An astute reader may notice a problem with my opening story. We were thinking thoughts of 1914. Yet, I specifically disclaimed the idea that any of our current new technology—aggressively hyped as it is—has the revolutionary potential of Fritz Haber’s invention.
Our Story…
How can we be seeing the political issues that come of technology that “changes everything,” without seeing the everything-changing technology itself?
Part of the reason I opened with this story, even given its problems, is that it dramatically depicts the starkest motivation. And of course, the alternatives are stark enough that I hope they may motivate you, dear reader, as well. There is nothing in our digital technology with the world-changing power of abundant ammonia. But we are seeing similar psychological phenomena growing up around it.
Then, as now, there was a split in the technology community between those, on one side, who could be characterized as Haber-style sycophants. They told the rich and powerful what they wanted to hear, even knowing the message was misleading. Others, more like Clara, opposed them in emotional terms. They muttered that there was something else that technology truly “wanted.” But their story was disorganized and uncertain. They were often self-destructive or even actively suicidal.1
The intellectual consensus reeks of Grand Illusion. It has the same characteristic suspicious selectivity. It seems to claim that new digital technology will, by right, enrich and empower the currently dominant players. Yet it will also dissolve their obligations to their workers, the environment, or society. Is that plausible? Yet no one appears to be able to effectively stand up to this story—fantastical as it is.
All these psychological phenomena seemed to me reminiscent of the proverbial fin-de-siècle era. That world stood on the cusp of a disaster, of which it had no intimation.
Pushed Back in Time
In the specifics of this inference, I now think I was wrong. I was too biased towards events that lay within the reach of living memory. As we will see later in the book, now I think the most accurate historical analogies lie a century earlier. They refer to the turn of a different century. Our technological advance may be extravagantly hyped. Yet, our digital revolution is just not that far along!
But it is harder to reach further back in time. Experience too far out of living memory is misremembered and misunderstood. We will have to belabor accuracy in historical analogy. The care that will go into that effort is what forces this treatise to take on the form of a book-length tome. It is a form I would have avoided if I could! But, I must ask my readers to bear with me on the way to the point. Demanding historical accuracy is technically difficult; reaching back into time is emotionally difficult. Once we get into it, we will have to take it slow.
As a result, for the purposes of introduction, I think it is fair to use this dramatic story. A more accurate story would have to reach so far outside living memory that it would give the wrong impression. (A later essay discusses this problem) Once one moves back too far, memory turns to mythology. Prominent people are either canonized as saints or demonized as villains. They are not remembered as human beings. We no longer identify with their struggles.
Instead, we tell their stories either as inevitable triumph or inevitable failure. We don’t think of their choices as choices. We no longer remember the agony of indecision. It is that agony which figures so prominently in our story of Fritz and Clara’s argument. That is the agony which I want to relate to our own.
So even with these cautions, the alarm invoked by the echos of Fritz and Clara’s argument is not misplaced. The parable is meant to warn that technological transformation might as easily terrify as thrill. Even when the breakthrough is fundamentally an extraordinary advance. Even when, in the long run, it improves the lot of humanity immeasurably. For all that, the short run can be so bad that we might wish the advance had been, if not deferred, at least delayed.
Maybe we do not stand on the edge of the same precipice, but that does not mean there are no wicked drops ahead. This story should not be taken as an entirely apropos template. It is nonetheless a useful introduction to the themes and objectives of this book.
Urgency of Understanding
The story of Fritz and Clara also presses urgency in understanding. Perhaps it is less true now, but when I started this project, there was a burning question: why bother? I was studying to be an engineer: why should an engineer be distracted by social questions? Why should we worry about the effects of technology projected far forward in time?
To be clear, the main subject of this book is the distant future. We are asking “what does technology want?” In other words, we mean to derive a picture of a “fully mature” digital economy. We want to project the politics of a new Konrad Adenauer—a politician capable of masterminding a digital economic miracle. This imagined politician would be understood in his own time as a conservative. Yet, his conservatism might differ completely from ours. It might be so different we wonder how his conservative party could smoothly evolve from our own.
Or, for much the same purpose, we can try to imagine the philosophy of an ultra-conservative historian of 2200. That is to say, after everything has shaken out and settled down, what will the most conservative thinkers have to say about it all? When they look back out our handling of the digital revolution, what will they think our face-palming mistakes?
This vision is not immediate. If history develops at a similar pace to the past, we may be projecting more than a hundred years in the future. If technology is adopted and developed more quickly in our era, then philosophy and politics may have to develop more quickly as well. The timeline isn’t clear. But however we imagine it, we are not talking about the near future. The development we are projecting may not appear in our lifetimes. We may be talking about the long run after which we are all dead.
Why even try to look that far forward?
History Moves…
It is easier to be certain about the far future than the immediate one. John Maynard Keynes famous quote about “the long run in which we are all dead” has an elaboration. He continues: “Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if, in tempestuous seasons, they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.” But for us, it is far from useless to discuss the sea level that a calm ocean will attain. It might help us know now where to build our cities. As we will narrate later, in a previous era analogous to our own, the glory of New York and Washington D.C. were bargaining chips on a negotiating table. What similar trades do we need to make today?
Predicting the steady state of a “mature digital economy” is, as Keynes said, “easy.” If only it were actually easy! But at least it is easier than anything else. Abusing Tolstoy, we might say: “All mature & wealthy economies are alike; each developing economy develops in its own way.” Mathematics can only confidently predict the shape of societies which are “all alike.” So we can only describe the final state with any the certainty. I haven’t the expertise to do the derivation formally myself. But the argument is designed so that someone so trained (and so inclined!) could render it formally—even fully mathematically.
In other words, we can only predict a conservative opinion in 2200. We can’t envision a liberal one, nor any opinion on either side in the interim. Only conservatism is simple and dogmatic enough to be predictable—and that only in the long run. Wealth and political maturity are mathematically foreseeable. The path by which one would make one’s way to it is shrouded in uncertainty. Perhaps some clairvoyance could predict something of the interim states as well. But such a power of foresight would not be mathematical.
If the only foreseeable state is in the far future, why bother? Is it useful to know only the distant future? Understanding the far future is not only useful, but urgent. Why?
Because history has momentum.
Like a Train…
When I was young, my parents sat me down to watch the Holocaust documentary Shoah. All ten hours of it. I was too young. It was a blur. But one recurrent image stayed with me: a camera panned down the track out of Auschwitz, past the gates marked Arbeit Macht Frei, and down the track until it comes to a switch. They played that long shot over and over. It was almost surprising for how uncinematic it was. In an era when thirty-second commercials have as many cuts as seconds, it seemed shockingly slow. The camera holds and holds the shot of the track moving away beneath the train. It commands attention by being boring.
At the time, being young, I was annoyed at my parents for making me sit through it all. Those endless minutes of watching railroad track were a special focus of my annoyance. I could understand that sitting through interviews with witnesses to the Holocaust was good for me, in an eat-your-vegetables kind of way. But all those long minutes panning over railroad track seemed like an extra helping of vegetables on top of the vegetables.
That Turns…
Perhaps I should thank my parents for their cinematic vegetarianism. That image stayed with me. When I got older, I understood the intended symbolism. In addition to the expected warning about “never again,” the filmmaker had indicated a more general warning. He was warning us not to forget that societies move like trains.
One might wish that a body politic would be light and maneuverable, like a bike, or at least a car. Then the minute it becomes apparent that things are on the wrong track, it would be possible to steer away from the danger.
But they aren’t. Instead, they move like laden freight trains. Societies have enormous momentum. Like trains running on tracks, typically there is no option to turn to the right or left. All one can do is hang on.
That isn’t to say it is impossible to direct a train to one place and not another. But to do it, the switches need to be carefully set the right way at the right time. That is best done by someone who can see the whole railroad network. The switch that directs a train may be many tens or even hundreds of miles down the track from the desired destination. The person who sets the switch cannot see where his action will send the train. He has to know.
Only at a Switch
Hence the urge, after something goes wrong, to pan backwards along the track looking for the switch—and the person who set it. This is why Fritz Haber is a monster to us. One feels that those “six weeks that changed the world” in the spring of 1915 were a turning point—a point when the momentum of society was set on a new track. Germany’s choice to embrace total war, the shock and betrayal felt by the rest of the world, the failure of the presumed solidarity of the aristocracy to hold the world order together—all of this set history down a different direction. Such moments make one wonder whether it would have been possible to choose a different route.
Such a question turns our attention to people like Haber—those who unquestionably put their weight on the switch. He didn’t just let his society’s natural momentum carry itself past him. Instead, he anticipated the train’s arrival, prepared tools in advance to change its direction, and made a positive choice about which path he wanted. When the moment came, he leaned into the switch hard.
The Need To…
And he chose wrong. It is all too easy to prepare seriously, yet prepare wrong. There are strong emotional forces at work. Powerful illusions easily envelop everything. The topology of the track ahead is difficult to discern. Yet the stakes are high. Future generations will not forgive those who squandered freedom of action while they still had it.
We worry about the train blowing past a switch set the wrong way. It is set by decision makers who could not see ahead where the track would lead. Perhaps later there would be people on that train, doomed to be helplessly carried by the momentum of history to some terrible fate. They would look back with fury on the thoughtlessness of those who had squandered the opportunity to make careful choices while they could still be made.
Anticipate The…
If one thinks of the danger this way, then one realizes there doesn’t have to be an immediate threat to still feel an urgency for understanding. It becomes important to envision even the distant future. If one wants society to have the wisdom to set the switch correctly before the train blows past it, one has to start early. It takes time to figure out where the train will go after passing the switch. It takes time to articulate it. It takes time to write it all down. It takes time to convince those with their hands on the switch to understand what is at stake. Or it may even be necessary to convince voters to replace the hand on the switch. In all this, there are enormous lead times.
At the time I started this project, this sense of urgency was out of step with the surrounding community of intellectuals. They seemed quite comfortable to take a wait-and-see attitude. They demanded to see evidence that the technology in question was sufficiently transformative. Perhaps in response to marketers who were claiming that the new technology was as significant as electrification, there was a running discussion about “The Dynamo and the Computer” There was the implication that the theorists would rather not get out of bed for technology less significant than a digital dynamo.
But take the history of transformative technology with the dangerous momentum of history in mind. How significant does technology have to be to rouse theorists out of their beds? Is there any point so early that it is safe to be complacent?
Firebell in The Night
Remember, in 1820, Thomas Jefferson wrote of a “firebell in the night” that awakened and filled him with terror.2 The disaster he suddenly noticed was arguably already unstoppable. The country’s divisions already had too much momentum behind them. If we walk backwards along the track to look for the point when there still was the freedom to choose a different path, we find ourselves walking into the eighteenth century.
The electrical technology of that time was primitive: not a dynamo, but a Leyden jar. Yet somehow something as basic as a Leyden jar demanded that philosophers and politicians get out of bed. It insisted they pay attention to the way it was changing the world.
This was true even though the Leyden jar wasn’t notably “changing the world” in the sense that phrase is used nowadays. It didn’t have applications that changed how people lived or worked. Even its contemporaries were frustrated by its uselessness for anything but stage magic. And yet, somehow, this technology seemed to change the world even before it changed the world.
We will have much to say in this book about this peculiar phenomenon. If a philosopher or politician wants to know whether some technology urgently requires of them a fundamental change in thinking, asking about its power or usefulness is the wrong question. Many powerful inventions do not alter the basic shape of society. At the same time, some seemingly insignificant ones set titanic forces in motion. The property of “changing the world” that we are looking to articulate has nothing to do with those properties normally touted by marketers. Technology can change the topology of society’s railroad tracks long before its benefits are felt by its users. Decision makers need to think about its effects long before consumers do. Technology can change the world even before it changes the world.
If we want to direct our society to a certain happy destination, we must set the course thoughtfully. And the thought must happen far, far in advance of the action. The window of opportunity to change course happens many years or even decades before the result. And one cannot change course wisely unless the ideas behind the decision are already well established. So even the shape of the extremely distant future may yet be urgently our concern.
