Reversing Technological Innovation

...had a little snow [yesterday] which wouldn't be enough where I live to even entice a child to take a sled out and yet it snarled up the traffic, the power lines came down, the telephone system was in trouble...

...man's unique survival reflex has been flexibility, his ability to adapt to change...

...Yet, while weapons become more destructive and sophisticated, the actual conflict reverts to earlier and more primitive military tactics and hardware...

...The technology of eavesdropping and wiretapping has outpaced all the means for control and detection...

...Evasion and nonuse of communications conveniences becomes for some a regular pattern which defeats bugging and counterbugging...

...American strategists explain that Vietnam is a testing ground where "International Communism" seeks to demonstrate the efficacy of "wars of national liberation" as a means for communizing all the underdeveloped regions of the world...

...but too rapid or uncritical a 61 H. L. NIEBURG change passes a point of diminishing returns and becomes too costly to sustain...

...So long as the technology for the invasion of private communications continues to improve in efficiency, decreases in cost, is easier to install and operate than to detect— and while there is a market for such information —enforcement will remain spotty and ineffective at best...

...A good example is the field of private communications...

...In low-calorie countries, population since World War II has increased faster than food production...

...To quote General Curtis Le May on Vietnam strategy, "You can never kill all the flies until you destroy the manure pile...

...Similarly, as growing technological change sweeps over the Western world, conservation of air and water purity becomes a central issue of mankind's future...

...Through the same mechanism that triggers the military hardware race, international diplomacy finds its own level and searches for advantages in less dangerous occasions for conflict...

...Man puts his trust into the machines because "they cannot fail," and so his own adaptive capabilities atrophy...

...Yet the ultimate controller must be man, though his attention and skill tend to be devalued by the awesome speed and imperturbability of the machines...

...The reversal principle is expensive and exasperating...

...It can be seen in such developments as the return to handwork and custom labor in the production of electronic systems, aircraft, and sophisticated machines of all sorts...

...He asks: is this association of power and productivity with violence and destruction purely accidental...

...Snooping, in all its varieties, has become a normal part of government investigation, private legal action, and industrial espionage...

...Great destruction and great expectation are both equally ambiguous and subject to counterproductive reversals...

...The result is that most of these areas now suffer a lower per-capita food intake than they did at a lower level of technology prior to World War II...

...German physicist C. F. von Weizsacker writes: "The modern world is a tree in which many birds build their nests, and it is an all-consuming fire...

...but, while more of them live past infancy, they may ultimately have trouble controlling their weight and die of heart attacks earlier than did their grandparents...

...without these the world would face nuclear catastrophe, precipitated by radar echoes from the moon or by the migration of geese...

...In the Myth of the Machine, Lewis Mumford points out that highly complex technology and integrated societies were in existence long before the development of hardware technology and artificial energy sources...

...The question is, can you destroy the manure pile...

...The megamachine sustains a 62 REVERSING TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION magnetic plasma of all the inherent powers of human relations...

...Man now enjoys new comforts and benefits, but he pays a price...

...But the reversal principle can be generalized beyond diplomacy and warfare...

...This problem results in further paradoxes: the need to devalue the fail-safe system in order to avoid undermining its deterrent value—and the necessity for ourselves and our enemies to mutually devalue our deterrents, so that we all may be safe from accidental or preventive attack...

...all the systems that are processing the fire, theft, casualty, and life insurance policies issued by major companies...

...THERE IS DANGER IN OVERSPECIALIZATION...

...Under such conditions, new laws are bound to be futile...

...And well-trained and -supplied soldiers in the field find it impossible to cope with poison bamboo spikes and booby traps made of tree limbs...

...The squandering and pollution of environmental resources in effect will result in a larger government role, apart from all the other factors of social integration and centralization...

...defoliation chemicals...

...but it also amplifies minor failures which now can result in major power blackouts that may affect vast sections of the United States...

...It seems, more than anything else, the war has shown that war power is of little use unless it be intelligently controlled and directed at reasonable purposes...

...59 H. L. NIEBURG The Process of Degradation THE REVERSAL PRINCIPLE can be seen in the tendency toward the breakdown of large automated systems like the electric power distribution grid of the nation...

...And so the reversal principle generates a defensive cultural adjustment which, as a way of preserving the coin of communication, in turn degrades the technology itself...

...but this is a volatile fusion not yet fully harnessed and never fully congruent with the requirements of a highly integrated society...

...In its modem form, the megamachine may suffer the allconsuming fire which destroys the very benefits that should preserve the society...

...In this sense, the trend toward present-day interventionism —and its concept of the task of policing the process of political change in the new nations—results from the same dynamic that once was known as Western Imperialism...

...The first fruits of industrialization are spread abroad, dramatically cut infant mortality and then generate an explosive population increase...

...The difference between Andrew Jackson and Adolph Hitler may so be entirely based upon advances in technology and social integration...

...And if the fail-safe is too safe, it will fail to react properly in the situation for which it was designed...

...A megamachine can be built with soft human and animal power through rigid social organization, as was demonstrated by the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians...

...This improves efficiency and reliability...

...This in turn widens rather than narrows the development gap between the advanced and the backward areas of the world, sharpening all the political antagonisms that arise from the fact of malnutrition...

...For a contrary trend accompanies the "tech-fixing" syndrome, a kind of human defense mechanism against efficiency, speedup, and convenience that undermines both positive and negative effects of innovation...

...The causes of such power failures are hard to detect, and an unprecedented amount of time is now required to trace the source of malfunction...

...Yet the key problem of advanced economies is to continuously juggle and balance the contradiction between the rate of change and the economics of change...

...As in professional spying, confidential private or business communications return to the primitive conditions of whispered words in crowded airports or noisy bathrooms—the antithesis of technological convenience and progress...

...The input-output cost must be judged in terms of the overall human condition and social policy...

...The megamachine, Mumford asserts, tends toward dehumanized powercentered culture which "monotonously soils" the pages of history "from the rape of Sumer to the blasting of Warsaw and Rotterdam, Tokyo and Hiroshima...

...It may be technology that marks the difference between the random extermination of American Indians when it is compared with the systematic destruction of European Jewry...

...In the very cloisters of our power and wealth we may be losing the common human basis for understanding and dealing with the more primitive and desperate revolutions and hopes in the backward ghettos of rural counties, urban slums, and in the proud, unsure, and hungry reaches of the underdeveloped world...

...The reversal principle is inseparable from scientific and technological change...

...Today's great powers must arm themselves with arsenals of versatile missilry and nuclear bombs...

...Through better nutrition and sanitation children grow taller and straighter than their parents did...

...This generates the science-technology race but at the same time renders each additional gain both more expensive and less relevant to present military requirements and diplomacy...

...Their problems were not too different from those of the modem megamachine of Western civilization...

...But the private man finds ways of overcoming the technological advantages of the snooper...

...people sniffers," a chemical and electronic instrument designed to smell the body odor of concealed enemy troops...

...all the systems routing long-distance telephone calls, setting newspaper type, making sausages, mixing cakes and cement, preparing weather forecasts, directing city traffic, diagnosing illnesses, and cashing most of the checks in the nation...

...A society organized as a rigid megamachine, wedded to a blind, high-speed, narrowly specialized process of technological change, will forfeit some of its options for the future...

...New York City...

...cannot impose a doctrine of "welfare imperialism...

...This trend toward the reversal principle is most clearly apparent in the recent pursuits of technology: every new offensive weapon begets a defensive system or forces another, new competitive system into being—erasing, in either case, incremental advantages and sometimes rendering whole systems obsolete...

...Science and technology constitute the basis of the modern industrial state...

...But this is not the direction we have chosen...

...In the same way, the vigilance of electronic early-warning systems has been downgraded by the necessity for fail-safe devices...

...Any society that is overly dependent upon one or two major staples suffers instability...

...The reversal effect in warfare is wellknown and has been extensively analyzed...

...a great number of complex fragmentation devices launched against enemy personnel from air and ground platforms of virtually unrestricted range and mobility...

...But there is persuasive evidence that far from being exceptional, the reversal effect is universal...

...A society that considers science and technology as separate and apart, exempt from the process of public criticism, imposes a fixed charge on the entire community which will dominate the flavor of its culture...

...It might also be said that, from the Vietnamese point of view, the war is a proving ground to demonstrate that the infinite might and power of the U.S...

...Such a reversal principle is apparent in the nuclear stalemate...

...The technology of our advanced civilization is now so highly articulate and complex that, in the words of Vice-President Hubert Humphrey...

...The urge to imperialism that motivated the great Western powers for 300 years resulted from the balance-of-power stalemate in the cockpit of Europe...

...Foreign policy in the decade of the 60's seemed to be making a strong case for the view that neither the terrible nor the tantalizing tools which science and technology have put at the disposal of the advanced nations can secure them a stable diplomatic position in the world...

...The same reversal principle operates in the magnificent new computerized systems that are keeping track of all the ships at sea, all the planes in the sky, all the satellites, boosters, and space junk in orbit around the earth...

...The scene of tension and conflict often shifted to the world's remote reaches where the great powers competed to colonize tribal regions through the most primitive methods of violence, trade, and persuasion...

...troops (and for riot squads at home...

...It tends to preserve older values and the incorrigibility of human nature...

...In every area where new technology challenges human needs, man finds ways of circumventing progress...

...Superior, next-generation computer-surveillance and -control systems are designed and superimposed upon a flawed older generation of machines, and so the problem is aggravated...

...The scale of good is indeed augmented, and evil becomes massive and monumental...

...There is a tendency to regard it as highly exceptional, an accidental side issue to the strategic technological stalemate between Russia and the United States...

...Rejecting the ideological tenets of tech-fixing, the body politic and its practitioners must force an assessment of specific proposals and problems...

...The power and magnificence of hardware technology is inordinate in the simultaneity of its reach and power...

...To reserve our options we must reject the "tech-fix" mentality, and assess 60 REVERSING TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION and control the rate and direction of change according to standards of comparative value...

...A solution cannot be found through legislation, since the very ease and low cost of snooping makes it so simple to evade enforcement...

...Should we introduce a fail-safe system in all these activities in order to prevent the augmented disaster of a breakdown, we would find ourselves returning to smaller, multiple, and segmented systems with human intelligence once again operating at many interfaces...

...The new world of professional wiretappers—eavesdroppers, countereavesdroppers, and double-agent eavesdroppers— in government, private industry, and private lives force him to go underground, to adopt evasion techniques in private communications as a normal way of life...

...Change in itself is unavoidable and necessary...

...In the late 1960's, we see the aircraft manufacturers reaching back to types of pre-World War II and even World War I aircraft for the limited warfare in Southeast Asian jungles and military needs throughout the underdeveloped world...

...Vietnam: the Archetype of Reversal As CONDUCTED SINCE 1965, the warfare in Vietnam developed into a testing ground for highly sophisticated technology and massive striking power versus elemental and primitive forces of political organization and loyalties—nylon body-armor for U.S...

...It can be seen in the trend of highly-skilled scientistengineers to work as salesmen and wildcat promoters...

...MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about the impact on ecology and the negative environmental toll which continues to mount throughout the world...

...This world is blind to its own ambivalence...

...But automatic systems are incapable of adaptive behavior in unprogrammed situations which, when they come (and ultimately they must), undoubtedly will bring augmented blackouts and disaster...

...There are present in human relations and in each human being great natural forces comparable to hurricanes, earthquakes, and sudden natural disasters...

...nevertheless, it promotes a healthy and dependable human reaction that finds ways of subverting the megamachine to more humane, if primitive, realities...

...During the last ten years most of the switching mechanisms, which balance surges and peaks of power among regional systems, have been automated...

...In an ideological search for infinite security against war, want, and weariness, innovation must face the fact that the search itself may be futile...

...night-seeing infra-red radar...

...Weizsacker likens the inevitability of ambivalence and the half-truths through which man's mental life fluctuates to Jesus' parable of the wheat and the tares: "I have never seen a clearer description of modern times than this growing cornfield in which the tares unavoidably grow up alongside the wheat...

...The tech-fixers' common response to this process is to accelerate the innovation process as though to outdistance the reversal principle...