- Siva Vaidhyanathan

(Siva talks *fast,* so I missed a lot....)

told a story about North Korea testing a nuclear missile
when it failed, Bush said military advisers told him they could have shot it down
he expressed a dangerous level of faith in unproven technology

anti-missile system is a waste because can easily thwart them:
1. overwhelm the defense with dummy warheads
2. shift warheads to low-flying missiles where satellites can't knock them out
3. put missiles in backpacks, on trains, etc.; put them on humans (the opposite of rocket science)

every test of these systems have failed over the years
US military stopped testing rather than admit failure
Bush still "just believes"
this is an example of technofundamentalism
the belief that we can - and should - build a machine that will fix the problem

the sense that invention is the best of all possible methods for resolving human problems
we currently pay a heavy price for technofundamentalism
bigger roads to relieve traffic, drugs to solve medical problems, Moore's law that falsely predicts computer power will double every 18 months
most dangerously, we neglect real problems with real structures, such as the New Orleans levees
now it is the operative ideology in national security policy
don't need to depend on credible military threat, human intelligence, etc.
using technology to solve these problems - scanning, ID cards, etc.

empiricism deficit in the US today (evolution, etc.)
Americans put immense faith in technology but don't believe in science
decisionmakers ignore facts and research, which means fundamentalism wins out
must employ our critical faculties
with our tradition of public engagement, we're ideally positioned to fight technofundamentalism

noted Twain's protaganist (Morgan) in "Connecticutt Yankee" and his technofundamentalist moment about patents

from the beginning of the US republic, we built our community around faith in redemptive, dramatic, urgent, unavoidable, get-with-it-or-get-out-of-the-way, unidirectional progress (patent office, like Morgan created)

since the rise of global digital networks, most of the systems in our lives have been in flux

Kevin Kelly wrote what happens when all of the books become digital and networked
1 - books on the margin of popularity will become marginally more popular than they are now
2 - the universal library will deepen our understanding of history
3 - new sense of authority; if you can incorporate all texts ever, then you have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization and species know and don't know
4 - (I missed this one)

there's no agency in Kelly's writings
Google tells us we must merely trust them and the process
Updike followed up with a lamentation that Google's digital book dream would come true; never really addressed what Kelly advocated and described or questioned it

all of this depends on copyright, because the current plan will kill their plans
lost in the debate is the status of rights and workers
technolibertarianism
obscuring the labor that builds its foundations
voices crying for freedom in every direction, but justice in none

John Henry challenged the machine that was to replace him to a race
he outdrives the machine, but when he dies at the end, we're left wondering what do we do with this?
what is a human being for, now that the machines do all the work?
fortunately, we have tools

the sociological imagination by Mills
the presentations tomorrow will employ the technocultural imagination
this asks these types of questions:
- which member of society gets to decide what technological tools get implemented
- what are the cultural and economic implications of how technology works in the world
etc.
- to what extent do social phenomena effect technology?
- what are the social costs of raised expectations?

none of these questions (or answers) are simple?
when confronted with so many questions, we can't lurch for the easy answer, which is, of course, that technology will be the answer

question: when you talk about technofundamentalism, it's a loaded term - blind faith. what's the opposite of that, the common ground?
answer: we can all believe in progress, although not everyone does. innovation doesn't necessarily equal progress or that progress follows innovation. I live better than my grandfather in almost every way... is there progress? sure, our species wins. am I sure my grandchildren will lead better lives than I do? I'm not sure. just because I live better than my grandfather did doesn't mean my grandchildren will follow that pattern. blind faith in sewers to solve cholera problems wasn't the answer; finding the answer to cholera and not relying on one specific technology was the best way; there are problems we could solve if there were certain proposed answers that didn't end with "just let the innovators solve the problem"

question: thinks Kelly's vision for the long tail of books isn't necessarily utopian; seems to him he is correct about communities around books; the digitization of books and making them more widely accessible is close to Kelly's vision
answer: bringing discrete and highly disaggregated individuals who share an interest and have to find each other, that's a tremendous phenomenon that is happening already, digitizing of books or not; doesn't mean it wouldn't help to have them universally accessible; the problem with Kelly's argument is that Google isn't really making the books accessible, and Kelly's argument is incorrect in that Google won't just give us the books; thinks we need a large-scale effort to
question: the limitations on what Google is doing is limited by the same copyright regime you are critical of
answer: but that's why they shouldn't be doing it - the Library of Congress should be doing it; they're the wrong agent to do it for a dozen reasons

question: one of the issues is the determinism that it is inevitable that technology will take us on this particular trajectory; this is interesting if you think back to 1980, a year after Three Mile Island, Star Wars technology is being proposed by Reagan, etc. we think it's only going to bring us bad things
answer: yeah, but I was playing pong
question: but we thought technology would take us in a negative direction; you used the term "imagineer;" all of the science fiction from that period is distopian, not utopian; it's all the warnings about universal ID, police state tactics, etc. and yet today, the discourse around technology is really governed by Silicon Valley and this utopian vision
answer: disagrees in that some sectors of our discourse are difficult to puncture, but thinks Washington is just as much to blame, which is a greater threat and problem; there's a conversation going on around the country that centers on this, and it actually comes out of the evangelical notion of the redemptive nature of work; it's so familiar to us, we don't have to go far to find other versions

question: seems Americans understand themselves in terms of resilience; if I take religious fundamentalism and its impact on the military, where officers are religious fundamentalists... tell me something about technofundamentalism that would help me frame it
answer: I'll have to get back to you

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