In these lectures I have emphasized the difference between holistic and prescriptive technologies because I feel it is important to understand the ways in which prescriptive technologies fragment work. When a task that used to be done by one person is divided into subtasks for a number of people, some basic social parameters change. I said in the first lecture that putting people into a prescriptive mode of work where they have no latitude for judgement and decision-making acculturates them to external control, authority, and conformity. Prescriptive technologies are a seed-bed for a culture of compliance. I have also tried to show how our sense of reality has been changed, especially by the kinds of communications technologies that are based on long-distance information transfer. I introduced the concept of reciprocity to distinguish between the one-way communications so common today and those human interactions based on a give-and-take model.
In the last lecture I showed that since the time of the Industrial Revolution public planning and public resources have provided the infrastructures necessary for the expansion of new technologies and for the diffusion and use of the products of the new industries. This development forged increasingly close linkages between governments and technological growth and development. Our lives today are affected by these linkages. The planning processes which have fostered the development and spread of technology have provided infrastructures that we now consider as a given, normal, and unquestionable part of the real world. Not being mindful of how these structures arose can hamper attempts to change them or to replace old arrangements with new and more appropriate ones.
Today these infrastructures go well beyond road, rail, airport, and power grids; they include financial and tax structures, information networks, and government sponsored research and development on behalf of technological advancement. All these infrastructures could have been designed differently if the first design priority had been human development rather than technological development.1
Many technological systems, when examined for context and overall design, are basically anti-people. People are seen as sources of problems while technology is seen as a source of solutions. When, in the factory, the owners feel workers are too slow or too unreliable or too demanding, they are replaced by machines. When students are seen as not sufficiently competent, it is likely to be computers that the school purchases rather than extra teacher’s time and extra human help. And when security agencies in this country feel that Canadian citizens harbour thoughts and might contemplate actions that the state doesn’t like, they don’t invite these citizens to discuss their grievances or alternate thoughts openly and on a basis of equality. Instead, telephones are tapped or files are assembled by purely technological means. And I say that with some feeling because I’ve been on the receiving end of some of that.2 The notion that maybe technology constitutes a source of problems and grievances and people might be looked upon as a source of solutions has very rarely entered public policy or even public consciousness.
Now, among all the infrastructures that port specific technologies and their industries, the infrastructures that support the preparations for war and violence are very powerful and deeply entrenched. You note that I do not use the word “defence.” This is quite deliberate because if defence, in the sense of maintaining territory and authority, had been the main policy priority, then other structures with other contents would have been developed in Canada and in the rest of the world, at least during the past forty years. There was no shortage of suggestions for these alternative structures of defence, based on civilian defence or what one calls “defensive defence,” involving a very different mix of military equipment and quite different international channels of communication.3 The use of such alternatives, we sadly note, has not happened, and so we need to talk about the infrastructures that support, still today, the preparations for war and for the use of organized violence.
In terms of infrastructures, military procurement is simple and straightforward. The state develops and articulates the needs. The state provides the resources for development and production. The state guarantees final payment and profit, and also provides financial guarantees through loans and research contracts. All this is carried out within a complicated, not to say bizarre, framework of contracts and offsets that exist in order to meet some of the government’s non-military needs. Regional development considerations, industrial incentives, and alliances all come into play.
You may say that all this is old hat. After all, didn’t Galileo earn a living in Padua by lecturing on the subject of military fortifications? Yes, it is true that the close links between civilian and military powers are ancient, but modern practices have brought new dimensions to these arrangements. Let me just touch on two of them. First, there is what Anatol Rapoport, former chair of the University of Toronto’s peace studies program, calls the “technological imperative.“4 In simple terms, it says that whatever can be done by technological means, will be done. The military environment, unconstrained by economic considerations or common sense, offers a particularly tempting field of opportunity for the practitioners of advanced technology. They will provide the newest, most surprising, most novel applications of their expertise, regardless of whether or not these applications address real problems. Remember Star Wars?
My second point is that once a country has embarked on developing an arms production system, it falls upon the government to provide the wherewithal over a long period of time. The development of a weapons system, from design to deployment, may take ten years or more. To keep such technological activities going, public funds have to be committed and expended. To keep the public funds flowing, justifications are needed. And this generates the need for a credible long-term enemy.
In the real world of technology, there are then two tasks for the state, if governments wish to use arms production as an infrastructure for the advancement of technology: the state has to guarantee the flow of money, and the state has to guarantee the ongoing, long-term presence of a credible enemy, because only a credible enemy justifies the massive outlay of public funds. The enemy must warrant the development of the most advanced technological devices. The enemy must be cunning, threatening, and just barely beatable by truly ingenious and heroic technologies.
It will be interesting to see how western infrastructures respond to the current situation in the Soviet Union. I would venture that the social and political needs for an enemy are so deeply entrenched in the real world of technology (as we know it today) that new enemies will quickly appear, to assure that the infrastructures can be maintained. I am personally very much afraid that there will be a turning inward of the war machine. After all, the enemy does not have to be the government or citizenry of a foreign state. There is lots of scope — as well as historical precedent — for seeking the enemy within.
Since this lecture was written, the “war on drugs” has broken out. It is not clear to me whether the production of illegal drugs and the trade in them has taken on such a quantitatively different character during the past six months that a declaration of war is in order. However, the bad guys and their helpers have been identified and the enemy’s cunning cruelty has been graphically projected onto the local scene. The Red under the bed has been replaced smoothly by the grass in the grass. It is the ease and speed of the transition that I find remarkable.
Finally, the following item, which appeared in the University of Toronto Staff Bulletin, supports the point I am trying to make:
National Research Council of Canada has announced a new Canadian program of science and technology. In support of law enforcement, the proposed Canada Police Research Institute will involve the NRC, police, corporate and industrial security, universities, government, and manufacturers of equipment used in police and security work, and will research, develop, and evaluate new security related products. Interested investigators may contact....
In summary, then, this is the situation: most activities in the real world of technology have been planned; the spread of technology has resulted in a web of infrastructures serving primarily the growth and advancement of technology; the presence of these infrastructures and their “forward planning” (often manifested as institutional inertia) severely hinder political or economic changes, even if such changes are viable and appropriate.
For instance, institutional and commercial initiatives to resolve conflict non-violently and to transcend war and violence are hard to sustain in an environment structured by assumptions of escalating violence and warfare, whether economic or military. At one point planning becomes prophecy — not by what planning and struc-turing does, but by what the plans and structures prevent. The constellation in which “the enemy” has a technological and economic support role profoundly affects the peace movement. It took many of us, who worked for reconciliation and the reduction of hostility, a long time to grasp the power of this constellation.
There is no reason to believe that the support of any state for the preparation for war and violence is the only possible infrastructure to promote a national development of advanced technology. Japan, it should be remembered, was prevented by peace treaties from building up its own armed forces. Japan became — and I would suggest because of, rather than despite, these constraints — a major high-tech success. It developed infrastructures for linking government and industry that are somewhat differently constructed from those of the war-machine builders, but are very effective.
Before leaving the subject, I want to point out the changes that technology has brought to the part of citizens in war preparation and warfare. Just as fewer and fewer unskilled workers are needed in a modern technological production system, a country now has little practical need for raw recruits to operate its modern technological destruction system. Abandoning compulsory military service is not so much a sign of peaceful intentions as it is a sign of galloping automation. But the old pacifist dream that there might be a war and nobody would come and consequently the war could not take place, is no longer valid.
Wars can be started without calling on any additional people. Military service from citizens is no longer a prerequisite for war. What is a prerequisite is the compulsory financial service of all citizens, well before any military exchange begins. Thus the pacifist’s motto “We Won’t Fight,” must be translated into a new slogan: “We won’t pay for the preparations for war and organized violence.” This, of course, is the position of Canadians who pay their full income tax but insist on redirecting a portion of it to a peace tax fund so it cannot be used for the war-building purposes I have described.5
Before continuing with some thoughts on planning strategies, let me suggest a few general reflections on planning itself. I don’t want to talk here about the grand designs of the past — the sort of thing one finds in majestic cities, in palaces and temples; the sorts of layouts that brought a friend of mine to sum up his first impression of Washington D.C. by saying, “The place seems to be designed to be ruins.” I want to talk about planning in the modern sense of prescriptive technologies, the kind of thing that Webster defines as “making plans ... arranging beforehand.” I like this simple definition because it says that there are planners as well as plannees; there are those who plan and those who conform to what was arranged beforehand. Just as it is easier to give good advice than it is to accept it, it is much more fun to plan than it is to be subjected to plans made by others. The degree of effectiveness of participation by the plannees in long-term planning operations seems to me a true measure of democracy in the real world of technology.
I raise these points because planning is so frequently carried out without the plannees” knowledge or consent. In fact, when plans do not work out, it is often the lack of consideration of the position of the plannees — of their reactions, their counter-planning, their avoidance strategies — that is the reason for the plan’s dysfunction. And, as I will stress later, the natural environment is often regarded as a plannee and is usually not consulted.
Even within one plan, there are often contradictory goals. When I was actively involved with the Toronto Planning Board, I wrote a paper called The Resource Base and the Habitat. I wanted to point out that large modern cities fulfill two internally contradictory functions. Cities have become the natural habitat for many people; it is in cities that most people grow up, spend essentially all their lives, and bring up their families. Planning is supposed to assure that the city remains a liveable, safe, and sane habitat. But large population concentrations in cities also present a resource base for many enterprises. The need for food and shelter, for entertainment and employment, make cities a resource base like mines or forests. Those who want to exploit the resource base have different planning goals from those who need to develop and maintain the habitat. The resource-base users press for unrestricted access to the resource, and as little responsibility as possible for the debris and residue left by the exploitation of the resource. The garbage heaps of the shopping centres or the plastic containers from the fastfood emporia become the equivalent of a mine’s tailing dump and lagoons, left for the community to dispose of.
Different planning perspectives, with their contradictory demands, could be balanced through appropriate democratic planning processes. But although such processes exist in some jurisdictions, their practical execution is frequently weighed against the habitat function. For instance, Sunday shopping is fine for the resource-base constituency, but not so good for the habitat community.
Let me recap again. I have pointed to planning as an activity involving planners and plannees. Planning, in my sense of the word, originated with prescriptive technologies. As prescriptive technologies have taken over most of the activities in the real world of technology, planning has become society’s major tool for structuring and restructuring, for stating what is doable and what is not. The effects of lives being planned and controlled are very evident in people’s individual reactions to the impingement of planning on them. The real world of technology is full of ingenious individual attempts to sabotage externally imposed plans. As a social phenomenon, such avoidance techniques are well worth studying.
A common denominator of technological planning has always been the wish to adjust parameters to maximize efficiency and effectiveness. Underlying the plans has been a production model, and production is typically planned to maximize gain. In such a milieu it is easy to forget that not everything is plannable. Actually, most things are properly described by a growth model — and that means many activities of living — and are ultimately not plannable. A quick example from my own experience: Although I was intellectually quite well prepared for the birth of my first child, I was stunned by the degree of randomness that this event created in my life. It took me a while to understand that it was pointless to plan my days the way I used to. This did not mean that I didn’t plan or prearrange, but that I needed different schemes to deal with the unplannable.
Women in particular have developed such schemes over the centuries — arrangements that are not a surrender to randomness, but an allotment of time and resources based on situational judgements, quite akin to what I described earlier as the characteristics of holistic technologies. Such schemes require knowledge, experience, discernment, and an overview of a given situation. These schemes are different in kind from those of prescriptive planning. What makes them so different is that holistic strategies are, more often than not, intended to minimize disaster rather than to maximize gain.
Berit As, the well-known Norwegian sociologist and feminist, has described this difference in strategies. She sees traditional planning as part of the strategy of maximizing gain, and coping as central to schemes for minimizing disaster.6 A crucial distinction here is the place of context. Attempts to minimize disaster require recognition and a profound understanding of context. Context is not considered as stable and invariant; on the contrary, every response induces a counter-response which changes the situation so that the next steps and decisions are taken within an altered context. Traditional planning, on the other hand, assumes a stable context and predictable responses. Planning protocols for prescriptive activities, whether they’re industrial, administrative, or educational, can be transferred from one application to another without regard to context.
You may say it’s fine to make these academic distinctions between planning strategies, but how would one actually plan to minimize disasters, not in the family, but in the public sphere? I want to give two prominent examples because I am anxious to show that there are indeed no practical obstacles to planning to minimize disaster, and that such approaches are possible in today’s real world of technology. One of the examples is drawn from the inquiry led by Thomas Berger into the building of the Mackenzie Valley pipeline;7 the other is the 1977 study of the Science Council of Canada, entitled Canada as a Conserver Society.8 Again the crux is how context is treated.
All features of the report of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry imply respect for context. The context was illuminated as much as possible, keeping in mind all ramifications of the proposed plan. The circles of consideration were wide, and interactions within the planning milieu were considered important. The recommendations and the proposed course of action made further assessments of the impact mandatory, with built-in revisions to the plan’s long-term realization. The Inquiry itself gathered evidence in many different modes, ranging from listening to native residents in their own communities to questioning “experts” on the reliability of forecasts of energy needs or gas reserves. This was a very participatory and interactive process, and it resulted in the recommendation of a ten-year moratorium on pipeline construction, during which urgently needed protective measures for the community and the arctic habitat were to be carried out. The report also recommended certain permanent constraints on future technological activities. Thus the Inquiry resulted in a workable plan to proceed with development while minimizing potential harm. In addition to the recommendations, the Berger Inquiry generated most valuable documentation and research material which would not otherwise have been available in the public realm.
To me the Inquiry is proof that it is indeed possible to engage in a different kind of planning. The complexity of the real world of technology offers no fundamental barriers for implementing strategies to minimize disaster.
The study, Canada as a Conserver Society, by the Science Council of Canada, is an example in a slightly different vein. In 1975 a Science Council committee, which I chaired, was asked to explore whether and how Canada could become a conserver society. The council’s final report described the concept of a conserver society as follows:
The concept of a conserver society arises from a deep concern for the future, and the realization that decisions taken today, in such areas as energy and resources, may have irreversible and possibly destructive impacts in the medium to long term.
The necessity for a conserver society follows from our perception of the world as a finite host to humanity and from our recognition of increasing global independence.
The realization of the urgent need to minimize disasters became embedded in all phases of the study. This was reflected in the research questions asked and it influenced the conduct of the study itself. From the beginning of the investigation the communities of concern, ranging from citizen groups to regulators and industry, were drawn into the process. During the study, background papers and a newsletter were published and workshops were held. The work of the committee was open and public throughout the period of its deliberations.
The assessment and the specific recommendations incorporated in the council’s final report made it clear that planning to minimize disaster is quite feasible within Canada’s existing economic system and political infrastructures. It was demonstrated that there was an urgent need to institute public policies related to conservation and to encourage appropriate technological innovations to implement disaster-minimizing opportunities. But the public policy recommendations were not taken up by the government of Canada in 1977. The subsequent onslaught of the gain-maximizing strategies of the 1980s, greatly increased the likelihood of environmental and social disasters and are making the restorative tasks evermore complex and difficult.
The common theme that runs through many disasterminimizing endeavours is the conviction that ordinary people matter — in the way Schumacher meant when he called his book Small Is Beautiful; Economics as if People Mattered. But we must remember that, in the real world of technology, most people live and work under conditions that are not structured for their well-being. The environment in which we live is much more structured for the well-being of technology. It is a manufactured and artificially constructed environment, not what one might call a natural environment. While our surroundings may be a milieu conducive to production, they are much less a milieu conducive to growth.
Speaking about the environment, I must say that I have become more and more reluctant to use this term, although it figures so prominently in current discussions. I feel that “the environment” is now more often a term of befuddlement than a concept that is helpful in the search for clarity. What do people actually mean when they talk about the environment? Is it that constructed, manufactured, built environment that is the day-inday-out setting of much of the contemporary world of technology? Is it what is euphemistically called our “natural” environment? Why don’t we speak about nature? It seems such an egocentric and technocentric approach to consider everything in the world with reference to ourselves. Environment essentially means what is around us, with the emphasis on US. It’s our environment, not the environment or the habitat of fish, bird, or tree.
The reluctance to use the word “nature” in political discussions may very well come from a reluctance to acknowledge that there are independent partners on this planet. People are but one part of nature. This recognition is inconsistent with speaking about “our” natural environment, which somehow puts nature into the role of an infrastructure, into the role of something that is there to accommodate us, to facilitate or be part of our lives, subject to our planning. Such a mindset makes nature into a construct rather than seeing nature as a force or entity with its own dynamics.9
There are many ways, some of them seemingly small, in which the real world of technology denies the existence and the reality of nature. For instance, there is little sense of season as one walks through a North American or western European supermarket. As a child in Berlin, I still experienced a sense of special occasion when participating in small festive events around the family table to celebrate the first asparagus of the season, the first strawberries, the rare and special gift of an orange in winter. Today such occasions for marking the seasons are rare. Just as there is little sense of season, there is little sense of climate. Everything possible is done to equalize the ambience — to construct an environment that is warm in the winter, cool in the summer — equilibrating temperature and humidity to create an environment that does not reflect nature. Nature is then the outside for “us” who are in an internal cocoon. Indeed, technology does allow us to design nature out of much of our lives. This, however, may be quite stupid. People are part of nature whether they like it or not. Machines and instruments will thrive and work well in even temperatures and constant humidity. People, in fact, may not. For the sake of our own mental and physical health, we may need the rhythm of the seasons and the experience of different climates that can link us to nature and to life.
In no way do I wish to deny the urgent task of “cleaning up the environment,” as it is often phrased. But I would like to stress that there is also the urgent task of cleaning up the technocentric and egocentric mindset, to get rid of the notion that nature is just one more infrastructure in the real world of technology.
Sometimes I think if I were granted one wish, it would be that the Canadian government would treat nature the way Canadian governments have always treated the United States of America — with utmost respect and as a great power.
Whenever suggestions for political action are placed before the government of Canada, the first consideration always seems to be “What about the Americans? They may not like it. They may let their displeasure be seen and felt. They may retaliate!” And what about nature? Obviously nature does not take kindly to what is going on in the real world of technology. Nature is retaliating, and we’d better understand why and how this is happening. I would therefore suggest to you that, in all processes of planning, nature should be considered as a strong and independent power. Ask, “What will nature do?” before asking, “What will the Americans do?“
Having spoken so much about planning, I do not want to end this lecture without touching briefly on the outcome of such plans. After all, plans are made in order to achieve a particular goal. It is therefore of some interest to see what happens to goals. The retrospective evaluation of plans and predictions is not a particularly comfortable undertaking; maybe this is why it is not well developed as a discipline of study. One would think that much could be learned from finding out why well laid plans and well considered predictions are often so totally out of whack. Of course, the literature is full of anecdotes about how great people so misjudged the development of science and technology that they thought manned flight was impossible, that sound could never be carried by wire, etc., etc. I’m not interested in simply pointing out how far off others have been in their predictions. I have little doubt that some of what I have said here will not stand the test of time either. What I am interested in are reasonable, shortrange predictions that did not come true, largely because of a total misreading of context. To me this serves as a reminder that any plausible approach to forecasting the impact of technology must focus on context and involve the experience and views of the plannees as well as the planners who design the technology.
In 1964 the British journal The New Scientist, under its editor, Nigel Calder, approached social and physical scientists from a large number of countries and requested from them a prediction of what their fields or their countries would be like in 1984, just twenty years in the future. These were scholars who knew their fields well and who were looking ahead to the Orwellian date of 1984. The responses were published in 1964 and the book is still in print.10 I warmly recommend it to you because it’s quite stunning. There are visions of air-conditioned plenty, of creative leisure and broadly based political involvements. But I especially like the prediction of a senior official at IBM, in an article called “The Banishment of Paperwork.” He confidently forecast the total absence of paperwork in 1984: Computers, within two decades, would have become the sole medium of communication, while all that burdensome paper would have vanished from our desks.
In the case of Canada, the then vice-president of the National Research Council entitled his contribution “Canada: Plenty of Room for People.” He predicted a Canada of at least thirty-five million people, exporting wheat, pulp and paper, iron ore, nickel, and many other metals. At the same time Canada’s manufacturing industries would be thriving. His prediction also foresaw a great future for educational television. “For instance, by dialling the public library, one might be able in 1984 to read any book while sitting in one’s house, the printed page presented on the television screen. The blind, the lazy and the illiterate can listen instead.” He further anticipated that the ratio of motor vehicles to people would probably stabilize before 1984, for the simple reason that cars would be so numerous that the increment of usefulness for additional vehicles would be essentially zero. Every place would be so clogged up that more cars would be pointless. The lack of roads on which to drive cars and parking lots and garages in which to leave them would make more cars virtually unwanted.
What is so striking in this and many similar comments is the lack of appreciation of the political dynamics of technology. Of course roads will be built even if they gobble up the best agricultural land. Of course garages will be erected in preference to housing for the poor.
The collection contains other quite astonishing predictions — astonishing in their belief that the growth of technology and information would bring limitless comfort and potential prosperity. The title of one essay, “Bioengineering — Opportunities without Limit,” is representative of such an outlook.
There are many contributions foreseeing air-conditioned and totally climate-controlled living and working spaces — and one senses the wish to keep something out, to protect and encapsulate people. But the contributions contain little awareness of the connectedness of life and the fact that whatever may harm humans will harm air, soil and water, plants and animals.
There are acknowledgements of hunger in the Third World — a number of the contributors were from outside Europe and North America — and of the need to nourish a growing world population. But there is no recognition whatever of the potential for hunger and poverty in the First World. The reality of economic underdevelopment was perceived by the scholars; the reality of moral underdevelopment was rarely mentioned.
When I talked earlier about the need to look at technology in context, I meant the context of nature and people. When predictions turn out to be as wrong as many of those in The World in 1984, it is because context is not a passive medium but a dynamic counterpart. The responses of people, individually and collectively, and the responses of nature are often underrated in the formulation of plans and predictions. Electrical engineers speak about inductive coupling: A changing field induces a current, which may induce a counter-current. Change produces changes, often in different dimensions and magnitudes. Maybe what the real world of technology needs more than anything else are citizens with a sense of humility — the humility of Kepler or Newton, who studied the universe but knew that they were not asked to run it.