Y2k year 2002 back to archive
week 1
y2k Year 2002 week 1 January 3
Douglass Carmichael
REFLECTIONS: Overview of what we can learn from Y2K two years ago to understand technology and society now.
I've spent the last two years fairly quietly, trying to comprehend what Y2K was about, and reading history to fill in my own glaring gaps. Time to put it together. The idea here is to create openness about difficult issues of technology and society. Responses by email are welcome. I'll keep tying the larger issues to weekly events in an attempt to weave some meaningful relevance.
Y2K took us to an edge and opened up the vulnerabilities of our systems for a good peek. September 11 has done the same. Y2K still seems to me relevant and September 11 provided another example of a similar phenomena. We can learn from these, and it's important to try to do so. Basically the issue is, how (or can, and if so when) society responds intelligently to complexity, as well as to opportunities and crisis, to human nature and culture, to delight and awe and vulnerability.
How society responds to the complex is clearly a determinant of our future. Humans, and other species have relied on conflict and disease to limit their own population. Can we do better? Human nature is limited. George Miller published a paper in 1956, "The magic number seven, plus or minus 2", about the amount of different pieces of information we can handle at a time (http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html ). Can humans cope with the complexity we face? Is it different from complexities of the past? (We never have understood where we are very fully). We fight too much because in ways our breeding has been too successful. As human ability is enhanced by tech we must realize that those who design, sell or buy technology have an agenda. "In the museum of neutral technology, the knife of Jack the Ripper lies on a scarlet pillow." And we move now in a world where violence is part of our children's play and our adult dreams more than the coliseums provided for Rome or Kabul.
On the one side we have increasing crowding, but on the other, the side of solutions, the means of coping are owned, not by societies, but by groups of people with power and agendas. The means of system coping are controlled by small parts of the system. (Yes, it has always been that way. Implications?)
It seems worth the while to look at Y2K in perspective and apply what we have learned to the current situation.
Y2K is lacking post event analysis. Those who thought it was
going to be a big deal were embarrassed, and those who thought it wouldn't felt
self-righteous. Just as very few were interested in trying to balance the evidence
in '98 and '99, very few are in the last two years have shown interest in what
really happened in the rollover period and the work leading up to it, to help
see what helped and what went wrong in analysis and policy. The reality is that
there was tremendous activity in organizations, the military, and national infrastructures,
in the months leading up to January 1, 2000. Moreover corporations replaced
old systems, and turned off lots of interconnectivity. Enough money was spent
on computer and related software in 1998-99 to cause some of the post January
2000 recession,
Y2K was a very expensive operation. The heavy spending on computer infrastructure
in 1999, using new laws as ways to make deductible hardware and software purchases,
probably helped create the current recession because the budgets had been spent
and ran up the economy in 1999, reported in 2000, and the fall off in purchasing
showing up in 2001. Equipment was new and budgets were depleted, and assimilation
of new capacity became the focus, rather than new acquisition of computers and
software.
Y2K efforts also built infrastructure that made the WTC attack less impactful because backup systems installed for Y2K, and procedures learned, were still largely in place..
Yet the most interesting issue from Y2K is why we got such social coherence, much of it unseen. My view is that accountability was fairly clear and heads would roll within organizations for failures. In my consulting in a range of private corporations and government agencies, I saw this clearly. I also saw that managers say, "we are not going to have a problem, understand?" This meant, if we do, cut the loses and don't report it: absorb the problem internally. The reason for this approach was that it was considered that it would look bad to have had a problem. Much of this was fear of litigation. So internal to organizations, and externally to the organizational community, accountability was fairly precise.
The implication is that social threats that can lead to accountability can be solved, like Y2K, but those where accountability is more vague, like climate change, the effects of a globalizing economy on remote people and situations, or population increase, are much less likely to be solved. September 11 shows the same ability of this society to cohere, much like a puncture proof tire's ability to keep rolling and fill holes with stuff.
The issue gets complex when we see how the plight of the rich, who certainly face financial problems of a sort, can be dealt with by the current social cohesion, but the plights of the poor, which increase, do not have access to that social cohesion in a search for solutions.
"The campesinos always ask: Why did our ancestors have
the capacity to build such an important city, and we live so poorly and don't
have the ability to do similar things?" says Dr. Shady, the Peruvian archaeologist
who recognized the importance of Caral five years ago. The answer "is very
difficult for me."
http://www.ChristianScienceMonitor.com/2002/0103/p11s1-woam.html
How does this apply to September 11?
First, the ability of contemporary society to withstand major shocks is clear. But the cost, in terms of dollars, increased security, loss of justice, loss of political debate, are not born equally. Joseph Taintor's book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, makes clear that societies increase infrastructure costs faster than the rise in productivity, till troubles emerge. Y2K and September 11 are both unanticipated costs that are just taken on without reflection on costs or trends.
We recognize now that we are dangerously out of touch with much of the third world, which has continued to build attitudes, culture, politics and understandings, which spring up at us now like mushrooms from the dark. We also are able to admit that our own culture needs some work, because out internal situation with income and wealth and the devastation of inner city and rural communities is uncomfortably like third world poverty.
An Egyptian writer and close observer of politics and cultural trends said that he felt Sept 11 would make the west more paranoid, parochial and closed, and make the middle east more modern, open and creative. I continue to have hope that we can do better, for the US and the world. Not just by products but by quality of life.
I think these are some of the crucial issues.
1. How society deals with the balance between economy as an
autonomous system and the commonwealth of society as a whole (the economy is
doing well but the people are doing badly.)
2. How decisions get made about technology
3. The role of military and police action and the issues of justice
4. Over spending on infrastructure to defend structures that benefit the few,
while piling the true tax costs and income dilution onto the rest of the population.
5. What happens to governance when media dominate and corporations set the agenda
worldwide?
There are some assumptions in these that I am not sure about, and issues that would require reframing in the perspectives of some. I have become increasingly aware that frames of reference that define problems are slippery and fragile and very important parts of our culture and political process. [I highly recommend reading Simon Schama's The Embarrassment of Richs, a history of the Dutch empire, and its struggles with many of the same issues. For example, he says that to understand the Dutch in the 1600's it is necessary to understand the difference between burgher and bourgeoisie: the former take it as natural that responsibility means balancing state, economy and the welfare of the families that make up the population, the bourgeoisie tend to take middle class interests without regard]
I do think democracy (as manifested in voting in a media dominated environment) has ceased to be meaningful as a way to balance people's needs with operations of the governmental and economic structures. The issues people feel locally are not represented in the political process: schools, environments, and other quality of life and hope issues. The American dream has become a defense strategy, not a goal) and we do not have a replacement.
One of the problems of elites having power is that they are removed from much of the consequences of their policies, and therefore are immunized against the feedback that would help them steer the ship of state and the flock of society.. Here is where Y2K lessons apply. We can expect the institutions to act in self-interest to an amazing degree, like the ability of Wall Street to be open four days after September 11. That was a problem they felt. But other issues, such as the fates being lived by inner city and rural children, or the environment, does not register except as a cost.
Here is another lesson from Y2K: it requires understanding psychology, group and individual, to grasp what the issue was, and how to deal with it. Much of the pre Jan 2000 action was around belief: people believed they knew what would happen even when there was not sufficient evidence. That belief itself was a major part of the glue that held it together. So we realize we better understand how thinking and belief work. "Historical lies become cultural commonplaces" - Schama.
The reduction of reason to economic thinking is weird. It needs to be understood. It is a compulsion. Here is what I think. Money feels good because it reduces a complex world of apples and oranges, cars and butter, to arithmetical comparisons and equivalences. We replace a complex world of real differences with one that feels more tractable. Instead of appeasing the gods of seasons and agriculture, cattle and game, we can simply deal with money and its security and reliability (ha). Money replaces the world of complexity, and as we lose the feeling for complexity we lose our human power to create and respond. We actually become more stupid. Rationality for the Greeks of Athens meant the use of mind in the service of living. The reduction of "reason" to creating projects that are well designed but not consistent with the purpose of living would be, for the Greeks, unreason. [Another remarkable book is E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, about the rise of cults and superstition in Athens at the end of the classical age, when Athens faced the choice between joining Macedonian empire and getting lost in a larger whole, or by fighting that annexation and being crushed in the process. Reason breaks down when threats have no perceived hopeful response].
Economy is important, but we have let it replace the whole of reality. As a result human beings with their feelings, children with their need for cultural stories, adults with their needs for dignity in making sense of the world, old people respected for what they have been through and their stories, are all discounted: valueless in cash. We expect ourselves and others to know the difference between reality and lives on the one side, and markets and money on the other. But if we are honest with ourselves and about others, we know much more about the system of money than the system of human relationships, or the system of our ties to nature.
We must work harder at understanding the past and the future in terms of complexity adequate to the realities we face. Reduction to market, technology, science, past lives, superstitions, millenarian hopes, or "I told you so"'s is just not going to be good enough. Churchill said "blood, sweat and tears." We must say, "hard thinking about lots of facts and speculation, done with compassion"
The west, globalization (really a process of the vast localization of political and economic power, but avoiding the constraints of the nation), the materialistic middle class, technology, multinational corporations, probably will still dominate the future. The wiggle room is around the quality of life: we can have more control to the point of unsubtle fascism; or become more open, democratic, educational, skeptical, conversational and communal, with our hard work at bringing forward human relationships, nature, art, spirit, awe and respect and curiosity.
What we mean by "the whole" is more sophisticated now. But how we think about it still seems underdeveloped.
These issues will be the focus in these newsletters, and I will try to keep them short.
"If they do not have constant income, they cannot have constant hearts." - Mencius
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Joseph Taintor The Collapse of Complex Societies
E.R.
Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational
Simon Schama The Embarrassment of Riches (Dutch empire)
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