THE WEIGHT OF MEGASTRUCTURE

...The survival of a human societal system, like that of any living system in the realm of nature, entails multidimensional tasks...

...We human beings, with our endowment of intelligence, can overcome or bypass natural barriers...

...By now the ever-growing mass of our system's interdependent substructures has become too cumbersome for radical change...

...Nuclear plants, their critics argue, entail inflexibly, tied-down capital investment, and rigid plant construction...

...Despite mounting criticism these trends continue— leading us toward our society's ever larger, more complex, and centralized organization...

...Here, as in other areas, our pluralist society is not quite so pluralist...

...To speak more concretely: human societies will always orient individuals and groups to perform tasks within the framework of larger, societal tasks and goals, upholding the principle of functional differentiation (the division of labor) and thereby raising the level of effi339 ciency...

...Nor can we count any longer on the exploited nations' ever-lasting tolerance of the industrial countries' greed In the last decades, we have heard many complaints about the spreading secrecy and opacity in most areas of public life—from areas of administration to those of politics, science, and economy...

...Since we cannot assume that human intelligence will increase with the ever-more complex tasks it must face, we may expect that at some point we will no longer be able to solve our ever-more complex "steering problems...

...Let me stress that there can be no question of elevating nature, as a whole, to the model for human societies...

...And the experts' use of computers in the handling of complex structures tends to magnify rather than minimize the complexity and cumbersomeness of the tasks at hand...

...It surfaces as aggression against society in the form of criminal behavior, or as resigned flight from society into alcohol, drugs, and suicide...

...It is doubtful that the ecological movement will gain sufficient momentum and influence fast enough to bring about the necessary radical change of direction, before it's too late...

...In (bio)cybernetic terms, "changeability" or "adaptability" imply, as Karl Deutsch has put it, "the capacity for fundamental reform and reorganization of the inner structure and, with it, for fundamental change of outward behavior...

...To put it more cautiously (and leaving room for human and humane adjustments), our society cannot blatantly flout nature's guidelines...

...And this "changeability" or "adaptability" is part of the basic conditions for survival, for the individual organism as well as for whole societies, in a changeable environment...

...Yet despite all rational counterarguments, the more power a society thinks it has, the greater its temptation to make use of it...

...And all this news comes to us in our homes over our TV sets, often blotting out family conversation and neighborhood interaction...

...For, in order to preserve our longrange capacity for change and adaptability, we must choose a path of progress that not only tolerates but encourages diversity of values and life styles...

...The same holds true for the super-formalized and -specialized instruments of "applied knowledge"—the computer systems serving in our administrative subsystems...

...The use of power and violence, in the long run, can neither prevent the drying up of the by now already limited supply of raw materials, nor can it assure the stability of supplier countries...

...Yet in general, in times of upheaval, persons with a good, many-sided, all-around education have a better chance of adapting to new situations than those who are highly specialized...

...And if we take this anthropological rule seriously we simply must stop extending specialization and the division of labor indefinitely, must stop degrading individuals to a point where they feel like cogs in a bewildering megamachine...

...The focus of this debate is not on whether nuclear energy benefits or harms human life but, very specifically, on these issues: Could we free ourselves, and at what price, of a commitment to nuclear energy systems if they should turn out to be failures...

...Although in principle these functions need not be unadaptive, because of today's conditions they balk adaptivity to other purposes...

...In contrast, natural systems aim for diversity and "to spread the risk" throughout a wide range of variants...

...Thus the larger, superior "megasystem" organs would act merely as guides in relation to the subsystems, aiding them where needed in the performance of their tasks...

...Thus the failure of one substructure would affect (almost) all others— and indeed the whole worldwide maxistructure...

...A one-sided orientation that ignores the limits of efficiency's value endangers the whole system's adaptability, and so also efficiency itself...

...How can we extricate ourselves from this vicious circle...

...Human societies, therefore, must be concerned not only with the whole system's capacity to survive but equally with that of the individual...

...But there are some signs that might give us hope...

...But efficiency and specialization cannot be extended indefinitely...

...This ever-increasing leveling of life styles in the course of industrialization ought to provoke our concern...

...We can see that these huge concentrations of capital and information, required to feed the megatechnological system, leave little room for the relatively modest investments needed to pursue small and medium-sized alternative projects...

...First, because of the farreaching goals and large means at stake in today's major decisions, decision-makers are compelled to uphold earlier decisions...

...Society's Adaptability ALL THIS POINTS to a basic question: is it right to apply here principles of the biological, ecological, "natural" realm as criteria for human societal structures...

...Our streets, foremost, are means of getting to where we have to go—to work, school, shopping areas, to the larger road system...

...And here we come to the fundamental question that is the theme of this essay: does not this predominant trend toward an ever-expanding megatechnology itself endanger our society's capacity for adaptability and change...

...So our new streets often inhibit rather than foster neighborhood life...

...Local streets, in the past, were above all thought of and planned as the communal space, connecting homes and families with each other and serving the neighborhood...

...The huge megasystem, for example, will be prone to "loss of friction" and to accidents...

...It springs from a universal human mechanism of psychic inertia, which affects our megatechnological system most gravely, for two reasons...

...There is indeed a causal connection between the increasing meaninglessness of work and the individual's lack of identification with the community...

...Thus we are experiencing a clear structural shift toward a preponderance of long-distance connections, to the detriment of local connections and interrelations...

...Another obvious example that fosters this process is our communications system—and much has been said on the subject in recent years...

...Our present political scene provides vivid examples...

...For this fate is by no means inevitable, and it is quite in the range of human capacity to yearn for and make changes...

...Pseudoadaptability—Via Use of Power & Violence MOST DISQUIETING perhaps is the realization that the waning of our society's adaptability proceeds largely unnoticed, behind a smoke screen of apparently constant structural changes...

...Democratic citizens everywhere are demanding more openness in all these spheres as the logical precondition for the exercise of their right to share in decisionmaking...

...Few people are prepared to take such risks...

...Let's not underestimate the outsiders' potential: they can more readily experiment with structural elements and rearrange them in new patterns, and they are freer to propose and champion a new course...

...Why risk surgery when the consequences are incalculable...

...The same holds true for the nonhuman, material, or informational elements or substructures in an industrial megastructural system...

...Indeed, the administrators of our megatechnological system find it difficult to absorb even the psychological irritation caused by such, capitalwise puny, efforts...

...Thus motivated, we might reorder our system by giving, even on the lowest hierarchical level, maximum autonomy to each subsystem in our society...

...So this bias protects the status quo...

...Today, finally, people are beginning to see that this exploitation means the depletion and destruction of systems upon whose survival indeed depends our own...

...What are the professional chances, for instance, of today's nuclear physicist who falls out of favor in his nuclear field...

...Second, the long-range time frame (often a decade) needed to execute today's major projects must in turn extend the time frame in which decisions, and the bias in their favor, retain effect...

...Consequently, decisionmakers are biased against new alternatives and fundamental revisions...

...But a society like our own can compensate for its dwindling adaptability in still another way...

...TO SUMMARIZE our thesis: the process set in motion by the industrial societies' system of megastructures creates ominous environmental dislocations...

...The more highly specialized a person's professional group, the stronger is the pressure to conform...

...There is yet another psychological mechanism that affects our system's decision-makers: the pressure to conform to their social group, and the sanctions that might result from bucking it and making nonconformist decisions (loss of professional prestige, of chances for advancement, even of the job...

...But the more specialized the task an element performs within a given structure, the more inextricably it is tied into it...

...Now that these myths are losing credibility, with our various experiences of unexpected reverses, the concept of the need for adaptability is taking hold in the general consciousness...

...Nature knows neither compassion nor solidarity, and—in human terms—conducts the process of adaptivity and survival with pitiless cruelty: unless they find an "ecological niche," the less adaptable fall by the wayside...

...Is it not this unhalting, constant megatechnological growth, producing ever more cumbersome and immovable structures, that 336 undermines, almost systematically, the prerequisites for our survival...

...There are the various attempts, by a variety of groups, to break away from the megastructural form and to try out new paths...

...Whereas simple tools, for instance, can be used in many different ways, specialized machinery can only serve one single purpose: as, for example, some huge pieces of machinery whose single use is the production of certain parts of the automobile...

...Let us look in this regard to the realm of nature, where we see the larger systems subdivided into smaller (partial) subsystems—subsystems with the ability to prevail and survive...

...Thus our environment is thrown into conditions of constant change, entailing dangerous instabilities...

...The Megasystem Is Secretive & Uncontrollable OUR SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS' COMPLEXITY and secretiveness reflects the system's growing uncontrollability, in the cybernetic sense of its "steering ability...

...Men and women will act as responsible members of their community only as long as they feel they have an integral part in it...

...Perhaps all these various pioneers will form the nuclei around which a new ecological society can crystallize...

...Let us take, for example, our traffic system...

...It also undermines, systematically, the society's ability to cope with these conditions by way of the needed structural change...

...At the expense of time allotted for local subjects (about which we might be able to do something and in which we might be intimately involved), we get lengthy reports about distant places, news we usually take in passively and are unable to affect...

...This question becomes ever more urgent as we watch the industrial societies' constant megatechnological expansion sparking in turn our rising consumption of natural resources, and so interfering ever more with both the rhythms of the natural and the human sociopolitical worlds...

...This constant flight into ever greater complexity is the megasystem's attempt at pseudoadaptability...

...Today, surely, we plan our streets most of all to accommodate and fit in with the larger road and traffic system...

...The debate about nuclear energy has sparked an examination of even more fundamental problems and has led some of our contemporaries to air their deep doubts about the viability of our industrial civilization and its concept of constant progress through megatechnology...

...Many highways, for example, with the changing transportation patterns and dwindling fuel supplies, might end up as useless, lost "investment ruins...

...To avoid disintegration, we must take care to divert society's course, away from the present one-dimensional efficiency-oriented megastructural development...

...Are we not suffering now, because of structural change, of "structural" unemployment...

...It can exert ever more violence and power in dealing with the natural and the sociopolitical world...

...This differentiation entails the performance of specialized (sub)tasks and capabilities, which are extricated and isolated from the original unified connection...

...This, in turn, poses the question whether our recognition of such need for change and its concrete political feasibility will come in time to be able to halt the process...

...The System's Rigidity: Materials & Means Are Not Transferable "STRUCTURALIZATION" here means: to set various materials or informational elements into a particular relation to each other, and so to tie these elements into a newly created structure...

...The question, however, that society must face is whether it can continue to violate without repercussions those rules that govern the natural systems' ability to adapt...

...Malfunctions, even catastrophes, in one biotope usually do not (and if they do, only moderately) imperil the stability of the system as a whole...

...And could we then, quickly enough, find and shift to other energysupply systems...

...The resulting call for more effective "intelligence amplifiers," in the form of information technology, cannot bring about a fundamental solution—it rather exacerbates the problem...

...But today's harsh adjustments are imposed only upon individuals and minor 340 structures on too low a level to affect the whole system's adaptability...

...This principle already finds political expression in the call for decentralization that now issues from the ecological movement...

...In our human industrial society, such substructures are organized in new spatial units that remain strongly dependent upon one another...

...The basic principle guiding these structures is one of differentiation or specialization (division of labor...

...And when we speak here of the "environment" of our industrial system, we mean to include both the sociopolitical and the natural world...

...We must steer a new course, not toward islands of primitive forms of production and life styles, but under the aegis of balanced and moderate guidelines, welcoming diversity, and taking into account both efficiency and adaptability...

...one of nature's methods, after all, to secure genetic variety is sexual propagation...

...By now it seems that large areas of our industrial society are coming dangerously close to this point...

...Paradoxically, the preservation of the system's huge rigidity requires these constant "little" efforts of adaptation at the bottom...

...in the field of cybernetics...

...Indeed, the systems themselves present organizing problems of such enormity that technical improvements are usually viewed as interference...

...We now see groups that are exploring alternatives in life styles, technology, agriculture...

...The megasystem copes with minor difficulties by adding further substructures and "structural frills...

...And so, in order to increase our efficiency, we have created megastructures with far-flung, interdependent networks of substructures...

...The formation of such new structures is possible only as long as there are still unattached elements available to form them—or if there are elements that are capable of becoming detached and freed from older, existing structures and thus can be brought into a new relation to other free elements...

...The human being as zoon politicon finds fulfillment not as a lone wolf but as co-actor, coworker, co-citizen, and as a member in the human community as a whole...

...A Ray of Hope...

...We might indeed say that these adjustments imposed on individuals and substructures are shielding the total megasystem from the needed radical structural change...

...Many experts, however, defend their privilege of secrecy, asking why they should have to inform, and explain to, the general public the complex systems that serve it...

...Consequently the 337 ultimate stage of this development would be a worldwide maxistructure, in which the functioning of each substructure depends upon the functioning of all the others...

...At present, ever more human intelligence is drafted into such potential dead-end channels, away from its proper function: creativity...

...Therefore, in order to keep the megasystem working, it has become essential to put a brake on all technical innovation...

...Foremost among these are the functions (or subsystems) of coordination (administration), of transportation (and traffic control), and of protection (surveillance to insure safety and control...

...To the people of the past, their local street's function in facilitating transit was of secondary importance...

...DECISIONS—be they political, economic, or technological—are rarely made in a neutral, clean-slate, unprejudiced atmosphere but usually against a background of earlier already enacted decisions...

...Yet it is the system as a whole that must undergo radical restructuring in order to adapt to the worldwide ecological and sociopolitical changes...

...We have long failed to realize that our capacity for adaptability and change might be endangered...

...For we have been shielded by two myths to which we have clung tenaciously: (1) that we humans can master and rule the natural world, and (2) that our own system is superior to all others...

...Within this framework of ever-increasing unadaptable specialization, a number of our society's subsystems (or functions) have reached extremes rendering them especially detrimental to the whole society's adaptability...

...Speaking of pluralism, our all-encompassing systems of transportation and communications guarantee that life even in remote corners proceeds according to our industrial society's uniform patterns...

...For no one can doubt any longer that the exhaustion of raw materials, and the limits of the load we can force upon the natural world, will one fine day force us to change our course...

...This debate tails in with on-going discussions This article is reprinted, with permission, in English translation and somewhat abbreviated, from the German socialist journal Frankfurter Hefte...

...We might be spurred on to maintain, or regain, our adaptability by upholding "the principle of small, autonomous circuits and finely meshed structures...

...Along with the more tangible and familiar criteria—of safety, economy, ecological and social compatibility— there now is discussion of the industrial nuclear structure's capacity for change and adaptability...

...And is our time not concerned with "dynamism," "pluralism," "mobility," and "flexibility...

...And so, fearing that change might set off uncontrollable instability, responsible political leaders continue to favor the status quo—even if they are convinced of the need for substantial change...

...In the long run, it seems to me, human societal systems must stay in line and harmony with the basic laws that guide other (self-organizing) living systems...

...Indeed, nuclear energy systems seem to lead, inevitably, to the development of breeder reactors and plutonium energy...

...These "structural communities of fate" are constantly expanding, encompassing more and more dependent subsystems...

...And so we're muddling through...

...The internal structure of these subsystems may show a high degree of internal interrelation, but their connection to other subsystems outside (within the larger system of which they are a part) are relatively limited...

...for only together can they fulfill the integral function of the whole system...

...In regard to the natural environment, this has been the traditional course all along in the modern era...

...To put the matter simply: as the system grows ever more cumbersome, so grows the difficulty of controlling it...

...Only if we stop accepting the constant expansion of our society's complexity as our inevitable, "natural" fate...

...And so the society's increased productivity, brought about by division of labor, must benefit both society as a whole and the individual within it, assuming, at least, a halfway fair distribution of wealth...

...338 We humans, with our ability to use tools and materials, are less closely tied to our natural environment and, in principle, can extend specialization further than other species...

...This shift now is prevalent in almost all realms of our societal life...

...Whereas oil-based plants might be converted to coal use in a relatively short time, nuclear plants do not yield to such conversion, cannot be shifted to serve in other, "soft" energy systems—and so are potential "investment ruins...

...So far, it's a cheap substitute for real adaptation...

...And this fragmentation of our cities, this breakup of our neighborhoods is the darker side of our planned, efficient traffic net...

...It is questionable that the system will ever reach this level of "perfection"—but we are moving far in this direction (under the motto: international division of labor...

...The more highly developed the various substructures' functional differentiation and specialization, the closer will be their connections to other substructures—in their common "structural communities of fate...

...Similar conditions prevail in the natural, biological realm: the more specialized a species, and the more it is dependent on very specific living conditions and tasks, the less its chances for adaptability and survival...

...Translated from the German by GEORGE ECKSTEIN and SARAH HERZFELD 341...

...Indeed, its cumbersome complexity is self-perpetuating...

...Indeed, cyberneticians define our present social system as a "turbulent field...

...But the concept of the larger human community, which is inherent in the division of labor, and that of an interdependence of individual and society are in themselves humane values worth defending...

...Consequently, it is the "outsider"—with loose connections within the system—in whom we might place our best hope...

...The structures thus created by our industrial society's system of division of labor mirror in some way the structures that exist in the natural world...

...But there are crucial differences: while the substructures in the natural world are characterized by loose external relations to other substructures and highly complex interrelations within their internal parts, the opposite holds true for our human, industrial societal system, with its specialization and division of labor...

...The concern here is a need for flexibility in planning and for open-ended options, a variety of sources and supplies—motivated by the worry that dangerous developments might be forced upon us by the very character of nuclear energy...

...And so, in the natural world, we see partially autonomous substructures (biotopes), which so are relatively shielded against disturbances in other substructures of the total system...