed walked everywhere and was afraid of toilets?

Lanier’s presents Wikipedia, and with it the larger phenomenon of user-directed content, as having a far more enthusiastic support than it seems to in the general public.

Lanier also worries that the anonymous collective nature of such sites negates the reader’s ability to judge the authority of what they are reading.  He writes:

When you see the context in which something was written and you know who the author was beyond just a name, you learn so much more than when you find the same text placed in the anonymous, faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia.

But I would counter that the argument from authority, whether that authority is genuine or faux-authority, has many of the same pernicious attributes that Lanier attributes to the anonymity of “foolish collectivism” that he deplores about the web today.  The actions of the scientists in Boyer’s By the Bomb’s Early Light are one example of this trend in my opinion.  Nuclear physicists in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a historically unique opportunity to explain their field of knowledge to a receptive public.  Instead, it seems to me, they leveraged their new found influence to scare the public into supporting a specific policy.  But I think you see this trend of scientific (and other academic) experts trying to influence public policy in the areas like climate change, vaccines, alternative energy, among others, and rather than attempting to engage the public and make complex issues more relatable, they fall back on a kind of “top scientists say” formula.  I think this approach strikes a lot of Americans as arrogant and their reaction is often hostile.  It’s a schism that has a lot in common with the one detailed in Summer of the Gods where the “fundamentalist”-oriented folks are suspicious of the urban-professional oriented folks.

It’s important to note that the “appeal to authority” is no more individualistic or meritocratic than Lanier’s collectivist Wikipedia.  When we read a news report that says, “Dr. Sandy Jenkins from Harvard Medical School urges children to eat their vegetables.”  It’s not so much the individual Sandy Jenkins and her persuasive argument, but the cultural authority of medical schools in general and Harvard’s in particular.

In general, Lanier seems to prefer the professional and authoritative over the “hive mind” and collective, but it seems to me that there are obvious problems with both approaches.  His “either/or” formulation makes it difficult to see whether each system has positives and negatives that may balance each other out, or — perhaps even more disturbing — whether authoritative and collective model share negative aspects that we are currently ignoring.

Thomas Kuhn and the Culture of Science

A fascinating aspect of Kuhn’s almost anthropological study of how science is done is how he connects science and culture.  It seems to me that Kuhn wants to show science as a human activity rather than the rarefied ideal picture of science presented in science textbooks (which in a great analogy he likens to learning about a country by reading their tourism brochures).  But at the same time, by focusing on “science” and “scientific revolutions” and not really considering the specific historical and cultural context of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, or Einstein, he still maintains a vision of science as a separate and distinct human activity that borders on the ahistorical.

I kept returning to the mental picture of Kuhn studying scientists like an early twentieth century anthropologist might study an exotic tribe in Africa, but rather than reinforce notions of cultural superiority, he’s looking to knock them off their pedestal.  Kuhn’s scientists are not looking to make new discoveries, but instead conduct experiments in which the results are expected.  When anomalous data is found that does not fit the paradigm, it is often ignored, and as was the case with the discovery of oxygen by Scheele or Priestley or Lavoisier, a new paradigm is only established after the conceptual framework can accommodate the new data.  Kuhn presents scientist as essentially resistant to new ideas only changing as the generation of scientists themselves change and younger men and women come to understand the “new” paradigm as the dominant one.

At the same time, science does seem to function for Kuhn as a sort of eternal ideal that functioned the same way in 16th century Poland as it did in the United States in the 20th century.  In Evolution: The History of an Idea, Peter Bowler convincingly argued that the specific cultural and historical context of the Victorian era played a major role in how Darwin’s ideas were received, and it seems to me that all scientific discoveries can be better understood in the context of time and place.  I think this context is present in Kuhn as the conceptual framework that must be present before the anomaly can be truly perceived, but — and perhaps this is my own personal interest — just how the specifics of this framework evolves and how that relates to culture are the most interesting questions.

Technology in Necromancer

William Gibson’s Necromancer presents a futuristic world where many individuals look to technology (both computer and bio-technology) to escape their biological reality.   The protagonist, a broken young man named Case (itself a word for an outer-casing), is some kind of former computer hacker who stole from his employers and can now no longer “jack in” due to the toxins injected in him as punishment.  At the novel’s beginning Case, strung out on drugs, is desperate for some kind of medical fix that will enable him to jack in, a process that requires some kind of direct interface between the hacker’s brain and the computer world.  Case despises being stuck in what he calls the world of “meat”, and he’s not only one as many of the individual’s presented in the novel try to either alter their physical forms or defy their mortality through various technologies.

• Hormone injections and surgery keep Julius young
• Bizarre plastic surgery for “Moderns”
• Molly’s enhancements
• Dixie Flatline’s consciousness saved on ROM
• Cryogenics of the Tessier-Ashpool family
• Marie-Frances’ creation of Wintermute and Neuromancer

Each of these demonstrate ways in which the mind or self could be divorced from the body using future technologies.  Another re-occurring theme is that of drug addiction (Case, Riviera, Linda), which could also be seen as a use of modern technology (sophisticated chemical synthesis) used to escape the confines of the body.

To Gibson, it seems, technology threatens to come between humans and what makes them human (perhaps best exemplified by the Flatline construct’s disturbing laugh), but at the same time allowing humans a certain degree of freedom (perhaps best symbolized in using the appellation “cowboys” for cyberspace hackers like Case).  Ultimately, though, I would say that Gibson is a technology skeptic for it seems like the only pure truth-teller in a story full of deceptions is the bartender Ratz.  Ratz appearences in the book are infrequent, but come at key moments in the story, and he differs from other characters in the novel by his lack of modern enhancements (“In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it”) and his honesty.  Ratz keeps referring to Case as an “artiste” . . . Could this be a commentary on the artist’s role in helping to define what it means to be human, preserving the core values while not shying away from the modern?

The Morality of the Atomic Bomb

Perhaps it represents my own burgeoning interests in history or maybe it’s a result of the cultural history emphasis in much of the coursework here at GMU, but in reading Paul Boyer’s By the Bomb’s Early Light, I could not help but focus in on the intersections with gender and race that he alludes to, but doesn’t really explore.  I think these are interesting issues and ones that shed light on what people at the time considered to be the morality of dropping the bombs Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It’s fascinating to read just how quickly the bomb was associated with sex.  The young actress referred to as the “Anatomical Bomb” and the name of the bikini coming from the atoll where atomic bombs were detonated.  It’s impossible to think about this aspect of the bomb without associating it with Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb the classic 1964 movie by Stanley Kubrick with its extended mid-air refueling sequence to begin the filming (set to romantic music) and its central conceit that a rogue general initiating World War III because he’s impotent.  But Boyer shows us that these elements were there from the beginning, although a more thorough focus on gendered language and the bomb would be fascinating and might shed light on discussions of morality. Were moral objections to the bomb couched in gendered terms?  It seems possible, especially given that many of the prominent critics were female columnists.

The racial aspect also stood out to me.  Boyer notes that in opinion polls blacks were more likely than whites to disapprove of the decision to drop the bomb and that several black critics expressed the opinion that such a bomb would never have been dropped on Germany.  I also found fascinating the Life magazine speculation on what an atomic war would look like has the hypothetical bomb that strikes the United States originating the jungles of Africa(!).  There can be little doubt that white Americans’ understanding of the war against the Japanese was cast in racial terms.  Japanese people in the United States were placed in internment camps based on their race regardless of how long their families had been in the United States.  Even the extent of the damage of the Pearl Harbor attack was related to racism as military leaders there were more concerned with sabotage by ethnic Japanese living in Hawaii than they were with an attack from actual Japan, and these beliefs affected the arrangement and readiness of airplanes that might have been deployed in defense.  Then there’s the rather chilling revelation in Boyer’s book that a significant minority of Americans wished that more bombs had been dropped on Japan with one woman comparing the island to a “nest of vermin”.  Given this evidence, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that viewpoints on the morality of the decision to use nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki must be considered through assumptions on the part of white Americans of racial superiority and inferiority.  Ironically, it’s my belief that one of the legacies of World War II was to undermine racial thinking in the United States as we had fought an enemy in Nazi Germany dedicated to racial hierarchy which engaged in the largest scale act of racial genocide in world history.  It’s fairly obvious from Boyer’s book, however, that in the years following the end of the war, the U.S. had not yet digested these lessons.

Research Paper Segment: Antebellum era

I’m putting this below the fold.  For those with the time and inclination to venture further comments, questions, and other feedback would be very welcome.

Charlie Chaplin and Modern Technology

Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times serves as a harsh criticism of the dehumanizing effects of modern technology while at the same time celebrating the vitality made possible by same technological advances.  I’m currently reading Miles Orvell’s The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture 1880-1940 which addresses the ambivalence artists felt at the turn of the century over the negative and positive aspects of the machine.  Hopefully, I can quote a bit from it later on because Orvell connects Modern Times and Taylorism, but for now I’ll just note what I see as the double-edged nature of technology presented in Modern Times.

The beginning of the film really emphasizes the dehumanizing nature of factory work.  Chaplin’s character cannot keep up with the level of efficiency required by his job.  He’s not allowed to rest (or to “soldier” as Taylor might have put it), and the result is that the machine literally eats him up and spits him out.  Mental stability has been sacrificed in the name of efficiency — a sharp critique of Taylor’s presentation of efficiency as an unqualified moral good from Principles of Scientific Management.

And yet . . . Chaplin’s factory is a pretty awesome place.  The machines look alive and the camera lingers over them celebrating their vitality.  The machine’s power enthralls and terrifies at the same time.  Later, when Chaplin and the Gamin spend the night in the department store, they celebrate their unfettered access to material goods.  The same goods that factories mass produce and make available to everyone.  Chaplin’s character is unwilling producer, but more than a willing consumer.

Of course, the most obvious form of modern technology in Modern Times is Modern Times.  The cinema was a prime example of both advanced technology and a mass consumer product.  Even here, though Chaplin is an ambivalent innovator as he only reluctantly introduced sound to his movies.  Modern Times was his first to do so, and he coyly gives voice only to machines at first (over the loudspeaker, over a microphone).  When the world finally got to hear Chaplin speak . . . he sang them a song instead.  I have to say I love the way he deftly handled the irony inherent in his critique: serious issues are addressed in the film, but by the end he’s reminding us of the fun that can be had.  Fitting then, his final suggestion to the Gamin and the audience: “Smile! C’mon!”.

Don’t know much about history, don’t know much biology

Nor, I hasten to add, do I claim to be an “A” student.

But I do think the key difference between the Scopes trial in the United States and the debates among Darwin, Huxley, and Wilberforce in England has to do with the fact that in the U.S. it was (and is) a debate over what to include in a public school curriculum that children were compelled by law to learn. The debate in England in the 19th century strikes me as a conversation among scientific and religious elites (who were often one in the same). They were debating the place of evolution within context of scientific study along with its ethical ramifications for society at large.

The argument in the Scopes case, however, was much different and more importantly involved different interested parties.  Rather than a matter for the Royal Society and those educated enough to follow scientific debates, the anti-evolution law involved people from all social classes and cultural backgrounds who had a stake in what their children were taught in school.  This fact made evolution a target of the Fundamentalist movement.  If evolution had stayed at the level of university research, I doubt there would have been an evolution controversy like the Scopes trial — indeed, it seems from Larson’s book that public universities in the South were not targeted in anti-evolution campaigns.  This also explains why this debate over evolution took place in the 1920s and not the 1860s.  Laws establishing compulsory education date from around the turn of the century, and at first only applied to elementary or grammar schools with high schools coming a bit later.

Now I happen to think that biology is an appropriate topic for high schoolers to study.  I also think that once we decide a topic is appropriate we are obligated to communicate the models of explanation that follow the latest research with as little distortion as possible.  Now if a fundamentalist wants to argue that science is inappropriate for schools because elements of science undermine religious faith that would be an honest debate, but to pick and choose aspects of science that they don’t like and then claim that these examples — like the Big Bang theory or evolution — are actually bad science, I think is pretty weaselly.