Mosaic (III)
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Specialists and Generalists
The greatest change electric networked information technologies beget is a loosening of specialist control, requiring more whole, systemic views. As McLuhan notes this change goes deep, much deeper, into the ubiquitous divisional order of society. “In education the conventional division of the curriculum into subjects is already as outdated as the medieval trivium and quadrivium after the Renaissance. Any subject taken in depth at once relates to other subjects. Continued in their present patterns of fragmented unrelation, our school curricula will insure a citizenry unable to understand the cybernated world in which they live.”(Mc)
Ignorance of the whole goes from bottom to top of our specialized society. In the Industrial Era, specialization, coined by Adam Smith as the division of labor, allowed magnitudes of success with no knowledge of the larger world than a specific specialization. It was exemplified in academia. “Even specialist learning in higher education proceeds by ignoring interrelationships; for such complex awareness slows down the achieving of expertness.”(Mc) In opposition, “we need a range of thought that will really unite the different sciences, shared among a group of men who are thoroughly trained, each in his own field, but who also possess a competent knowledge of adjoining fields.”(W) Only politics can provide such whole views. “Perhaps it would not be a bad idea for the teams at present creating cybernetics to add to their cadre of technicians, who have come from all horizons of science, some serious anthropologists, and perhaps a philosopher who has some curiosity as to world matters.”(W) Again, this is not simply a need of the Tech industry or academia, but requires a reorganization of all our institutions, an acknowledgment general knowledge is part of the education and responsiblity of every citizen, an understanding the specialist, the expert lacks knowledge of their specialty’s connections to the rest of the world. These connections are politics.
In the last half-century with identity politics, specialization and division have come to dominate politics itself, brought about in part by electric media. “For most people, their own ego image seems to have been typographically conditioned, so that the electric age with its return to inclusive experience threatens their idea of self. These are the fragmented ones, for whom specialist toil renders the mere prospect of leisure or jobless security a nightmare. Electric simultaneity ends specialist learning and activity, and demands interrelation in depth, even of the personality.”(Mc) The dominance of specialist organization has created just the opposite reaction. People cling to increasingly anachronistic, specialized cultural identities, while the necessity of politics in establishing a greater whole societal identity, the necessity of an encompassing human identity in regards to our relation to technology and the environment is degraded, lost, or simply never existed.
Values
The greatest task before humanity in this era of great technological change is not the development of new technology, but reformed social reorganization incorporating human values, not simply values defined by the technology or those of leviathan corporations. A reorganization recognizing a renaissance of values not simply of the last century or two, but some going back tens of thousands years, can help provide a greater understanding of ourselves.
“In connection with the effective amount of communal information, one of the most surprising facts about the body politic is its extreme lack of efficient homeostatic processes. There is a belief, current in many countries, which has been elevated to the rank of an official article of faith in the United States, that free competition is itself a homeostatic process: that in a free market the individual selfishness of the bargainers, each seeking to sell as high and buy as low as possible, will result in the end in a stable dynamics of prices, and with redound to the greatest common good. This is associated with the very comforting view that the individual entrepreneur, in seeking to forward his own interest, is in some manner a public benefactor and has thus earned the great rewards with which society has showered him. Unfortunately, the evidence, such as it is, is against this simpleminded theory.”(W Cy)
This simpleminded theory overwhelmingly provides the dominant, even exclusive, value of our era even more so than Wiener's, with the tech innovator valued only as entrepreneur. It is the organizational value of our dominant institutions. “It may very well be a good thing for humanity to have the machine remove from it the need of menial and disagreeable tasks, or it may not. I do not know. It cannot be good for these new potentialities to be assessed in the terms of the market, of the money they save; and it is precisely the terms of the open market, the ‘fifth freedom,’ that have become the shibboleth of the sector of American opinion represented by the National Association of Manufacturers and the Saturday Evening Post. I say American opinion, for as an American, I know it best, but the hucksters recognize no national boundary.”(W Cy) Today, hucksters run the show.
A first step in reorganizing our institutions, a revaluing, is understanding centralization, hierarchical organization is not simply endemic but considered natural. “In this, our view of society differs from the ideal of society which is held by many Fascists, Strong Men in Business, and Government. Similar men of ambition for power are not entirely unknown in scientific and educational institutions. Such people prefer an organization in which all orders come from above, and none return. The human beings under them have been reduced to the level of effectors for a supposedly higher nervous organism. ...in my mind, any use of a human being in which less is demanded of him and less is attributed to him than his full status is a degradation and a waste. It is a degradation to a human being to chain him to an oar and use him as a source of power; but it is an almost equal degradation to assign him a purely repetitive task in a factory, which demands less than a millionth of his brain capacity. It is simpler to organize a factory or galley which uses individual human beings for a trivial fraction of their worth than it is to provide a world in which they can grow to their full stature. Those who suffer from a power complex find the mechanization of man a simple way to realize their ambitions. I say, that this easy path to power is in fact not only a rejection of everything that I consider to be of moral worth in the human race, but also a rejection of our now very tenuous opportunities for a considerable period of human survival.”(W)
This prevalent centralized, undemocratic, degrading value of humanity requires politics to change. A politics that values people as people first and institutes organization allowing them to fully participate in creating the collective whole, in turn defining each person, in short democracy.
“Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of 'what the public wants' played over its own nerves. This question would be like asking people what sort of sights and sounds they would prefer around them in an urban metropolis! Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly. Something like this has already happened with outer space, for the same reasons that we have leased our central nervous systems to various corporations. As long as we adopt the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our own bodies as really out there and really independent of us, we will meet all technological challenges with the same sort of banana-skin pirouette and collapse.”(Mc)
Today, the entire media of communication and the rest of the economy is centrally controlled by a handful of corporations. A politics of technology begins with restructuring control of technology using the technology itself. We need to contemplate how we reform traditional pyramidal social structures with power concentrated at the top and control extending in one direction to more distributed, horizontally networked organization with power distributed and control gained by continuous feedback across the network. Through this structure order is gained and just as imperatively value. Participation continually defines and redefines both order and value. “All organizations, but especially biological ones, struggle to remain constant in their inner condition amidst the variations of outer shock and change. The man-made social environment as an extension of man's physical body is no exception. The city, as a form of the body politic, responds to new pressures and irritations by resourceful new extensions always in the effort to exert staying power, constancy, equilibrium, and homeostasis.”(Mc)
“The implosion of electric energy in our century cannot be met by explosion or expansion, but it can be met by decentralism and the flexibility of multiple small centers. For example, the rush of students into our universities is not explosion but implosion. And the needful strategy to encounter this force is not to enlarge the university but to create numerous groups of autonomous colleges in place of our centralized university plant that grew up on the lines of European government and nineteenth-century industry.”(Mc)
A half-century after this implosion of students into universities, the expanded university is incapable of offering anything but the most specialized education. Any sort of more generalized knowledge made valueless by established social structures whether they’re cultural, political, government, or, and especially, the corporation.
“Plato, who had old-fashioned tribal ideas of political structure, said that the proper size of a city was indicated by the number of people who could hear the voice of a public speaker. Even the printed book, let alone radio, renders the political assumptions of Plato quite irrelevant for practical purposes.”(Mc) Or as James Madison, the principal architect of the American constitution, wrote two thousand years later, “In a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, will be confined to a small spot.” It needs to be pointed out this organizational distinction between democracies and republics was something Madison made-up. Nonetheless, what are the political implications for political organization allowed by the internet and this next generation of networked compute technologies? It requires not simply a reform of organization but a reform of value, value defined through participation.
The Organic Planet
We require not simply an understanding of machines’ interactions with the species Homo sapiens, but also the machines interaction with the larger environment, the ecological systems by which human beings remain very much defined, no matter how our technology alters it. “The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the outer environment, and of our living effectively under that environment.” (W)
From the beginning until today, human technological development has ignored and dismissed the environmental implications and impacts of technology. In fact, just the opposite, the mindset has largely been that of conquering nature, simply an impossibility as we are nature. The Industrial Era saw a massive transformation of the global environment, a transformation continuing even as the feedback from its destructive power grows in severity. We now develop new technologies in response to the impact of older technologies. “We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in the new environment.”(W Cy)
The latest response to this long established exclusive linear mindset is the idea humanity can flee the planet, the world which created and defines us, wrapped in our own technological shell, Narcissus in space. Simultaneously, we remain vastly ignorant of both ourselves and the greater environment that created us. The next generation of technology would best develop by not trying to conquer the world, but in appreciation of it.