Digital Barbarism, page 2
“Go to my files,” you might say as you sit in the airport, “and get everything I’ve said in the last five years about Descartes. I made a remark with a metaphor about the law, co-ordinates, and virtual prisons. When you get it, put it on the screen in blue. Take a letter to Schultz, and file a copy at home and with the office.”
But as you issue, you must also receive, and it never stops. Though the screen of your portfolio is electronically textured to feel like paper and is as buff or white as flax or cotton, you miss the days of your father, when one could hold the paper in one’s hands, and things were a little slower. But you can’t go back, you can’t fall behind, you can’t pass up an opportunity, and if you don’t respond quickly at all times, someone else will beat you to it, even if you have no idea what it is.
The world flows at increasingly faster and faster speeds. You must match them. When you were a child, it was not quite that way. But your father and grandfather did not have the power to make things transparent, to be instantaneously here or there without constraint. Unlike you, they were the prisoners of mundane tasks. They wrote with pens, they did addition, they waited endlessly for things that come to you instantly, they had far less than you do, and they bowed to necessity, as you do not. You love the pace, the giddy, continual acceleration. Though what is new may not be beautiful, it is marvelously compelling. Your life is lived with the kind of excitement that your forbears knew only in battle, and with an ease of which they could only dream.
II.
AUGUST 1908, LAKE COMO, ITALY
You are an English politician, a member of Parliament suffering patiently between cabinet posts, on holiday in Italy. In the two days it has taken to reach your destination you have fallen completely out of touch, although you did manage to pick up a day-old Paris newspaper in Turin. The Times will be arriving a week late, as will occasional letters from your colleagues and your business agent. Your answers to most of their queries will arrive in London only slightly before you yourself return at the end of the month.
The letters you receive are in ecru and blue envelopes, with crests, stamps reminiscent of the Italian miniaturists, and, sometimes, varicolored wax seals over ribbon. Even before you read them, the sight of the penmanship gives away the identity of their authors, and may be the cause for comfort, dread, amusement, curiosity, or disgust. And as you read, following the idiosyncratic, expressive, and imprecise swells and dips like a sailor in a small boat on an agitated sea, the hand of your correspondent reinforces his thoughts, as do the caesuras rhythmically arrayed in conjunction with the need to dip the pen.
Some of your younger colleagues use fountain pens, and this you can detect in lines that do not thin, pause, and then fatten with a new load of ink. Occasionally, a typewritten letter will arrive. This you associate with the Telegraph Office, official documents, and things that lean in the direction of function far enough to exclude almost completely the presence of grace—grace not in the religious sense, but in the sense of that which is beautiful and balanced.
You will receive an average of one letter every two days, fifteen or sixteen in all, and will write slightly more than that. You are a very busy man for someone on holiday, and wish that you were not. Half the letters will be related to politics and governance, the other half to family and friendship. An important letter, written by the prime minister eight days before its reception, will elicit from you a one-page response composed over a period of an hour and three-quarters and copied twice before it assumes final form, for revision and so that you may have a record. You will mail it the next morning when you pass the post office during your walk. The prime minister will receive his answer, if he is in London, almost two weeks after his query. He will consider you prompt.
During your holiday you will climb hills, visit chapels, attend half a dozen formal dinners, and read several books, more than a thousand pages all told. If upon reading a classical history you come across a Greek phrase with an unfamiliar word you will have to wait until the library opens, walk there by the lakeside, and consult a Greek lexicon: one and one-half hours. Sitting in your small garden with its view of lake and mountains, you will make notes as you read, and some of these will be incorporated in your letters. Most will languish until your return to London. By the time you look at them in a new season, only a few will seem worthy, and the rest you will gratefully discard.
In August you will hear music seventeen times. Five times it will have been produced by actual musicians, twelve times by a needle tracing the grooves in a cylinder and echoing songs in extremely melancholy imperfection through a flowerlike horn. You will attend the theater once, in Italian, but you will spend hours reading Henry V and The Tempest (which you read each summer), and several plays by George Bernard Shaw. In your mind’s eye you will see the richest scenes and excitements known to man, and your dreams will echo what you’ve read, in colors like those of gemstones, but diamond-clear, and with accompaniment in sound as if from a symphony orchestra.
Your shoes are entirely of leather, your clothes cotton, silk, linen, and wool. You and your wife hired a rowboat and went to a distant out-cropping of granite and pine. No one could be seen, so you stripped down to the cotton and swam in the cold fresh water. Her frock clung to her in a way that awoke in you extremely strong sexual desire (for someone your age), and though you made no mention of it on the bright rock ledge above the lake, later that night your memory of her rising from sparkling water into sparkling sunlight made you lively in a way that was much appreciated.
Indeed, your memory has been trained with lifelong diligence. You know tens of thousands of words in your own language, in Latin, Greek, French, and German. You are haunted by declensions, conjugations, rules, exceptions, and passages that linger many years after the fact. Calculations, too, built your character in that you were forced to work elaborate equations in painstaking and edifying sequences. As in other things, in mathematics you were made to study not only concept but craft. And, yes, in your letter to the prime minister, you repeated—with honorable alteration—a remark you made some time ago regarding Descartes. At first you could not remember it, but then you did, because you had to.
Necessity you find to be your greatest ally, an anchor of stability, a pier off of which, sometimes, you may dive. Discipline and memory are strengths that in their exercise open up worlds. The lack of certain things when you want them makes your desire keener, and you are better rewarded when eventually you get them.
You cannot imagine a life without deprivations, and without the compensatory power of the imagination, moving like a linnet with apparent industry and certain grace, to strengthen the spirit in the face of want. Your son went out to India, and you have neither seen him nor heard his voice for two years. Thus, you have learned once more the perfection of letters, and when you see him again, worlds will have turned, and for the best. It was like that when you were courting your wife. Sometimes you did not see her for weeks or months. It sharpened your desire and deepened your love.
You have learned to enjoy the attribute of patience itself, for it slows time, embraces tranquility, and lets you savor a world in which you are clearly aware that your passage is but a brief candle.
I am of course deeply predisposed in favor of the second example, and in my view the vast difference between the two is attributable not to some inexplicable superiority of morals, custom, or culture, but rather to facts and physics, two things that, in judging our happiness, we tend to ignore in favor of an evaporative tangle of abstractions.
Unlike machines, we are confined to an exceedingly narrow range of operations. Though we may marvel at the apparent physical diversity of the human race, it is, given its billions of representatives, astonishingly homogenous. Of these billions, only a handful rise above seven feet. Not a one is or has been over ten feet. And the exceedingly low standard deviation in form is immense compared to that which applies to function. There is no escape from the fact that after a set exposure to radiation; absent a given number of minutes of oxygen; at, above, or below certain temperatures; or subject to a specific G-force, shear, or shock, we will expire. No one will ever run the mile in two minutes, crawl through a Cheerio,™ or memorize the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Because of our physical constraints we require a harmony of the elements that relate to us and of which we are often unaware. The Parthenon is a pleasing building, and Mozart’s Fifth Piano Concerto a pleasing work, because each makes use of proportions, relations, and variations that go beyond subjective preference, education, and culture into the realm of universal appeal conditioned by universal human requirements and constraints.
A life lived with these understood, even if vaguely, will have the grace that a life lived unaware of them will lack. When expanding one’s powers, as we are in the midst of now doing by many orders of magnitude in the mastery and flow of information, we must always be aware of our natural limitations, mortal requirements, and human preferences. For example, unlike his modern counterpart, the Englishman at Lake Como is graciously limited in time and space. Because the prime minister is in London or at Biarritz, the prime minister cannot sit down with him and discuss. In fact, during his fictional stay, only one of his colleagues visited, and spent several hours on the terrace with him in the bright but cool sunshine. All others were kept away by time and distance.
The man of 2028, on the other hand, is no longer separated from anyone. Any of his acquaintances may step into his study at will—possibly twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty a day. If not constantly interrupted, he is at least continually subject to interruption, and thus the threshold of what is urgent drops commensurately. No matter how urgent or pressing a matter, the prime minister cannot sit down with the tranquil politician. No matter how petty a matter, a co-worker can appear to the man of 2028. Screening devices or not, the modern paradigm is one of time filled to the brim, of life choked and breathless. Potential has always been the overlord of will, and the man of the first paradigm finds himself distracted and drawn in different directions a hundred times a day, whereas the British statesman is prodded from without only once or twice. And when he wants light at his Italian lake villa he does not throw a switch or speak a command, he lights a candle, and enters into a relation with it—protecting it from a breeze or being overturned, staying within its dim light, alerted by its flickering of changes or movements, aware of its scent, warmed by its flame, conscious of its burning down.
Were we gods, we might be able to live well without rest and contemplation, but we are not and we cannot. Whereas our physical capacities are limited, those of the machine are virtually unlimited by comparison. As the capabilities of the machine are extended, we can use it—we imagine—to supplement our own in ways that will not strain our humanity. Had we no appetite or sin, this might be true, but our desires tend to lead us to excess, and as the digital revolution has quickly progressed we have not had time to develop the protocols, manners, discipline, and ethics adequate for protecting us from our newly augmented powers. In fact, as is the subject of the first half of this book, we often rush mercilessly and barbarically to abolish them.
The history of the last hundred years has been, as much as anything else, the process of encoding information: at first analog, in photographic emulsions, physical and magnetic patterns in needle grooves or on tapes, waves in packets blurted into the atmosphere, or in the action of x-rays recording paths of varying difficulty through tissues of various densities on plates of constant sensitivity. With binary coding, electrons as messengers, and the hard-fought mathematical adaptation necessary for control, we can now do almost everything in regard to information. We may, for example, look through billions of pages in an instant, or process and match data fast enough so that a cruise missile can make a “mental” picture of the terrain it overflies almost as impressive as that of an eagle.
And because potential has always been the overlord of will, and as the new machines hunger for denser floods of data, images have gradually displaced words. The capacious, swelling streams of information have brought little change in quality and vast overflows of quantity. In this they are comparable to the ornamental explosions of the baroque, when a corresponding richness of resource found its outlet mainly in overdecorating the leaner body of a previous age.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men of multimedia cannot improve upon a single line of Yeats. One does not need transistors, clean alternating current, spring-loaded keys, and ten-million-hour “programs” for writing a note or a love letter—and yet this is how we now write notes and love letters, going even to the extreme of doing so on complicated electronic pads that though they tediously strain to imitate a sheet of paper fail for want of simplicity.
I am not decrying the digital revolution per se, or recommending for you and your children the cold water, wood fires, and Latin declensions of my brick-and-iron childhood. I have always understood that the heart of Western civilization is not the abdication of powers but rather meeting the challenge of their use. And, of course, it would take a person of less than doltish imagination not to be attracted by the wonders and aware of the benefits of all this new stuff.
The British statesman of the second paradigm might well have lost a son or daughter to a disease that could have been detected early and with precision by the digital diagnostic techniques of modern medicine. The Titanic, four years in the future, might not have gone down—with him aboard, perhaps—had real-time thermal maps of the North Atlantic been available to its captain. And so on. You know the litany, because you are bombarded by it daily.
The impossibility of abdication is also due to the necessity of racing the genie after it has exited the bottle. Although antediluvian nuclear protestors have not, apparently, even a clue, they are on the wrong track. Nuclear weapons are now small enough, reliable enough, simulable enough, and widespread enough to be a rather mundane constant in calculations of the military balance (at least in regard to the major powers). The guaranteed action and volatility is in command, control, communications, intelligence, and guidance. Digitally dependent advances will enable submunitions scattered in great number over a future battlefield to hide, wait, seek, fight, and maneuver. For example, rather than a platoon of tank-killing infantry, a flight of submunitions will not long from now be able to land with little detection far behind enemy lines, where it will hide in the treetops or the brush and await patiently for as long as required the approach of an appropriate enemy target, such as a tank, which it will then dutifully pursue, engage, and destroy, its reflexes as fast as light.
No matter what arms agreements come into being, with the passage of each day a first nuclear strike becomes more and more feasible. The possibility of real-time terminal guidance as a gift from satellites to maneuverable reentry vehicles makes any kind of mobile deterrent just a temporary expedient. Even submarines, nuclear stability’s ace-in-the-hole, will no longer be secure bastions for nuclear weapons, as thermal and radar imaging from satellites pick up surface perturbations upwelling from their undersea tracks, and as the panoply of antisubmarine warfare is resurrected (as it will be with the rise of China’s submarine fleet), refined, empowered, sensitized, and its weaponry mounted on ballistic missiles that will be able to reach any area of ocean within minutes.
It is also possible that in some war of the not-so-distant future a combatant will electronically seize control of enemy command structures and direct his opponent’s arsenal onto his opponent. Eventually, all battles will be entirely computational. The “arms competition” of this sort has already begun. To step out of it at this point would be to lose it, and, with it, everything else.
The attraction is strong, the need is real, the marvels truly marvelous, and there is no going back. The speed with which all is taking place is almost a self-organizing principle. Like many changes in history, it seems to have its own internal logic, pulling everything after it. Why then do we need an ethos, a set of principles, and an etiquette specifically fashioned for the rest of a revolution that will follow with stunning force the mere prologue through which we are now living?
One always needs such things, but more so now as we leave the age of brick and iron. The age of brick and iron, shock as it may have been to Wordsworth, was friendlier to mankind than is the digital age, more appropriate to the natural pace set by the beating of the human heart, more apprehensible in texture to the hand, better suited in color to the eye, and, in view of human frailty, more forgiving in its inertial stillness.
Put quite simply, the life of the British statesman was superior because he was allowed rest and reflection, his contemplation could seek its own level, and his tranquility was unaccelerated. While he was, in his time, a member of a privileged class unburdened by many practical necessities, today most Americans have similar resources and freedoms, and yet they, like their contemporaries in even the most exalted positions, have chosen a different standard, closer to that of the first paradigm.
The life of the exemplary statesman, then dependent upon a large staff of underpaid servants, and children working in mines and mills (if not in Lancashire, then certainly in India), is now available to almost anyone and without the attendant injustices. Even if in one’s working hours one does not sit in the Cabinet Room at No. 10 Downing Street, one can have a quiet refuge, dignified dress, paper, a fountain pen, books, postage, Mozart with astonishing fidelity and ease, an excellent diet, much time to oneself, the opportunity to travel, a few nice pieces of furniture and decoration, medical care far beyond what the British statesman might have dreamed of, and a single-malt scotch in a crystal glass, for less than the average middle-class income. If you think not, then add up the prices and see how it is that people with a strong sense of what they want, need, and do not require can live like kings of a sort if they exhibit the appropriate self-restraint.
