On the evening of September 2, 1998, the first-class and business-class passengers of Swissair Flight 111 bound for Zurich from New York’s Kennedy International Airport had settled into their comfortable seats looking forward to a night of gourmet food, fine wines, and high-tech video entertainment aboard their McDonnell-Douglas MD-11 jumbo jet. Some were already enjoying Swissair’s highly acclaimed, new $70 million state-of-the-art computer entertainment system which featured video games, music, a dozen movies, on-screen slot machines, and bingo. Bored travelers could painlessly pass the time away gambling—using their credit cards to bankroll their losses. To promote the system, Swissair ads proudly proclaimed that it provided passengers with “an unprecedented degree of freedom and choice.”
Two hours out of Kennedy, Flight 111 filled with smoke, caught on fire, and plunged into the Atlantic near Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, killing all 229 aboard. Some Canadian and American crash investigators have speculated that the in-flight entertainment system may have sparked the fire which brought the MD-11 down—an eerie reminder of a similar crash two years earlier of TWA Flight 800 thought to have been triggered by a spark of unknown origin in the center fuel tank causing the Boeing 747 to explode off Long Island killing 230 people. A year later a third jumbo jet mysteriously crashed into the Atlantic after taking off from Kennedy Airport. For no apparent reason, one of the Egypt Air Flight 990’s pilots appears deliberately to have flown the plane into the sea.
Flying across the Atlantic in a giant jumbo jet engenders feelings of freedom, power, and control—not unlike the feelings experienced by Apollo astronauts, B-2 bomber pilots, high-speed race car drivers, physicians conducting high-tech medical procedures, and genetic engineers creating designer plants, farm animals, and even babies. High-precision automobiles, high-tech musical instruments, telecommunication satellites, home computers, cell phones, and the Internet all make us feel like we are in charge. Although technology may increase efficiency, reduce drudgery, and improve the quality of life, it is also one of the most powerful metaphors for the illusion of control.
For some, technology provides more freedom, more time, and an increased sense of community. For others it sucks up time, reduces freedom, and destroys community. Technology makes some of us faster, smarter, and richer. It makes others more materialistic and contributes to our alienation. Is technology our personal slave, or are we slaves to technology?
First class passengers on Swissair 111 thought they were in control of their own destiny on that ill-fated night over the Atlantic even though the pilot and the co-pilot spent the final minutes of the doomed flight arguing over whether to fly the smoke-filled plane by the book or by instinct. John F. Kennedy, Jr. may have thought he was in control of his high-tech, Piper Saratoga when he dove it into the sea off Martha’s Vineyard. In reality, they were in control of nothing—nothing at all. Swissair filed for bankruptcy three years later.
Who could have ever imagined that a handful of terrorists armed only with box cutters and small knives could commandeer four wide-bodied jets, destroy the World Trade Center, and severely damage the Pentagon?
We place infinite faith in high-tech global communication systems, megacomputer networks, communication satellites, international electric power grids, high-speed planes and trains, and high-precision automobiles. They are our gods!
To assuage their existential pain caused by the human condition, many are easily seduced by technology—particularly big technology. Still others use technology such as the electronic media, computers, computer software, and the Internet to manipulate millions of adults and children alike. “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” sang Janis Joplin in “Me and Bobby McGee.”
We don’t just embrace new technologies, we place them on a pedestal and worship them—always in the name of progress. The automobile, television, nuclear power, the space program, high-tech weapon systems, the personal computer, and the Internet have all been viewed with God-like awe—the next panacea. It is as though the frontier spirit of the Old West has been reincarnated in the form of high-tech euphoria.
Historian David F. Noble argues in his book The Religion of Technology (Penguin, 1999) that our enchantment with technology, “the very measure of modern enlightenment,” is rooted in “religious myths and ancient imaginings.”
Through genetic enhancements and gene splicing, parents of the future will be able to design their own children, choosing whatever qualities they desire in the way of beauty, strength, intelligence, or artistic ability. The future will be just like Garrison Keillor’s mythical Lake Wobegon, “where all of the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
In his provocative book Radical Evolution, Joel Garreau gives new meaning to the term “denial of death” as applied to state-of-the-art technology. Radical Evolution involves the use of gene therapy, genetic engineering, cloning, robotics, brain-computer interfaces, information technology, and nanotechnology (the technology of infinitesimally small devices) to enhance intellectual, physical, and emotional capabilities; to eliminate disease and unnecessary suffering; and to extend the span of life dramatically.
Since the early 1970’s we have witnessed the arrival of a plethora of new high-tech gadgets ranging from voice mail, fax machines, cell phones, VCR’s, and DVD players to personal computers, BlackBerrys, iPods, video games, e-mail, and virtual reality devices. Once they were accepted, they soon became indispensable to modern living.
Prior to the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident and the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant near Kiev, Ukraine in 1986, few technologies had been promoted as vigorously as nuclear power. Nuclear power plants were hyped by the industry as clean, quiet, cost-effective, and free of chemical or solid air pollutants. Billions of dollars were spent by the U.S. government on failed nuclear energy projects in the 1980s.
In his 1986 State of the Union address, President Ronald Reagan called for a security shield which one day could “render nuclear weapons obsolete and free mankind from the prison of nuclear terror.” That Reagan was so attracted to a strategic missile defense system, which some called Star Wars, came as a surprise to no one, given his penchant for large-scale, high-tech ventures such as the B-1 bomber, the MX missile, the stealth bomber, the Trident II submarine, the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, the Space Shuttle, the space station, and the Super Collider. Reagan never encountered a high-tech weapon system he did not wish to buy—and the more expensive the better. Just as the Egyptian pharaohs had their pyramids and the Turkish sultans their mosques, so too did Reagan have his Star Wars.
As originally envisaged, the fledgling missile defense system would consist of a complex network of X-ray laser beams; particle beams; and electromagnetic “sling-shots,” which would hurl nonexplosive projectiles called “brilliant pebbles” through space at great speed; and sensing, tracking, and aiming devices. All these systems require the extraordinary coordination of advanced computers and other technologies to detect missiles, compute their trajectories, and direct intercepting weapons over great distances. There was only one hitch. Most of those who have worked on the missile defense system have admitted that it is pure fantasy. There have been endless rocket failures related to the system resulting in the loss of billions of dollars. In spite of the continuation of these failures, President George W. Bush, most members of Congress, and two-thirds of the American people, enthusiastically support a scaled-down, antimissile system similar to Reagan’s dream. Whether or not it will ever work seems to be fundamentally unimportant.
If the Pentagon has its way, future wars will be fought with remote controlled robots, vehicles and airplanes. Unmanned aerial vehicles (U.A.V.’s) can rain down bombs on a distant target while the “pilot” sits at the controls in a risk-free remote control room thousands of miles away. Future wars may become clean, quick, bloodless, and effortless in the eyes of the television viewing public. The aim is to reduce the number of American body bags.
In spite of state-of-the-art nuclear power plants, sophisticated international electric power grids connecting the United States and Canada, computer controlled electronic switching networks, and modern high-tech communications equipment, tens of thousands of people in New England were powerless for over a week and nearly two million Canadians for over two weeks during the Great Ice Storm of 1998. With four of the five major power transmission lines serving Montreal out of service, the city came perilously close to a complete power blackout. Much of New England and Quebec looked like a cross between a war zone and a frozen winter wonderland.
Then on 15 August 2003, over 50 million people in 8 states and part of Canada lost power, some for as much as two days. About the Northeast power blackout Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico and former Secretary of Energy said, “We are a major superpower with a third-world electric grid.” As federal, state, and power industry officials tried to sort out the cause of this fiasco and assign blame, no one raised the following question. “Why would any sane human being ever propose an electric power system in which 50 million people were dependent on a single interconnected grid for their power?” No one suggested subdividing the grid into smaller completely independent units. Indeed, some members of Congress called for a national grid so that the entire country could be at risk simultaneously.
Millions of Californians have also experienced repeated temporary power blackouts as a result of unencumbered corporate greed.
Size, entangling economic relationships, standardized mass production and distribution, and technological complexity are not risk-free in the electric power industry or any other industry. We are much more vulnerable than our politicians and Corporate America would have us believe.
Yet we remain mesmerized by virtually every form of technology. To account for the powerful influence of our irresistible attraction to technology there must be a psychological explanation. Have we been seduced by what English economist Joan Robinson once called, “the silent hum of a perfectly running machine; the apparent stillness of the exact balance of counteracting pressures; the automatic smooth recovery from a chance disturbance?” Robinson questioned whether there was something Freudian about it. “Does is connect with a longing to return to the womb?” Or have we simply been taken in by the Enlightenment notion of progress?
Before embracing every new technology which comes our way, we need to ask the right questions. What will the technology do for people? What will it do to them? What will be the unintended side effects? How will people participate in its use? Will the technology serve us, or will we serve it?
Rebél
Thomas H. Naylor
May 1, 2008