Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (best reads of all time .txt) 📕

passports. Hardly did I or my blonde, blue-eyed, Wellesley-educated wife resemble the Palestinian terrorists who had begun to target civil aviation, their richest prize and obsessive focus being El Al. But upon boarding an international flight at Lod, I was questioned and inspected to the extent that the heels of my army boots were prised off; my suitcase was deconstructed almost to the point of ruin; everything in it was pierced, squeezed, and eyed to death; and the Israeli army girl doing the inspection questioned me for more than half an hour about my history, views, plans, and friends. El Al combines this approach with both passive defenses and threat targeting, and although there is no absolute guarantee of safety, it has been for decades at one and the same time the most desirable target for terrorists and the one they have been unable to hit.

We can’t institute such thorough measures in this country because of the size and throughput of our commercial air networks. True enough, but we can take enough trouble and spend enough of the greatest cumulative wealth of any country in the history of mankind to make an almost totally impervious barrier, the price of which would be the acceptance of hard work and expense rather than evading it via the supposedly magic channels of data processing.

This would demand, however, not merely extra care and expenditure but an adjustment of prevailing attitudes sufficient to be a retreat to an earlier time in which machines and industrial processes worked according to general applicability rather than a tailored approach, which was left to craftsmen like tailors. Machines were generally comprehensive and indiscriminate. The cotton gin goes through all the cotton and blindly removes the seeds: it does not identify them. Nor does it miss them. Its action would be exactly the same if the cotton were infested with seeds or had not a single one. In fact, its action would be the same if it were combing through polyester or wool. The combine does not seek out and identify an ear of corn, it takes in everything and because of their characteristics the ears of corn are blindly stopped by its selective filter. Even something so apparently able to “scribe” contours as an apple-or potato-peeling machine of the nineteenth century accounts for variation only by the constant application of a single pressure following the shape of the apple as unconsciously as a wheel takes a dip in the road.

In regard to this characteristic of manufacturing processes and the action and design of machines, we are now between eras. Day by day, machine methods are revised and the preponderance of one approach shifts to the other. The household thermostat no longer depends upon the expansion or contraction of a coiled wire that tilts a mercury-phial switch, but reads the temperature exactly and issues a digital command. Though temperature, like time, is analog, it may be expressed numerically, and the modern thermostat not only measures more precisely but acts or refrains from action in a process of complex decision making.

Moving from analog to digital, from the general, unmodulated application of force to its controlled and targeted application—as in precision-guided munitions in contrast to a blind artillery barrage, or in individually targeted advertising in contrast to roadside billboards—we are adjusting the processes of industrialization to bring them more in line with those of the pre-industrial era. This has always been the motivating factor in the design of machines such as the Jacquard loom (which can do what the most skillful weaver can do), or the sewing machine, or the Cuisinart.™ We build mechanisms either to do what we are incapable of doing—flying, communicating across the seas, shattering mountains, lifting 100-foot trees—or to relieve us of what we can do. The machines of the first category have far outperformed those of the second, until now, when we are approaching a kind of critical mass that will usher-in the eventual predominance of mechanization’s new phase.

The combination of miniaturization, striking advances in materials science, and exponentially improving information storage and processing will allow things never thought feasible even in the most hopeful blushes of the machine age. The theme newly made possible is particularization, the goal of the federal bureaucrat who wants to stop a hijacking not by making it unachievable for anyone but by finding the hijacker, just as it is the goal of the bureaucrat overseeing a container port, who would forgo inspection of each container for the presence of nuclear weapons, in favor of finding out by investigation who might put a nuclear weapon in a container and in which container he might put it.

Explanatory analogies are abundant, such as, for example, a method of shaving that (unlike a razor blade, which runs along an entire front without making distinctions) would select and cut each hair. To Ptolemy this might have seemed as impossible as it might have to Francis Bacon or even to Einstein, although probably any one of them could have drawn a good map to the end result, identifying in terms of its simplest elements that which, though missing, if present would allow the “miracle” in question to occur—a miracle that is now only a matter of time. Strong nano-structures, nano-gearing, subminiature power storage, and the progress of information-processing compression must lead to such things: perhaps a thousand nano-lawn mowers applied to the face, each one chopping one hair shaft at a time, close to the surface, after gripping it like a logging machine, and then returning to base as a magnet is swept over them, the machines thus retrieved and simultaneously recharged by induction. Or perhaps, and for this you may pray without embarrassment, there will be cancer excision cell by cell, and patrols within the body to detect pathological irregularities in more or less real time.

The possibilities are so many that they call for a new Jules Verne to write about their wondrous application; a new H.G. Wells to view them with a more jaundiced eye;