Jacques Ellul on technology, freedom and moral judgment

Technology will not tolerate any judgment being passed on it. Or rather: Technologists do not easily tolerate people expressing an ethical or moral judgment on what they do.

But the expression of ethical, moral and spiritual judgments is actually the highest freedom of mankind.

...So whatever I say about technology and about technologists themselves is unimportant to them.

It won't deter them from what they are doing. They are now set in their course. They are so conditioned.

For a technologist is not free. He is conditioned by his training, by his experiences and by the objectives which he must reach.

He is not free in the execution of his task. He does what technology demands of him. That's why I think freedom and technology contradict each other.

-Jacques Ellul
The Betrayal of Technology: A Portrait of Jacques Ellul (~28:00 mark)

Ellul of course speaks broadly. After all, no matter their vocation few people tolerate moral judgment on their work.

One could debate what he means about the expression of judgments as the highest freedom. But it is certainly a higher freedom than that of instrumental reason.

The "conditioning" of technologists is not simply the kind of habit one expects of a virtuous man. Rather, it is a discipline bordering on the penal. Without conscious effort, efficiency and neutrality towards ultimate matters easily become the highest virtues. Here is a curious overlap between a technological focus, careerism and consumerism.

Especially in bioethical debates, technological experts and pretenders to expertise often appeal to freedom from moral censure. Ellul's often radical philosophy suggests this phenomenon is in fact the slavery of a man in servitude to his tools.

Vatican now on Twitter

Joining the social networking trend of 2009, the Vatican has a twitter feed, according to Catholic News Agency.

Its account name is unpoetic but functional: News_Va_en

Having noticed the Italian-language announcement from Vatican Radio by way of Paolo Rodari, I was among the English-language feed's first twenty followers. However, I made the mistake of breaking the news via Twitter alone, not thinking to add a blog entry.

Brains beat machines

On the Internet, transhumanism may be belittled as much as it is praised. Its science fiction dreams predict artificial intelligence, immortality through computing, and the wholesale re-engineering of mankind. Rev. David B. Hart described it as “a sensibility formed more by comic books than by serious thought.”

But its proponents are generally technology lovers who believe that foul devil Progress is on their side.
Derision, alas, is not enough to silence their claims.

Over at the New York Times, Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang evaluate the prospective match-up of Computers vs. Brains.

Of the brain, they say:

One cubic centimeter of human brain tissue, which would fill a thimble, contains 50 million neurons; several hundred miles of axons, the wires over which neurons send signals; and close to a trillion (that’s a million million) synapses, the connections between neurons... unlike a computer, connections between neurons can form and break too, a process that continues throughout life and can store even more information because of the potential for creating new paths for activity.

Their back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests the human brain has a capacity for about one petabytes, one million gigs, of information. (They say all information stored on the internet only reaches three petabytes.)

The writers throw cold water on futurist Ray Kurzweil's optimism that Moore's Law (the so-far constant doubling of computer capacity) will overcome the difficulties. Even if it runs into no insurmountable design barriers, “By 2025, the memory of an artificial brain would use nearly a gigawatt of power, the amount currently consumed by all of Washington, D.C.”

The human brain runs on only 12 watts. If nigh-limitless power devices remain uninvented, substantive technological mock-ups of the human brain may never be possible.

Aamodt and Wang close on a humanist note.

...although it eventually may be possible to design sophisticated computing devices that imitate what we do, the capability to make such a device is already here. All you need is a fertile man and woman with the resources to nurture their child to adulthood. With luck, by 2030 you’ll have a full-grown, college-educated, walking petabyte. A drawback is that it may be difficult to get this computing device to do what you ask.

Hacker strikes web site of U.S. Intl. Religious Freedom Commission

Not only is USCIRF's Iraq recommendation being overlooked. So is its web security.

See the hack in action:



(Click for larger screenshot)

The ringtone and medication spam are viewable in Google's search results and in Google's cache, but not on the site proper.

This U.S. government site is a victim of the spam link injection hack. One victim provides further information on the attack, writing:

The hack I fell victim to involves some waste of space making secret changes to Wordpress source files and the Wordpress database enabling him to output a tonne of hidden links on all blog pages via a hidden Wordpress plugin.

It appears USCIRF itself uses Joomla, which is also vulnerable to the hack.

Brief research indicates that the hack is viewable only to search engine bots. Besides producing spam, the attack negatively affects page ranking in search engines and thus reduces the likelihood that internet users will find useful information from an affected site.

Given the mission of the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom, it is hard not to speculate whether the site was deliberately targeted by freelance or government hackers who wished to bury information they found to be disparaging of their country.

In addition to adversely affecting the dissemination of USCIRF findings, the bad security practices which allowed this hack may render sensitive information vulnerable to exposure and may help make public the commission's reports before they are intended to be released.

The U.S. State Department isn't paying much attention to the USCIRF's Iraq recommendation. Thanks to these hackers, internet users won't be paying attention either.

Apollo 8's 1968 Christmas Message

Forty years ago, broadcasting from lunar orbit, the astronauts William Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman read the first ten lines of Genesis in a live television broadcast.



Writing from the good Earth, forty years later, I too wish a Merry Christmas to you all!

Experiments in Virtual Living: Law and Justice in Second Life

Second Life, the virtual world created by Linden Labs and a few hundred thousand users, makes for a living laboratory in political science. One nice essay examines the politics of Second Life, tracing its subsidized and well-regulated beginnings to its quasi-anarchic present:

There are no central regulatory authorities. You cannot file abuse reports for fraud. You have no way to know if someone is a known fraud or a reputable businessperson. Although word-of-mouth helps to spread the reputation, that’s all there is. There are also no taxes. And until very recently, there was no control on the kind of content that you could sell.

Some communities established, locally, a way to deal with frauds and abuse from either producers or consumers. On a mall, for instance, it’s customary to kick out a fraudulent merchant; but they’ll simply move to the mall next door, defame the previous mall owner, and business goes on as usual. There is no way to file a suit against someone. Consumers have no rights and no way to enforce them, even if they managed to band together to protest (which they do, but are mostly ignored); producers can be ripped off using several techniques, and they have no way to legitimately claim for justice.

If the technology and economy supported the effort, this situation would be a nice test case for the Libertarian dream of private law and justice committees.

A Local Myspace Clone for Catholics and Other Christians

GodSpace is a Denver-based social networking site that has been developing nicely, though it has had its growing pains. Any of my fellow locals might profit by it, as it has been heavily advertised among young Catholics in the area. There are only so many viable social networks, though I wish them the best.

Colorado Business Blogs

The Tech sector has been driven by "angel investors," well-moneyed men who swoop down upon a budding business venture to nurse it into success with capital, connections, and advice.

Two of them are blogging from Colorado: 5280 Angel and Colorado Startups.

I discovered both through the Stumbleupon toolbar, which combines the lethargy of channel-surfing with the surprising world of social bookmarking. I'm quite indebted to Stumbleupon for driving thousands of visitors to my very minor venture into the world of webapps, semi-fluent.com

Your Own Personal Missile Silo

Timothy Bendel often stamps "RKBA" on his work. It's an acronym for the Second Amendment "Right to Keep and Bear Arms."

"When you have the right to own and carry guns, you have all your other rights," he explains.

America is a great country. Here, Bendel is not only free to carry guns, but free to own an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile silo. He bought it on the Internet in March for less than $400,000, and recently gave me a tour. Built in 1960, it was on alert during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was decommissioned in 1965 as more advanced missiles came on line.

Bendel lives here with his wife in the former officers' quarters, 20 feet beneath the windswept plains northwest of Cheyenne. Bendel also works here with three partners in 15,000 square feet of reinforced concrete that once housed an Atlas-E missile with a nuclear warhead.
Missile silo is gateway to final frontier

Bendel's sister is a friend of mine, though I've only met him once or twice. I heard from her there was a successful test up at his facilities this summer which resulted in a pillar of fire. Supposedly this spooked some locals, but since it happened in Chugwater, Wyoming, it never made the news.

Here's his company website. I can't believe he got that missile silo for only $400K.

He says "If you want to live your life in a free way, you've got to get away from all this authority. Ultimately, you'll need to get off the planet." I didn't know he was such a Mal Reynolds type.

There's some good advice on getting into the tech sector with a Liberal Arts degree over at Darwin Catholic

Another Dying Language...

A father laments that his son's peers might never learn BASIC:

Microsoft and Apple and all the big-time education-computerizing reformers of the MIT Media Lab are failing, miserably. For all of their high-flown education initiatives (like the "$100 laptop"), they seem bent on providing information consumption devices, not tools that teach creative thinking and technological mastery.
David Brin
Why Johnny Can't Code

This article has many good points about the loss of under-the-GUI computer skills. Besides good old Logowriter on the elementary school's Apple IIe, I had at home an old Atari 400 with BASIC support. My dad would type in programs from preteen geek magazines, which would inevitably fail due to a typo somewhere. QBasic was a bit more productive for me. Then a few years later I was dumb enough to blow over $150 on Borland C++ 4.0 for Windows. Without any clue, I tried to learn the language by following a book. Ignorant of the included command-line interpreter, I tried to write DOS programs in a Windows environment. Ah, wasted youth. I was a little like the Koreans who first learned Christianity from books picked up in the Beijing court.

At last I got my hands on a DOS compiler, learning C alongside PASCAL. My one brief peak of high school popularity involved my near-exclusive ability to program games for the TI-85 calculator. I don't think many teachers ever realized that students weren't really "studying math."

Though I jumped the Computer Science boat to learn Latin and Greek, that hobby was certainly more productive than my videogaming, and the loss of BASIC-type programs is truly lamentable.

A Speedbump on the Embryonic Research Road

The UK, having removed anonymity for IVF sp*rm donors, is facing a shortage of willing men. This could have an impact on embryonic research. The negative effects for female egg donors have been previously discussed here.

In Defense of Skilled Labor

Several sites have been buzzing about Matthew B. Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft, a defense of blue-collar labor against the technology-worship of the dominant educational regimen.

Because craftsmanship refers to objective standards that do not issue from the self and its desires, it poses a challenge to the ethic of consumerism, as the sociologist Richard Sennett has recently argued. The craftsman is proud of what he has made, and cherishes it, while the consumer discards things that are perfectly serviceable in his restless pursuit of the new. The craftsman is then more possessive, more tied to what is present, the dead incarnation of past labor; the consumer is more free, more imaginative, and so more valorous according to those who would sell us things. Being able to think materially about material goods, hence critically, gives one some independence from the manipulations of marketing, which typically divert attention from what a thing is to a back-story intimated through associations, the point of which is to exaggerate minor differences between brands. Knowing the production narrative, or at least being able to plausibly imagine it, renders the social narrative of the advertisement less potent. The tradesman has an impoverished fantasy life compared to the ideal consumer; he is more utilitarian and less given to soaring hopes. But he is also more autonomous.

I must admit some displeasure with the choice of the word "utilitarian." Whenever utilitarian appears in ethical essays, it's almost always pejorative. It is commonly used to mean precisely a subjective standard issuing from the self, or society, and its desires. Crawford uses the term in opposition to imaginative of course, but "practical" or "pragmatic" seems to be the bon mot here.

But besides this one hitch, the piece contains many gems:

The craftsman’s habitual deference is not toward the New, but toward the distinction between the Right Way and the Wrong Way. However narrow in its application, this is a rare appearance in contemporary life—a disinterested, articulable, and publicly affirmable idea of the good. Such a strong ontology is somewhat at odds with the cutting-edge institutions of the new capitalism, and with the educational regime that aims to supply those institutions with suitable workers—pliable generalists unfettered by any single set of skills.

Finally, one passage invokes a contrarian interpretation to the economics of self-interest:

Contradicting the assumptions of "rational behavior" of classical economics, it was found that when employers would increase the piece rate in order to boost production, it actually had the opposite effect: workers would produce less, as now they could meet their fixed needs with less work. Eventually it was learned that the only way to get them to work harder was to play upon the imagination, stimulating new needs and wants. The habituation of workers to the assembly line was thus perhaps made easier by another innovation of the early twentieth century: consumer debt.

One of my college professors once touched upon this interpretation of the rise of capitalism, but I know neither its provenance nor its fundamental soundness. Should any reader know, please enlighten me.

Virtual Politics, Virtual Insanity, Real Comedy

"You've performed quite well, sir," he said. "You are not a noob."

I still can't figure out if a Washington Post report on a virtual town hall meeting by "presidential hopeful" Mark Warner is a real or a joke:

By the time everybody figured out how to sit down, they had lost the governor. "[The] guy was here, where did he go?" Zon inquired. "Five bucks says he split because of the low turnout."

Actually, Warner created the low turnout. Shortly before he flew onto the scene, his aides cleared the virtual room of all uninvited guests, including an avatar called Xtof Sao who was demanding a kiss from another avatar named Chat Parrot. This produced a protest from the usual Second Life crowd.

Cyberpunks, how far have ye fallen!

Introducing Semi-Fluent.com, a Useful Tool for Language Study!

Among other projects I've been working on, I've developed a modest web site which speeds up reading foreign-language websites considerably.

For people with a basic grasp of grammar, vocabulary is the primary issue. When reading a foreign-language newspaper, even a good browser toolbar does not eliminate the tedium and distraction of vocabulary look-up.

So my little webpage at Semi-fluent.com speeds things up. You can paste in a chunk of text from the source of your choice and each word will be hyperlinked into any available bilingual dictionary. Clicking on each word will pop-up a window containing the word entry and its grammatical analysis. One can skip over known words and word forms and research unknown words with ease--and most importantly, without breaking one's concentration on the text at hand.

At the moment Spanish, Italian, and Latin are available.

If anyone knows of other good on-line bilingual dictionaries which accept(and, preferably, analyze) inflected word forms, let me know. I'm eager to broaden my site's capabilities.

(New Feature as of 9/12: Automated Vocabulary List Creation)

I am also developing a plug-in for bilingual blogs and websites to render pages more accessible to non-native readers. This should be a great boon to such webmasters.

The site is still under construction, but I believe it is close enough to completion to receive public input. Comments on layout and functionality are welcome here, though I will soon have contact information set up over at the website.

Should you find the site useful, please spread it around. Websites, like manure, work best that way.

Denver Catholics Launching MySpace Clone, "Godspace"

Heard about this at Theology on Tap tonight. We'll see how it works out.

CGN: Computer-Generated News

I wasn't imagining things after all. Max Headroom has a prototype in Business Journalism:

First it was the typewriter, then the teleprinter. Now a US news service has found a way to replace human beings in the newsroom and is instead using computers to write some of its stories.

Thomson Financial, the business information group, has been using computers to generate some stories since March and is so pleased with the results that it plans to expand the practice.

The computers work so fast that an earnings story can be released within 0.3 seconds of the company making results public.
-Financial Times

I made a go at automated religion reporting with my Papal Critique-O-Matic. Maybe with just a few revisions, I can put Terry Mattingly out of business!

A Post-Mortem on Tech Boom Enthusiasm

A former Yahoo employee has written an insightful analysis of the bursting of the nineties' tech bubble:

Yahoo was a special case. It was not just our price to earnings ratio that was bogus. Half our earnings were too. Not in the Enron way, of course. The finance guys seemed scrupulous about reporting earnings. What made our earnings bogus was that Yahoo was, in effect, the center of a pyramid scheme. Investors looked at Yahoo's earnings and said to themselves, here is proof that Internet companies can make money. So they invested in new startups that promised to be the next Yahoo. And as soon as these startups got the money, what did they do with it? Buy millions of dollars worth of advertising on Yahoo to promote their brand. Result: a capital investment in a startup this quarter shows up as Yahoo earnings next quarter-- stimulating another round of investments in startups.

As in a pyramid scheme, what seemed to be the returns of this system were simply the latest round of investments in it. What made it not a pyramid scheme was that it was unintentional. At least, I think it was. The venture capital business is pretty incestuous, and there were presumably people in a position, if not to create this situation, to realize what was happening and to milk it.

He also has some thoughts on stock options and productivity:

If there is a problem with options, it's that they reward slightly the wrong thing. Not surprisingly, people do what you pay them to. If you pay them by the hour, they'll work a lot of hours. If you pay them by the volume of work done, they'll get a lot of work done (but only as you defined work). And if you pay them to raise the stock price, which is what options amount to, they'll raise the stock price.

But that's not quite what you want. What you want is to increase the actual value of the company, not its market cap. Over time the two inevitably meet, but not always as quickly as options vest. Which means options tempt employees, if only unconsciously, to "pump and dump"-- to do things that will make the company seem valuable. I found that when I was at Yahoo, I couldn't help thinking, "how will this sound to investors?" when I should have been thinking "is this a good idea?"

Bioengineering Monstrosities to Proselytize for Monsters

...even the most liberal ethicists shy away from advocating the breeding or genetic engineering of half-person/half-animal. Why, then, am I rooting for their creation?

Because in these dark days of know-nothing anti-evolutionism, with religious fundamentalists occupying the White House, controlling Congress and attempting to distort the teaching of science in our schools, a powerful dose of biological reality would be healthy indeed. And this is precisely the message that chimeras, hybrids or mixed-species clones would drive home.
David P. Barash, "When Man Mated Monkey"

The author is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. Using science to advance ideological anti-humanism is a danger not just to humanity, but obviously a threat to science as well.

He also writes "it would be difficult and perhaps impossible for the special pleaders to maintain the fallacy that Homo sapiens is uniquely disconnected from the rest of life." Well, how many other species does one see bioengineering other species? How many other species are pining for a definitive refutation of their kind's uniqueness?

At work alongside Professor Barash's misanthropy is an unfortunate dogmatization. Darwin himself denied any qualitative difference between mankind and other animals. That denial was one of his most unsubstantiated propositions, but it makes sense as a hermeneutic method for the biological sciences. To elevate this method into an ethical or ontological principle, as many of his disciples do, is surely outside the domain of science.

I have at times thought that I was paranoid to see embryonic stem cell research as just another stick with which to beat pro-lifers. Now that yet another writer has come out and said in so many words that biotechnology should be used as a political club, such self-doubt is on the wane.

The author also confuses Cartesianism with Christianity, but that's a matter for another time.

link via Ross Douthat

London Times Refers to Wikipedia. In Seriousness!