Rebuttle (of sorts) to Gore's Speech from Telecom Digest

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

which you sit. And if I could get an industrial chemist to confirm
this fact by describing some incomprehensible process by which it was
done, you would probably tell someone tomorrow that you spent the
evening sitting on a Bismark herring.


Perhaps I can get a bit closer to the point I wish to make with an
analogy: If you opened a brand-new deck of cards, and started turning
the cards over, one by one, you would have a pretty good idea of what
their order is. After you had gone from the ace of spades through the
nine of spades, you would expect a ten of spades to come up next. And
if a three of diamonds showed up instead, you would be surprised and
wonder what kind of deck of cards this is. But if I gave you a deck
that had been shuffled twenty times, and then asked you to turn the
cards over, you would not expect any card in particular - a three of
diamonds would be just as likely as a ten of spades. Having no basis
for assuming a given order, you would have no reason to react with
disbelief or even surprise to whatever card turns up.


The point is that, in a world without spiritual or intellectual order,
nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore,
nothing comes as a particular surprise.


In fact, George Orwell was more than a little unfair to the average
person in the Middle Ages. The belief system of the Middle Ages was
rather like my brand-new deck of cards. There existed an ordered,
comprehensible world-view, beginning with the idea that all knowledge
and goodness come from God. What the priests had to say about the
world was derived from the logic of their theology. There was nothing
arbitrary about the things people were asked to believe, including the
fact that the world itself was created at 9 AM on October 23 in the
year 4004 B. C. That could be explained, and was, quite lucidly, to
the satisfaction of anyone. So could the fact that 10,000 angels could
dance on the head of a pin. It made quite good sense, if you believed
that the Bible is the revealed word of God and that the universe is
populated with angels. The medieval world was, to be sure, mysterious
and filled with wonder, but it was not without a sense of order.
Ordinary men and women might not clearly grasp how the harsh realities
of their lives fit into the grand and benevolent design, but they had
no doubt that there was such a design, and their priests were well
able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not
rational, at least coherent.


The situation we are presently in is much different. And I should say,
sadder and more confusing and certainly more mysterious. It is rather
like the shuffled deck of cards I referred to. There is no consistent,
integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on
which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore, in a sense, we are
more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we
can be made to believe almost anything. The skin of a Bismark herring
makes about as much sense as a vinyl alloy or encomial dioxin.


Now, in a way, none of this is our fault. If I may turn the wisdom of
Cassius on its head: the fault is not in ourselves but almost
literally in the stars. When Galileo turned his telescope toward the
heavens, and allowed Kepler to look as well, they found no enchantment
or authoriza- tion in the stars, only geometric patterns and
equations. God, it seemed, was less of a moral philosopher than a
master mathematician.  This discovery helped to give impetus to the
development of physics but did nothing but harm to theology. Before
Galileo and Kepler, it was possible to believe that the Earth was the
stable center of the uni- verse, and that God took a special interest
in our affairs. Afterward, the Earth became a lonely wanderer in an
obscure galaxy in a hidden corner of the universe, and we were left to
wonder if God had any interest in us at all. The ordered,
comprehensible world of the Middle Ages began to unravel because
people no longer saw in the stars the face of a friend.


And something else, which once was our friend, turned against us, as
well. I refer to information. There was a time when information was a
resource that helped human beings to solve specific and urgent
problems of their environment. It is true enough that in the Middle
Ages, there was a scarcity of information but its very scarcity made
it both important and usable. This began to change, as everyone knows,
in the late 15th century when a goldsmith named Gutenberg, from Mainz,
converted an old wine press into a printing machine, and in so
doing, created what we now call an information explosion. Forty years
after the invention of the press, there were printing machines in 110
cities in six different countries; 50 years after, more than eight
million books had been printed, almost all of them filled with
information that had previously not been available to the average
person. Nothing could be more misleading than the idea that computer
technology introduced the age of information. The printing press
began that age, and we have not been free of it since.


But what started out as a liberating stream has turned into a deluge
of chaos.  If I may take my own country as an example, here is what we
are faced with: In America, there are 260,000 billboards; 11,520
newspapers; 11,556 periodicals; 27,000 video outlets for renting
tapes; 362 million tv sets; and over 400 million radios. There are
40,000 new book titles published every year (300,000 world-wide) and
every day in America 41 million photographs are taken, and just for
the record, over 60 billion pieces of advertising junk mail come into
our mail boxes every year. Everything from telegraphy and photography
in the 19th century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified
the din of information, until matters have reached such proportions
today that for the average person, information no longer has any
relation to the solution of problems.


The tie between information and action has been severed. Information
is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of
entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It
comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected
from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in
information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it.


And there are two reasons we do not know what to do with it. First, as
I have said, we no longer have a coherent conception of ourselves, and
our universe, and our relation to one another and our world. We no
longer know, as the Middle Ages did, where we come from, and where we
are going, or why. That is, we don't know what information is
relevant, and what information is irrelevant to our lives. Second, we
have directed all of our energies and intelligence to inventing
machinery that does nothing but increase the supply of information. As
a consequence, our defenses against information glut have broken down;
our information immune system is inoperable. We don't know how to
filter it out; we don't know how to reduce it; we don't know to use
it. We suffer from a kind of cultural AIDS.


Now, into this situation comes the computer. The computer, as we know,
has a quality of universality, not only because its uses are almost
infinitely various but also because computers are commonly integrated
into the structure of other machines. Therefore it would be fatuous of
me to warn against every conceivable use of a computer. But there is
no denying that the most prominent uses of computers have to do with
information. When people talk about "information sciences," they are
talking about computers - how to store information, how to retrieve
information, how to organize information. The computer is an answer
to the questions, how can I get more information, faster, and in a more
usable form? These would appear to be reasonable questions. But now I
should like to put some other questions to you that seem to me more
reasonable. Did Iraq invade Kuwait because of a lack of information?
If a hideous war should ensue between Iraq and the U. S., will it
happen because of a lack of information? If children die of starvation
in Ethiopia, does it occur because of a lack of information? Does racism
in South Africa exist because of a lack of information? If criminals
roam the streets of New York City, do they do so because of a lack of
information?


Or, let us come down to a more personal level: If you and your spouse
are unhappy together, and end your marriage in divorce, will it happen
because of a lack of information? If your children misbehave and bring
shame to your family, does it happen because of a lack of information?
If someone in your family has a mental breakdown, will it happen
because of a lack of information?


I believe you will have to concede that what ails us, what causes us the
most misery and pain - at both cultural and personal levels - has nothing
to do with the sort of information  made accessible by computers. The
computer and its information cannot answer any of the fundamental quest-
ions we need to address to make our lives more meaningful and humane.
The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot
tell us what questions are worth asking. It cannot provide a means of
understanding why we are here or why we fight each other or why decency
eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most. The computer
is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we
most needed to confront - spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves,
usable conceptions of the past and future. Does one blame the computer
for this? Of course not. It is, after all, only a machine. But it is
presented to us, with trumpets blaring, as at this conference, as a
technological messiah.


Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better,
religion better, politics better, our minds better - best of all,
ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or
the ignorant or the foolish could believe it.  I said a moment ago
that computers are not to blame for this. And that is true, at least
in the sense that we do not blame an elephant for its huge appetite or
a stone for being hard or a cloud for hiding the sun.  That is their
nature, and we expect nothing different from them. But the computer
has a nature, as well. True, it is only a machine but a machine
designed to manipulate and generate information. That is what
computers do, and therefore they have an agenda and an unmistakable
message.


The message is that through more and more information, more conveniently
packaged, more swiftly delivered, we will find solutions to our
problems.  And so all the brilliant young men and women, believing
this, create ingenious things for the computer to do, hoping that in
this way, we will become wiser and more decent and more noble.  And
who can blame them? By becoming masters of this wondrous technology,
they will acquire prestige and power and some will even become famous.
In a world populated by people who believe that through more and more
information, paradise is attainable, the computer scientist is king.
But I maintain that all of this is a monumental and dangerous waste of
human talent and energy.  Imagine what might be accomplished if this
talent and energy were turned to philosophy, to theology, to the arts,
to imaginative literature or to education? Who knows what we could
learn from such people - perhaps why there are wars, and hunger, and
homelessness and mental illness and anger.


As things stand now, the geniuses of computer technology will give us
Star Wars, and tell us that is the answer to nuclear war. They will
give us artificial intelligence, and tell us that this is the way to
self-knowledge. They will give us instantaneous global communicat-
ion, and tell us this is the way to mutual understanding. They will
give us Virtual Reality and tell us this is the answer to spiritual
poverty. But that is only the way of the technician, the fact-mongerer,
the information junkie, and the technological idiot.


Here is what Henry David Thoreau told us: "All our inventions are but
improved means to an unimproved end." Here is what Goethe told us:
"One should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem,
see a fine picture, and, if it is possible, speak a few reasonable
words." And here is what Socrates told us: "The unexamined life is not
worth living." And here is what the prophet Micah told us: "What does
the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy and to
walk humbly with thy God?"  And I can tell you - if I had the time
(although you all know it well enough) - what Confucius, Isaiah,
Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, Spinoza and Shakespeare told us. It is
all the same: There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma
is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking
ourselves in technological glory.


Even the humblest cartoon character knows this, and I shall close by
quoting the wise old possum named Pogo, created by the cartoonist,
Walt Kelley.  I commend his words to all the technological utopians
and messiahs present. "We have met the enemy," Pogo said, "and he is
us."


                         -------------------




[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: My sincere thanks to Bill for passing
along this article to us. It certainly does give us something to
meditate upon as we travel down the 'information superhighway' so
highly touted by the present occupant of the White House and his
staff.   PAT]