In the October 2003 issue of MIT Technology Review, Bruce Sterling (if you don’t know, please catch up, okay?) offered a list of “technologies… so blatantly obnoxious that the human race would rejoice if they were just obliterated.” It was a great piece then, and I’ve kept it in the back of my mind since. Events of this month caused it to bubble up and suggest it’s time for reconsideration. Normally these sort of visitations take place at intervals that are multiples of your (probable) number of toes, but some of these problems are too urgent to backburner for another three years, and I don’t want to keep this rattling around in my head that long.
I’m also going to refrain (for a moment) from going off on the word “technology”. I’m so goddamned sick of hearing it that it makes me want to self-harm. If you’re talking about something like a TV, a phone, a computer, a piece of software, or the internet, just say so, because calling them “technologies” makes you sound like a prat. The best definition I’ve heard for it is “that’s the word people use when they don’t understand how something works.” Oh… shit. See, I couldn’t refrain, even for a moment. That’s how worked up it gets me… so don’t get me started on “virtual”. But beyond that I’m going to let it go – Bruce’s categories fit it well enough.
I’m also not going to violate the copyright on his piece by restating it here, since the original is still online, so open it in another tab and flip back and forth like I’m doing now:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2003/10/01/233809/ten-technologies-that-deserve-to-die
1. Nuclear Weapons
There is nothing about the need for the absolute elimination of warnukes that requires any second thought. Next.
2. Coal-Based Power
A hundred percent, and on this one we’re slowly heading in the right direction. But the right direction still isn’t the right direction, because in the main it’s just toward a different hydrocarbon (read: still-CO2-generating) power source: Natural gas. Yes, it burns cleaner than coal (e.g. not feeding mercury and other really nasty stuff into the atmosphere) and people don’t die horribly in mines over it, but in exchange we get fracking, which creates geological instability and poisons the groundwater with chemicals the identities of which are concealed from their victims because the fracking companies get to call them trade secrets! Whee!
This is the hard one. This is nontrivial. This is the existential foundations-of-our-civilization problem that we still don’t have a single fucking clue how to solve. We have built our modern, post-industrial-revolution society on a finite cache of energy we’re really not entitled to, and we’re expending it at roughly a million times the speed at which it was created and treating it as inexhaustible. Andrew Nikiforuk has termed it “the energy of slaves” because, like human slavery, it comes at a real cost that we’re not actually paying and for which a reckoning will eventually come – sooner than its most determined exploiters think. Not only is it going to run out, making the collapse of all of our systems that depend on it inevitable, but we don’t even get to wait that long, because global warming will make the earth nonviable for human (and much other) life first.
And here’s the kicker: We have no idea how to replace it. There is no credible evidence to suggest that we can “innovate” our way out of this. Other than hydrocarbons and nuclear reactors, we’ve traditionally gotten our “base load” power from hydroelectric dams, and they’re slowly failing as the reservoirs silt up and shrink because the planet’s temperature is rising. Wind and solar are making a valiant effort, but they’ll never supply more than a small fraction of the power we require, and are inherently unsuited to supply base load. Every other so-called “renewable” energy source, despite our greatest wishes, is nothing more than a science fair project that won’t scale up in time to save us (if at all), but we’ve collectively decided that the only remotely viable solution – nuclear power – is, um, “unpalatable”. And even if we were to, globally, change our mind and begin a crash program today to build enough of the largest fission plants created to date (10 GW) at the rate of a new one brought online every month until the end of the century, it would still not meet the world’s electricity requirement of (in the roughest possible terms) 10TW. Why this would be impossible – even if humanity’s collective will magically turned on a dime and demanded it – is cheerfully illustrated by Long Island Light Co.’s Shoreham plant: A less-than-1GW reactor, 20 years from conception to completion at a cost of $5.5 billion (that won’t be paid off until 2033), decommissioned in 1994 without ever delivering a watt of useful power, because the neighbours didn’t like it and that’s how our priorities are aligned. We’re Just That Screwed. And please, let’s stick with reality and not fantasize about fusion; remember that we were promised that fission reactors would supply power “too cheap to meter” – and that was after they were actually made to work.
By the way, when you’re thinking about this stuff, it helps to reflect on how much of it is actually solar power, but in a different form. Hydroelectric is solar because it’s the sun – not magic – that moves water from below the dam to above the dam. Same with wind. Hydrocarbons are stuff the sun grew a long time ago – you get the picture. Other than solar, about all we have is nuclear and geothermal.
So sure, we’ll all be delighted to finally see the end of coal-fired power generation (and the gas-fired plants that follow it) – right up until the lights go out. In terms of energy consumption, our existence is a house of cards, the forecast is for strong winds, and we have no glue.
3. The Internal-Combustion Engine
This one’s tough. Aspirational, but tough. Bruce is right on the mark when he points out that the energy density of gasoline (a fuel so dangerously volatile and toxic that if it were to be invented now it would never be allowed on the market) is unmatched. There’s nothing like being able to haul a heavy load a long distance really fast using a cheap fuel you can carry in a bucket. Seriously – there’s nothing. Trouble is, the replacements he suggests (“hydrogen and fuel cells”) aren’t energy sources – they’re means of energy storage and conversion – and the energy to make the hydrogen (here on earth, anyway) has to come from… wait for it… electricity or hydrocarbon reactions!
A sidebar on Tesla, since it appeared around the same time as his article: The sound you don’t hear from the car is its siren call. It feels like “progress”, but I’m unlikely to get one because they’re simply too expensive. I’ve never been, and will probably never be, a new-car guy. I live in the real world, where a car is something bought used for less than a thousand bucks and kept running myself, though I’m inspired by the guys who are bringing “affordable” used Teslas to the aftermarket (look up “Rich Rebuilds”).
(Funny story. About a year ago I passed one of those temporary portable roadside signs with the big fluorescent letters hawking a nearby used car lot. “30 CARS UNDER $15,000” . I did the mental math and thought “Yeah, that’s about right.”)
But they don’t contain any more magic than hydrogen fuel cell cars, just the same “long tailpipes” – the actual energy still has to come from somewhere else (see #2 above). Here in Alberta, two thirds of our power plants still burn coal and generate about half of our power. Most of the other half comes from natural gas, and wind/solar together total less than 10%. So electric cars really are just a distraction, and anyone considering himself virtuous for driving one and paying a little surcharge for “clean green electricity” is just being smug about an accounting trick. The point is that what the future holds is a shortage of electricity… and we think plugging in cars instead of burning gasoline is going to help?
4. Incandescent Light Bulbs
You know, to walk into just about any store you’d think we beat this one. Not only are all light bulbs now LEDS, they’re MuticolourDimmableInternetEnabled! (Memo to self: Add “IOT” to the next version of this list.) I’m a pretty technical guy, and have no use for any of that crap. I want a thing that turns electricity into light, period. Now, the beauty of incandescent bulbs that Bruce fails to acknowledge is their simplicity. It’s a piece of wire that gets hot and bright when you push electrons through it – that’s all. If you don’t distract yourself with that whole pesky “fractional efficiency” business, the incandescent bulb suddenly becomes quite elegant – it’s about Occam’s Razor, which I’ve written of at length here (look for the “On the Trail of the MCU” posts). So while I’m not saying that we should go back to using them for light, I do want to point out that in the complexity (and thus reliability, which is what I’m really getting at) department, they have the inherent edge. Normally, heat-as-a-byproduct-of-inefficiency is the kiss of death for reliability, but we had a hundred years to get the materials right (how that ignorant, murderous bumpkin Edison got there is a completely different story I won’t get sidetracked by here), and the result is that those simple cheap things run for a long time before burning out (what we call a high MTTF – Mean Time To Failure).
I just wish I could buy a goddamn LED bulb that met that criterion, but I can’t. Every reasonably-priced LED bulb I’ve bought has had a shorter working life than any incandescent bulb in the house, and it’s because they’re complicated. Aside from the LED (or array of LEDs) that actually generates the light, there’s a little power supply in there, and that’s the part that falls over, making the assembly flaky or flickery if not outright dead long before it should. And that’s because globalization means they all come from China, where reliability in electronics is still an undiscovered concept. So I’ve completely given up on them, and every one that fails around here gets replaced with a compact fluorescent picked up for nothing from the local recycling depot, a working bulb discarded by some other sucker who replaced it with a LED. I’m not happy about this, since they’re fragile (like incandescents) and complicated and flaky (just not as much as LEDs) and toxic to boot, and can’t be used outside… where I still use incandescents because CFs won’t start up in the cold. Grrr.
5. Land Mines
Is there anything to add? Only that an estimated 110 million land mines still in the ground in 78 countries kill 20,000 innocent people every year and maim countless more. And that the Countries That Matter refuse to sign the treaties banning them (it’s incidental but instructive that the US also refuses to sign on to the International Criminal Court). What the fuck.
6. Manned Spaceflight
In the beginning there was The Space Race, a cold-war rod length check between the US and the now-defunct USSR. And in a truly heroic accomplishment a few guys got to walk around on a dead rock and a few more guys died in the process. Bruce is right in that anything we need of space can be acquired by robots. But with NASA’s demise as the leader in the field, SpaceX emerged and has again dazzled us with extremely impressive new toys (I’m writing this as someone with a friend who works there), but the fact remains that we don’t really have any business being there. But to make matters worse, instead of acknowledging this, people who should know better are taking seriously the utterly barmy notion that we should be colonizing the moon, then Mars.
Reality check: After all our centuries of study, we know of exactly one planet suitable for sustaining (human) life – the one that co-evolved with it. That’s all. And we’re already there, so there’s little point in continuing to look for others that might work but are entirely out of reach. So it’s time to redirect 100% of the effort and resources being wasted screwing around in space toward unfucking earth, because if anything is certain, it’s that we’re not going to find another and move there before this one expires (again, see #2 above). Fuck the space billionaires and their “tourists”. Fuck Branson (even though the son of a dear friend of mine flies for him) – he should have stuck with having a record label that put out a lot of really good music. Fuck Bezos for every reason in the world. And fuck Musk for every stupid idea about Mars he has and his lame hyperloop and even lamer flamethrower… but unfuck him a little for at least replacing NASA’s lost launch capability and helping actual research on the ISS continue.
7. Prisons
I have to assume that Bruce is taking a bit of a piss when he compares prisons to airports, but we’re just not on the same page with this one. For-profit prisons are wrong and need to be outlawed, now. Meaningful criminal justice reform needs to take place, starting with (at very least) decriminalizing all drugs. White-collar criminals shouldn’t be incarcerated, they need to be stripped of their assets – all of them, right down to the last secret Panamanian account – installed in shitty walk-up apartments, and made to flip burgers at minimum wage for the duration of their sentences. Do these simple, basic, reasonable things, and suddenly we won’t have very much use for prisons anymore. But “newfangled electronic-parole monitors and ubiquitous computing offer plenty of opportunities” only for failure. Consider it for a second. Do you really think that if we can’t build an acceptably-reliable LED light bulb, we can trust a shiny new magical widget to keep everyone safe from a psychopathic murder of children (Anders Breivik is a useful example, but Clifford Olson works fine too)? No, we’re (again) going to turn to Occam’s Razor, which dictates that (in the absence of capital punishment, which is wronger than prisons) the best answer is the simplest one: Some people represent such horrors that they need to be permanently removed from our society, so put them in a concrete box and never let them out.
8. Cosmetic Implants
Well, we are going to have to draw a distinction here that Bruce didn’t acknowledge: That not all cosmetic surgery is created equal. Plastic surgery’s earliest use was reconstructive, and was significantly modernized in the wake of World War I. If in the course of reconstructions, implants are necessary (or even just desired, as in the case of mastectomies), then so be it. But although – speaking as the most tiresome and obsolete of all things, a straight male – it’s difficult not to appreciate a good boob job, anyone who thinks unnecessary elective cosmetic surgery involving foreign matter is a good idea should watch a season of Botched. He’s quite right to state that those can wait until we’re good at growing human meat.
9. Lie Detectors
Totally right. “Lie detectors” are – and always were – bullshit gadgets that never worked, and the law considers their output inadmissible for just that reason.
10. DVDs
Yeah, okay, but don’t you think that’s a bit trivial compared to the other nine on this list? They died as Bruce predicted, only to be replaced by Blu-Ray, which do provide better pictures but suffer from all the same downsides. What we’re learning – much too slowly – is that removable media, whether optical or magnetic, just don’t have much useful life in a world in which fixed disks (both magnetic and, increasingly, solid state), slaughter one price:performance barrier after the other. Oh – and that there’s never been a DRM scheme that couldn’t be beaten, and there probably won’t be until quantum encryption is widespread, and probably not then either.
So… How are we doing?
It would appear that in 17 years, we’ve managed to bump the two smallest, most trivial items off of this list of persistent offenders: Incandescent lights (sort of) and DVDs. If we’re generous we might be able to add the lie detector, but I honestly don’t know to what extent that nonsense is still in use today. By any measure, that’s piss-poor performance. But what are we going to replace those two (or three) with?
New 4. Cryptocurrency and its evil twin, Blockchain
If you understand the history (which goes back to the cypherpunks), there’s some merit in its theoretical basis. But as is often the case, it doesn’t take much for a good idea – in this case libertarianism – to go too far and lose its shit, and given Tim May’s example it was probably inevitable. The argument has gone far beyond whether anonymous digital currency is a desirable thing; certainly Bitcoin has demonstrated that as a means of payment its utility is both marginal and flawed, and that instead it’s become a vehicle for truly insane speculation and prodigious energy consumption in both its creation (“mining”) and transactions. And contrary to what its cheerleaders would have you believe, there’s nothing useful that you can do with blockchain that you can’t do – or hasn’t already been done – by other means. As of this writing, China (not known for its modern moral leadership) has outlawed mining and is on track for banning blockchain altogether. How they’re going to enforce the latter is a different conversation, but at that point it’s a matter for the individual to determine whether it’s worth fucking with a regime that has no qualms about arbitrarily disappearing a citizen and repurposing his body parts.
What China recognizes (and the rest of the world is taking too long to catch up with) is that this has nothing to do with liberty and everything to do with energy, as they continue bootstrapping 1.4 billion people from the third world to the first. The earth doesn’t have the power budget, so ban that shit, and put offenders in the prisons that we still need (see #7, above).
New 10. Social Media
Without a doubt, the most pernicious new technological pathogen is “social media”, and I’m singling out Facebook, though there is an abundance of other guilty parties. I won’t use it, but I did sign on to Linkedin for what, at the time, were sound reasons: I wanted to get and stay in touch with the (mostly professional) acquaintances I’d made over the years, and felt that rebuilding my network online (as the local, real-life one in my business had evaporated over the years due to industry-wide changes) might lead to work. That does not, however, mean that I wanted to engage in 24×7 meaningless chatter with them and everyone they know – which is exactly what I found when I first started to follow my “update” feed. I watched it (and participated a little) for a few days, quickly determining that if I continued to do so I would go to my grave without ever accomplishing another thing of any significance, including raising my own children. I experienced exactly the same feeling as I did the one time I tried to use an iPod Touch (kids, that’s what came just before the iPhone) while driving: I understood with great immediacy that it would only be possible to operate if I did so to the exclusion of everything else important in my life – which at that moment was “paying attention to the road”. I didn’t do it a second time.
Facebook is clearly equally poisonous to normal human social function, with the bonus added evil of its automated algorithmic amplification for profit of the most foul and damaging speech available on the planet, as well as being operated both incompetently and amorally enough to have been, arguably, responsible for the election of Trump in 2016. The difficulty, of course, is that 3 billion people have made it the centrepiece of their lives, and would see its demise as some weird sort of genocide – the mass murder of their online identities. The solution is to do exactly what the little vermin who created it have been championing for years: Move fast and break it. In this case, that would be to halt trading of its stock without notice and nationalize the motherfucker by paying out its shareholders at the closing price. Then hand it over to whatever the American equivalent of a (Canadian) crown corporation is – that’s an entity that’s ultimately owned by the state, but is operated at arms length and completely without interference from the government – to run as a nonprofit. Absent the I’m-out-to-become-the-richest-and-most-powerful-person-in-the-world-by-any-means-necessary motive, competent, ethical computer scientists and business people could then dial it down to some semblance of sanity and continue to operate it for the greater global good (sort of).
Sounds too much like SOCIALISM for you? Suck it up, because your country needs some of that medicine if it’s to jump the hot rails to hell it’s on now. Which is the perfect segue to…
And in the queue
I don’t think any of these problems are going to fall quickly, but just in case, I want you to know that I’m thinking ahead and that there are lots more in the pipe. So here’s a teaser.
For-Profit HMOs
Yeah, you’re right. It’s a long stretch to call interposing the avaricious free-market profit motive into the simple idea of keeping your citizens healthy a “technology”, but fuckit, if you can patent a “business process” and Bruce gets to call a concrete box (prison) a “technology”, I’m going to give myself some latitude too.
Nitpicking Bastard 