Technology, reason, babel fish and misplaced faith
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What: Christian
Where: Vicar, St Anne’s Church, Kew
Transcript of the Radio 4 broadcasts
Listen to Giles’ Radio 4 broadcasts
Podcast script
Here’s the reverend Fraser for 30 April:
FRASER: It was the biggest power cut in recent memory. All across Spain and Portugal the lights went out. People were stuck in lifts and on trains. Internet and mobile phone coverage went down. Businesses suffered. It wasn’t quite mass panic, but it was near enough. … Isn’t it extraordinary how our society has become so overwhelmingly dependent upon something that a few hundred years ago most people had never even heard of.
Where to begin, Giles…?
How about with parallel tale of technological breakdown.
In London. In 1852. 273 years ago. For context, Queen Victoria was about a third into her 63-year reign. Huge wealth was flowing into London from the British Empire. Great Ormond Street Hospital, Britian’s first children’s hospital, had just opened, as had King’s Cross which instantly became the biggest railway station in Europe. And, of oblique relevance, a patent for the flush toilet was granted. The city of London was growing and had a water supply system built on centuries of innovation and expansion, and it was working hard to keep pace. 1852 saw the introduction of a new and highly effective filtration system that markedly improved the quality of the water delivered to Londoners. Then, thanks to the diligent detective work of one Dr Jon Snow, a deadly cholera outbreak was linked to a water pump in Soho. How could it be? With all this technology and a new filtration system? A seemingly simple fault resulted in contamination for a whole neighbourhood.
No doubt West London vicars had letters published in the papers sounding caution over these technological advances. All the promise of clean, high-quality drinking water and it comes crashing down following a single fault! Where to get water, now? How did the city become so overwhelmingly dependent on this vulnerable pump network for something as important as its water?
No. I suspect they did not.
The cholera problem was identified and the contamination was addressed. Within a decade, London’s water treatment and distribution system was complemented by the most advanced sewerage network the world had ever seen. This progression of sanitation technology improved the quality of life for thousands of Londoners. Likely also preventing the deaths of thousands more. The benefits of the advances in the 19th century were often both vast and visceral.
Many more people lost their lives in 1852 London as a result of the contaminated pump than did as a result of the Iberian power outage. But, the scale of the power delivery network on the Iberian peninsular would have been near-impossible for the average 1852 resident of Soho to comprehend. Covering almost 600,000 square kilometres, including hundreds of power stations and millions of homes and businesses. Because of that scale, millions more were affected in much more trivial ways by the power cut than the cholera.
This outage was a huge and unusual failure for western Europe. It’s not so unusual to hear of the larger cities in Venezuela, South Africa or India to suffer intermittent blackouts. Variously these are attributed to ageing infrastructure, supply constraints and underinvestment. In fairness, the first two of those are just euphemisms for the third. Spain and Portugal? Not so much. It was a reminder of our vulnerability. Much more is known today than at the time about the causes but it will be in 2026 that the official investigation will report. This will have valuable information for power grids the world over for the enhancement of resilience, the importance of preparedness and the importance of trusting good people to maintain cool heads under pressure. It took 10 hours to fix the power cut. Massively inconvenient but dwarfed by the impact on the family and friends of the six people who died. It took 15 days to remedy the cholera outbreak, 616 people died. Even at that point it was a natural flight of population away from the affected area that stifled transmission, not the intervention of any authority. The pump itself wasn’t disabled until days later. This was because our technology had not yet confirmed the germ theory of disease. Disabling a water pump when cholera was thought to be caught from miasma, or ‘bad air’ wasn’t straightforward in 1852 London. Even after 616 deaths that were precisely clustered around the pump in question. The stable door was closed long after the horse had bolted.
Because of the technological advances that we have made, today we have reliable clean water, from every tap in every house, because. We can heat our homes in winter, evenly, efficiently and without the life-shortening consequences of breathing wood-smoke, or the city-strangling consequences of billowing smoke from a chimney on every house. Each year we manage to do this with less contribution to the causes of global warming. We have astonishingly capable hospitals and emergency hospital backup systems as a result of millions of aggregated advances in technology since 1851 and before. By way of example, in 1885 we developed the first ever cholera vaccine (pertinently enough for this story, a Spanish doctor called Jaume Ferrani I Clua). The antibiotic, doxycycline, was discovered by Pfizer scientists in the early 1960s and remains the primary antibiotic treatment for shortening the course of the disease today.
Technology we’ve developed in medicine, physics, nutrition, sanitation, engineering, construction, chemistry, has resulted in things like an astonishingly low global infant mortality rate – the lowest it has ever been. In 80% of the world’s one-year-olds being vaccinated against at least one disease. In the number of deaths from natural causes halving in the last 100 years. Technology has also had a dramatic impact on global average life expectancy. If you were born in 1800, on average on Earth, you could expect to live to 29. By 2025 that number had risen to 70. The whole planet today has the average life-expectancy at birth of those born in the UK in 1956. Counterintuitively, all those 69-year-olds in the UK today who were actually born in 1956 will, on average, live another 16 or so years. This is because infant mortality was a disproportionately active member of the mortality family, until relatively recently. In 1965 Britian, 24 in 1,000 live-born children would fail to survive infancy. By 2015, this number had been beaten back to just 4 in 1,000. The benefits of technological development just keep landing.
We don’t have to go back to the 1800s or the 1950s for contrast. The momentum of this global technological development has reshaped very recent history. By way of illustration in 1980, 40% of the world’s population lived in a low-income country. Today, only 10% of the world’s population lives in a low-income country.
All in my generation learned about the developing world and the developed world. These labels have long been past their use by date.
By any measure, our world is a much better place to live than the past.
These numbers seem inconvenient for many commentators. For some, painting the world as relentlessly bad and in unstoppable decline presents the perfect backdrop to whatever woo, ancient wisdom or god they are looking to promote. Journalists can fairly be accused of committing this offense far more frequently than TftD presenters. They generally are not though flogging crystals, reiki sessions or sermons by candlelight. It’s prevalence in news media appears to be a consequence of a long-building preference for new that is bad. It happens so much, it even has a name. Declinism; which is a logical fallacy defined as the belief, contrary to objective evidence, that a society or institution is in decline, commonly resulting from cognitive biases, where the past is viewed more favourably than the future. Rose-tinted hind-sight perhaps.
I covered this a little in episode #008 in response to Lucy Winkett recounting exclusively horrific news stories to reinforce some guff she was attempting to string together about Good Fridays.
I wrote then that, this is understandable. One might suppose that if people were convinced that modern life were terrible, you would be better placed to offer your ancient religion from a simpler time, to people as a means to find solace from the hardship and pain.
I almost wonder if Giles somehow heard this without realising it was criticism.
When anyone seeks to advance their own views by making a general contrast between how bad things are now compared to some earlier time, they are engaged in deceit.
The truth is that we’re healthier and wealthier than at any time in human history. We have more free time, we have more education. All because of advances in technology. Despite all the parallel advances that we’ve made in weapons and defence technology, we also live in a time of unprecedented peace. Battle-related deaths have been around 2 in 100,000 (a global average) for decades. This is astonishingly low. In 1960 that rate dropped below 5 per 100,000 for the first time since before 1900. By 1971 it had dropped to 2 per 100,000 where has stayed ever since.
Fraser has a problem with technology? Or does he have a problem with his inability to make appropriate use of technology? All our breakthroughs can be used for good or ill. If the problem is choice, is a bad vicar blaming his tools?
Listen to this:
FRASER: Because all this technology can also be a terrible distraction. That still small voice of calm is often frazzled by the introduction of shiny new tech. I suppose that is why many find their God out on a walk in the sunshine or playing in the garden with their children. These technological breakdowns remind us of the way our society is now inextricably bound up with a technological complexity that rules our lives. Yes, technology enables us to achieve so much more than our ancestors were able. It creates wealth, puts food on the table, allows us to communicate with people all around the world. But I also understand those who think we are addicted to it and can never be completely free whilst so deeply enmeshed within it.
‘Terrible distraction’?
Wouldn’t you rather be distracted by technology than by hunger, by disease, by how you barely knew your parents before they died, by choosing which of your daughters will die because you can only afford antibiotics for one of them, by the randomness of death from childhood diseases or by the superstition and hate that develops from ignorance?
Am I being unfair. I’m not sure I am. Giles is clearly aware that technology is more than just the screen in his pocket. He mentions the broad benefits it’s delivered such as food and wealth. Yet listen to him talk about people not being free.
From what do these people want freedom: Social security? Health? Long life? Clean drinking water? These are the kind of naïve comments you can forgive from an idealist sixth-former, but not from anyone given an opportunity to speak to millions for three minutes on a Wednesday morning via BBC Radio 4 in the middle of Today.
We’re not just enmeshed by the products of our technological advances, we’re, for significant part, only alive because of these advances. And we live objectively better lives because of the all the technology we’ve developed. We’d certainly not be able to lead the healthy and prosperous lives that we do, benefit from the culture, sport and hobbies we take for granted if it were not for the technology that apparently creates reason for much complaint.
FRASER: Some years ago, I used to be the Chaplain of an Oxford College where the chapel didn’t use electricity. It was lit exclusively by candles. Some thought this was deliberately arcane, and perhaps it was. But there was also a lovely simplicity to that space that some modern churches, with all their reliance on overhead projectors and whizzy sound systems don’t quite manage to achieve. And that includes my own, I confess.
I feel that Giles hasn’t really thought this through. Perhaps he’s commenting on only the technology that he feels is somehow intrusive for him, that is somehow a drag on his plans and ideals? His smartphone, perhaps, and the imperfect environment in his church for which he blames some speakers and a projector. Clearly it doesn’t bother him too much, or he’d have had them removed. He has a choice to make. There’s no fault here at the door of technology. If he wants to conduct services in a shrine to a pre-industrial world, what’s to stop him? If he decides, though, that he and his church will achieve their objectives better with a sprinkling of the fruits of technological development then he needs to be a little more honest about those choices he’s made rather than indulging in meaningless nostalgia and kicking up a blamestorm at technology.
Fraser also claims that technological complexity rules our lives. Is that a fair claim? Seems unlikely. Sure, it’s all but impossible to opt out of modern medicine, artificially extended winter days, planes, trains and automobiles. Why would you? But are we ruled by these ties? Am I ruled by the utilities that supply my house? Am I ruled by my ownership and running of a car? Am I ruled by the perfect coffee I’m able to make effortlessly each morning at the press of a button? Or by the dishwasher that saves me hours each week? No. I’m freed by them. I have more choice because they exist. But I’ve just strawmanned that argument. Fraser didn’t claim that technology rules our lives, as I agued against. He claimed that technological complexity rules our lives. I think Giles is still away with the fairies but his claim raises a topic that does merit some attention.
My father recently became a widower. 70% of his life was spent in a marriage to my mother. It’s sad that she’s no longer with us but it wasn’t unexpected and by the end dad had been her full-time carer for over two years. He’s gradually re-discovering his life in the community where he lives. Which has involved showing up at various gatherings put on for those of a similar vintage. He was never one for joining things. A neighbour managed to rope him into joining a session on how to use phones and computers. My father found it very rewarding. Not because he was lacking (although had you asked him before, he’d had said he was) but because he spent the entire time showing others how easy and intuitive their phones were, with a few prods in the right direction. My father benefits from two children who are much more than averagely able to navigate technology. So he’s never been more than a phone call away from a helpful guide. It feels to me that my father’s generation has done a solid job of getting to grips with the complexities of technology. My dad stripped and rewired several family homes. He fitted a central heating system to one of them. He knew how to set the time on a VCR so that 1) it didn’t permanently flash 12:00, and 2) it was possible to programme the thing to do the job for which it was purchased. Typing, though, was not something with which he ever became familiar. He was given a laptop by his employer in the early 90s. It was only used when it was absolutely necessary. Dad had no difficulty using the famous menu interface of Nokia phones. At no point, though, did he develop any understanding of the WIMP environment that dominates computers (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer). The modern smartphone has done a masterful job of replacing the mouse and the pointer with the tip of a finger, and, if you’ll forgive the expression, reframing the role of windows. It’s a brilliantly intuitive experience. The architecture, though, that underpins all the software design in our phones is firmly rooted in WIMP. What is often called intuitive software is just software that makes sense to people with a rich experience of using operating systems developed by Microsoft or Apple. Most people I know today who get the most out of their smartphones, retain a knowledge of things like DOS and UNIX, which are what predated graphical user interface operating systems of Macs and Windows 3.1. The touchscreen has made the whole environment much more accessible but there are fundamental concepts that dictate how this environment functions, which are as alien to some as they are familiar to many. This can easily manifest itself as impenetrable technological complexity. There is a need for a few more like my dad who can bridge the understanding gap between gen x and the boomers, between those who have spent an entire working life on a keyboard and those for whom keyboards were exclusively for paperback writers and secretaries. We here, though, need to be cautious of age being presented as too much of a factor. I have contemporaries with less ability to use their phones and their Macs than my father. These, too, managed to spend careers not having to spend countless hours operating machines running Windows 3.1. Smartphones made ubiquitous this age-old software environment. Perhaps we need a little more thought on how to ensure all the software is as fundamentally intuitive as the touchscreen interface.
This is just another example of a challenge where careful thought, policy, education and design can help ensure all of society can experience of freedom, convenience and enrichment that smartphone can deliver.
To dismiss the challenges of this complexity as tyrannical or oppressive is to fail to understand the nature of the challenge. Worse, it is a failure of curiosity. A failure of wonder and ultimately, a failure to care.
Lest we forget, back to Fraser who is now consumed with the musings of some academic French theologian.
FRASER: The French anarchist theologian Jaques Ellul argued that the problem with technology is that it comes to mediate everything we do in the name of efficiency – and because of this something about ‘simply being’ is lost. Technology, he said, has become the new sacred.
Really? Everything I do is mediated by my flat-screen TV, humanity’s ability to treat cancer? By the quality of clean water from my taps? By the game Angry Birds on my iPhone? And this technological mediation is all in the name of efficiency? Hogwash. Seems probable that your anarchist, Giles, was making reference to a very specific instance of technology. If he wasn’t, he’s full of BS. If he was, you failed to relay his comments in appropriate context, rendering them meaningless. Let’s imagine Elull was commenting on something specific. Something that chimes a little with the points he’s seeking to land. Corporate email, perhaps?
If so, even more claptrap.
Assuming you’ve sorted out your big idea, and how you’re going to finance it, business is about getting things done. The clue is in the name. If you’re paying for someone’s time, you need them to be busy, but not for its own sake. You need that busyness to be effective. If email is more effective than Royal Mail, there will be a switch to email. Will there be challenges with the business adoption of an instant electronic messaging service that is effectively free to use? Sure. Have many of those been worked out by software writers, experience and thoughtful practice? Yes. If Ellul wrote those comments between 1996-2006 about corporate email, I can see where he may have been coming from. There was a tragedy of the commons. Email took no effort to use and was instant, so it was abused. It took businesses time to work out how to keep the advantages without incurring the burden on staff of 300 emails a day of which perhaps 30 were necessary. Good businesses, good leaders and good people work this stuff out. No doubt there are many workplaces that are stuck in the 90s. That’s a them problem. In any event, none of this is technology issue. It’s a use issue. One that can easily be solved with thought, policy and education.
Let’s revisit the near-enough-mass panic that Giles described in relation to the Iberina power outage. Madrid rolled out PENAM, its emergency plan. They had a plan. The plan worked. In parallel, the power companies systematically identified, isolated and fixed the power supply problems within 10 hours. A vast amount of the recovery would be automatic. Spain and Portugal were automatically isolated from the international grid. Nuclear power stations disconnected from the Iberian grid automatically. The re-energisation of the system over four countries (Spain, Morocco Portugal and France) was a dance of automation and standard operating procedure.
Yes, trains stopped and had to be evacuated. Most challenging of these were city subway services. Sure, extra police were needed in some cities but predominantly to help control traffic in the absence of signals. While automatic backup systems kicked in for hundreds of hospitals. Much business and communication came to a halt as the outage affected internet infrastructure and cell towers. There were reports of fear and confusion. To be expected. There were just as many reports of many streets and terraces developing a cheerful ambience and a near-festive mood. In fairness, Giles broadcast his comments barely 48 hours after the power outage began. He’d have had almost no reliable information on what had happened. He’d have had what the news providers felt was newsworthy and what the trolls thought was clickbait.
This should have tempered his report of the incident, but did not. Giles did, though, close with these sentences.
FRASER: But I wonder if there were also some people who, freed from the tyranny of the internet and the train time-table, found a surprising lightness. Or something else perhaps – I wonder if there will be a spike in the birth rate in 9 months time? For a moment something had lifted – where older gods and more human pleasures could be given the time and space they need.
His closing comment would prove to be much closer to the mark than those with which he opened. Yet he was happy to indulge groundless speculation and indeed he led with his groundless claim of near-enough mass panic. Likely, I imagine, because it provided a convenient bridge to the rubbish he was planning to spew about technology.
Technology is again here conflated with business. The tyranny of the internet and the train timetable? Cobblers. In this case, trains and a data connection are in the service of paid work. Almost all of us work. We sell our labour, or the fruits of it. Noam Chomsky would have us believe that a job is a form of tyranny. There are powerful counter-arguments but if there is any tyranny in the situation upon which Giles comments, it’s a perception among employees that the boss is a tyrant, not that the internet is a tyrant, or that train timetables are tyrants.
It was the legitimate reason people unexpectedly had to sack off work and head out for a beer that resulted in the lightness. History is dripping with examples of people coming together in adversity, and shared purpose. The leap he made instead to tech tyranny was, at best, wilful stupidity.
If he is right about the birthrate, I can imagine this coming at something of a cost. A load of commuters freed from the office, taking to the nearby bars and restaurants as they improvised alternatives to heading home to loved ones. Let us hope that Fraser’s contemplation of this espíritu de compañerismo benefited from one other vital technological development, that of birth control.
But let’s look at those reports of fear and confusion, and what we might learn from needlessly adding to them. Within 23 minutes of the blackout starting, there were reports on social media that it was a Russian cyberattack, falsely attributed to CNN, the European Union and utility companies. All completely false. Malicious or thoughtless actors stirring chaos while commuters, families and students calmly dealt with pitch black underground trains with locked doors with no AC, to ensure everyone was safely evacuated in the absence of platforms in kilometres of unlit tunnels.
Fear and confusion. Yes, because some like to spread fear and confusion with lies and propaganda with little thought of the consequences. Others, Giles, calmly get on with things.
Talk about having your perspective and priorities out of kilter. TftD is billed as providing a religious perspective on people and events in the news. This? This is the religious perspective for which TftD exists? This is just ill-thought out rambling and disinformation. This has no place in the output of the BBC.
Unfortunately, he was not done.
FRASER: We worship it and the tech moguls who supply it. Every new app promises a kind of salvation, every gadget an ever better way of doing things. But is my fancy smart phone a tool for me to use, making life easier, more efficient. Or am I just it’s slave, its servant. Are the solutions we find to life’s many challenges just creating a new network of constraints to trap us inside?
We worship technology? What the, Fraser did you realise that you were 20 seconds short and started jotting down any old rubbish? Worship of technology, salvation though software? Oh, please, be serious. And the moguls? Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are among one of the least liked individuals in the United States. Did I miss a meeting? Does Tesla now recharge churches? Does Facebook now do Goodbook? The worship of tech as hyperbolic rhetoric is tolerable if somewhat fanciful. Worship of the moguls who supply the tech is a preposterous suggestion.
There are some interesting examples (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs) who managed to capture the imagination of some sections of the public. Both if not worshiped were revered and fetishised. With Gates it was mostly focused on his wealth which in nine years from 1991 grew from just under $5 billion to over $100 billion. With Jobs, it was more layered. He had an astonishing turn-around story, but also the air of the unconventional and a drive to bring beauty, elegance and joy to products that for 30 years had been uninspiring beige and black boxes. But, worship? No, not even close, Fraser.
As for slave or master? That’s on you, you muppet. Your decisions, your strength of character, enough projecting your flaws and bad choices on the tech bros and the shiny toys they make. If you’re trapped in some new network, good to hear you’ve identified the problem. Surely, you’re now halfway to solving it. Now just get on and do that. Please, though, enough with broadcasting your journey. TftD is not a self-help slot. Although I can imagine it would be incalculably better if it were. Which illustrates just how low the bar is set by this brainless simpering.
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