DECLINE AND FALL: "STOP DAVE. STOP DAVE. I AM AFRAID. I AM AFRAID DAVE."

I read the 1981 detective novel, Free Fall in Crimson, by John MacDonald (July 23,1916-Dec. 28, 1986), and there was one passage about the “computer age” that stuck out for me. MacDonald will often put in social commentary—about politics or the environment, war, religion, or what he is probably best known for, about the state of Florida.  Here, his main character, a private detective in all but name, a righter-of-wrongs, the ever-redoubtable (yet sensitive) Travis McGee worries about becoming too well-known to authorities after he has inherited a small business. (In his line of work, anonymity is an asset):

“I don’t like all this! My God, when it got so you couldn’t rent a car or check into a good hotel without a credit card, I had to sign up. I had to have a bank account to get the credit cards. I keep getting into more and more computers all the time. Boat papers, city taxes bank records, credit records, IRS, army records, census records, phone company records…. God dam it! I feel like I’m getting more and more entangled. Like walking down a dark corridor into cobweb after cobweb. I didn’t sign up for this kind of lousy regimentation…I’m getting smothered!

     Meyer, his cerebral sidekick and “world–renowned economist”, and Meyer’s friend Aggie, respond with amusement to Travis’s naïve view of what would someday be called Information Technology, and Travis’s overblown concerns about privacy. Aggie says:

“Sit down, Travis. The computer age, my rebellious friend, is strangling on its own data. As the government and industry and the financial institutions buy and lease more and more lovely computes, generation after generation of them, they have to fill them, they have to use lots and lots of programs, lots of software to utilize capacity. “

She adds that, instead of avoiding such things as bank accounts, credit cards, business relationships, incorporations and the like, Travis should, instead, acquire as many as he can, and feed “all the information you can into all their computers.” And when Travis complains that all this complicated digital maneuvering would be a headache for him to keep track of she retorts, “Who said anything about keeping track? If you can get so complicated you confuse yourself, imagine how confused the poor computers are going to be.” Travis asks Meyer if she is joking, and he says:

 “She’s giving you good advice. If you try to hide, you are easy to find. You are leaving only one trail in the jungle, and the hounds can follow that. Leave forty trails, crossing and re-crossing. The computers are strangling on data. The courts are strangling on caseload. Billions of pieces of paper are floating around each month. Clogging the inputs, confusing the outputs…Think of it this way, Travis. With each new computer that goes into service, your identity becomes more and more diffuse and unreal.”

  

Meyer adds that if the entire population of the world (circa 1980) were put to work reading all the printouts generated by all the computers, they could cover “about a third” of what’s being produced.  He concludes by saying that, “We’re all sinking into the oblivion of profusion, and one day soon we will all be gone, with no way to trace us.”

     In reading this I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. (If I had to choose, I’d choose the later.) It’s BM (Before Microsoft) and BA (Before Apple), of course, and it was still a time when you could laugh at the absurdities being wrought by complexity and technological change. We still had the freedom—perhaps more imagined than real—to poke fun at all the projects and proposals youthful IT entrepreneurs were then proposing. Some of MacDonald’s thoughts on computer technology rings true today: We are awash in a sea of information. Just dip your toe into that vast digital ocean, even for a second, and you come away feeling like you’ve nearly drowned. There is just so much stuff out there in the World Wide Web. It’s such a quaint and comforting name—like the internet is a product of nature or something. Though, I wonder how many of us can say that we don’t feel, at times, like a tiny fly trapped in big, bad information-spider’s  lair because of all the complexity, and how it is reaching such absurd levels. (How many passwords does one human being need? D!%#.fUk00f).

In his seminal work, The Collapse of Complex Civilizations, anthropologist Joseph Tainter muses in his Introduction:

The image of lost civilizations is compelling: cities buried by drifting sands or tangled jungle, ruin and desolation where once there were people and abundance, surely few persons can read such descriptions and not sense awe and mystery. Invariably we are spellbound, and want to know more.

Later, he states:

Human history as a whole has been characterized a seemingly inexorable trend toward higher levels of complexity, specialization, and sociopolitical control, process of greater quantities of energy and information, formation of ever larger settlements, and development of more complex and capable technologies.

He ends his Introduction with the following:

In a complex society that has collapsed, it would thus appear, the overarching structure that provides support services to the population loses capability or disappears entirely. No longer can the populace rely upon external defense and internal order, maintenance of public works, or delivery of food and material goods. Organization reduces to the lowest level that is economically sustainable, so that a variety of contending polities exist where there had been peace and unity. Remaining populations must become locally self-sufficient to a degree not seen for several generations.

     So what does Tainter have to do with poor Travis’s worries about being caught in technology’s spider web? I think MacDonald rightly saw a future of increased complexity and computerization. He suggests, like Tainter, that the complexity of our systems will eventually be their downfall. And I think MacDonald is right, except that he didn’t consider how entwined, ubiquitous and complex our technology would become, and how powerful. Tainter addresses the challenges our civilization faces with its hyper-complexity (‘super-charged’, I might add, by our exploitation of the energy-abundant resource of fossil fuels), and concludes we may well go the way of past civilizations and be brought down by the very structures we created*. In the meantime, the complexity that arises from the computerization of our information and communication systems, and just about any other system you can think of, has morphed into a such a vast and interconnected enterprise, one that MacDonald could never have imagined. Today we hear about “Big Data” and the digital ‘hoovering-up’ of every bit and bite of information on the planet for various commercial, governmental, military, criminal, and you-name-it purposes. 
     As an aside, I find particularly disturbing, as we all should, the revelations made a few of years ago by former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden, which showed massive governmental oversight into the private digital lives of American citizens. And not only in America but in the so called "Five Eyes" security alliance (and why do I see "the Eye of Sauron" staring at me!) which includes Britain, Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada, which is active today, and whose purpose is to share this massive digital trove ("my precious!) among themselves. Snowden, as readers will recall, was charged with espionage by American authorities, and fled to Russia for asylum. The information he uncovered shed light into some very dark corners of our contemporary world, and I personally think the guy deserves a medal for blowing the whistle on this latest (but probably not last) iteration of "Big Brother".
     And returning to Free Fall in Crimson: Unlike a few banks or businesses 'choking to death' on their technological complexity, as MacDonald envisions, while the rest of us look on with wry amusement at the stupid, rich nobs and their foolish machinations , it's when our technological civilization as a whole begins to choke on its complexity, as Tainter describes, that there will be a much greater cost to be paid--by all of us. 

     I guess, as a civilization, we’re busy swallowing our own tail. And when we finally come round to swallowing our head, well, then it’s game over—at least for this go-round. At least for now. (And what comes later will be part of the woof and weave of legend.)
    But, my oh my, I'm sorry to say, poor Travis McGee would not be a happy camper if he were around today!

This is a bit of a tangent from what I’ve been talking about here, but the 1984 book by Neil Postman comes to mind, Amusing Ourselves to Death—Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.  Postman talks about technology and how it shapes our society. He writes about television and the decline of print technology, as well as the emerging computer industry of the 1970s and 80s. He writes about America, but of course, modern industrial society and the developed world in general, are implicated. If we think of how today's technology controls so much of what we see, hear and do, then like MacDonald and Tainter, Postman’s work is an alarm bell, a canary in the coal mine, if you will, telling us that “time is out of joint”, and it will be up to us and those who follow us, to “make it right!” (Hamlet, 1,v.)
I include his powerful Foreward  in its entirety, where Postman sets out the main argument of his book:

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another--slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.  This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right. 

Indeed, it will be up to all of us to choose what kind of society** we wish to have. And what our legacy will be to hand down to those future generations is yet to be decided. One only hopes that those who come after will look upon us with some measure of compassion.

*John Michael Greer has a similar take on civilizational collapse in a 2005 essay he wrote called, How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse

**And I am really sorry, but I couldn't help myself; I added this link to the ending scene from the classic 1995 John Carpenter SiFi flick, Escape From Los Angeles, staring Kurt Russell. That's just how I roll...You go, Snake!

[And I'm also sorry about the gratuitous 'Hal' references. Don't know who Hal was? Click here, and on the red eye up top and all will be revealed! He's my technological bete noir!]

     THANKS TO YOUTUBE AND WIKIPEDIA FOR GIVING ME SAFE HARBOUR AS I SAILED ACROSS THE STORMY DIGITAL SEAS.