Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com>
> >Well, a lot of it seems like simple-minded utopianism, for
> >one thing. The results of technological innovation are
> >complex and often paradoxical.
jan carowan:
> Mr Fitch, it is paradoxical indeed that the new technologies have given
> voice to those who then can only speak disparagingly of them. Before the
> internet, wouldn't you have been muttering your world view to yourself
> before donuts and coffee at some Krispy Kreme counter in an American subway
> station?
Indeed! But the Internet has made no difference. With a small handful of exceptions, everyone in the world is as impervious to my ideas as you are. I am a small boy in a vacant lot, idly throwing rhetorical stones at windows in a deserted building. Occasionally there is a gratifying tinkle of breaking glass.
> >Consider the results of
> >learning how to derive a lot of energy very quickly from
> >nuclear fission.
>
> Nuclear fission is not a new technology, the object of Mr Henwood's rant;
> the US military is no longer the major source of demand for info tech; and
> however much blame one puts on the scientists for how their ideology of
> value neutrality allowed involvement in the making of the bomb (did
> Heisenberg sabotage the German effort?), the main responsibility for the
> incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is clearly that of aggressive proto
> Cold War American politicians, not scientists and engineers. Your clever
> retort seems to constitute yet more proof for the rest of the world of
> America's continued evasion of the horrifying defects in its political
> system that not only allowed this greatest of human rights violation but
> also enables all generations since to ignore the crime. Are any of your
> political candidates ready to admit that the decision to drop the bomb was a
> terrifying mistake that squelched humanity's greatest hopes after the end of
> the War? Is your citzenry demanding this of your politicians? To blame a
> culture-less, state-less technology for these crimes allows you to evade the
> utter corruption of your political culture.
My clever retort is merely one of many, many examples of the paradoxical quality of technological advance: a beautiful, cruel, unpredictable animal which you can continue to choose to see as a brick or a loaf of bread until it bites you.
By the way, political systems are also technologies, usually of some form of slavery or servitude.