Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

No matter how petty a matter, a co-worker can appear to the man of 2028. Screening devices or not, the modern paradigm is one of time filled to the brim, of life choked and breathless. Potential has always been the overlord of will, and the man of the first paradigm finds himself distracted and drawn in different directions a hundred times a day, whereas the British statesman is prodded from without only once or twice. And when he wants light at his Italian lake villa he does not throw a switch or speak a command, he lights a candle, and enters into a relation with it—protecting it from a breeze or being overturned, staying within its dim light, alerted by its flickering of changes or movements, aware of its scent, warmed by its flame, conscious of its burning down.

Were we gods, we might be able to live well without rest and contemplation, but we are not and we cannot. Whereas our physical capacities are limited, those of the machine are virtually unlimited by comparison. As the capabilities of the machine are extended, we can use it—we imagine—to supplement our own in ways that will not strain our humanity. Had we no appetite or sin, this might be true, but our desires tend to lead us to excess, and as the digital revolution has quickly progressed we have not had time to develop the protocols, manners, discipline, and ethics adequate for protecting us from our newly augmented powers. In fact, as is the subject of the first half of this book, we often rush mercilessly and barbarically to abolish them.

The history of the last hundred years has been, as much as anything else, the process of encoding information: at first analog, in photographic emulsions, physical and magnetic patterns in needle grooves or on tapes, waves in packets blurted into the atmosphere, or in the action of x-rays recording paths of varying difficulty through tissues of various densities on plates of constant sensitivity. With binary coding, electrons as messengers, and the hard-fought mathematical adaptation necessary for control, we can now do almost everything in regard to information. We may, for example, look through billions of pages in an instant, or process and match data fast enough so that a cruise missile can make a “mental” picture of the terrain it overflies almost as impressive as that of an eagle.

And because potential has always been the overlord of will, and as the new machines hunger for denser floods of data, images have gradually displaced words. The capacious, swelling streams of information have brought little change in quality and vast overflows of quantity. In this they are comparable to the ornamental explosions of the baroque, when a corresponding richness of resource found its outlet mainly in overdecorating the leaner body of a previous age.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men of multimedia cannot improve upon a single line of Yeats. One does not need transistors, clean alternating current, spring-loaded keys, and ten-million-hour “programs” for writing a note or a love letter—and yet this is how we now write notes and love letters, going even to the extreme of doing so on complicated electronic pads that though they tediously strain to imitate a sheet of paper fail for want of simplicity.

I am not decrying the digital revolution per se, or recommending for you and your children the cold water, wood fires, and Latin declensions of my brick-and-iron childhood. I have always understood that the heart of Western civilization is not the abdication of powers but rather meeting the challenge of their use. And, of course, it would take a person of less than doltish imagination not to be attracted by the wonders and aware of the benefits of all this new stuff.

The British statesman of the second paradigm might well have lost a son or daughter to a disease that could have been detected early and with precision by the digital diagnostic techniques of modern medicine. The Titanic, four years in the future, might not have gone down—with him aboard, perhaps—had real-time thermal maps of the North Atlantic been available to its captain. And so on. You know the litany, because you are bombarded by it daily.

The impossibility of abdication is also due to the necessity of racing the genie after it has exited the bottle. Although antediluvian nuclear protestors have not, apparently, even a clue, they are on the wrong track. Nuclear weapons are now small enough, reliable enough, simulable enough, and widespread enough to be a rather mundane constant in calculations of the military balance (at least in regard to the major powers). The guaranteed action and volatility is in command, control, communications, intelligence, and guidance. Digitally dependent advances will enable submunitions scattered in great number over a future battlefield to hide, wait, seek, fight, and maneuver. For example, rather than a platoon of tank-killing infantry, a flight of submunitions will not long from now be able to land with little detection far behind enemy lines, where it will hide in the treetops or the brush and await patiently for as long as required the approach of an appropriate enemy target, such as a tank, which it will then dutifully pursue, engage, and destroy, its reflexes as fast as light.

No matter what arms agreements come into being, with the passage of each day a first nuclear strike becomes more and more feasible. The possibility of real-time terminal guidance as a gift from satellites to maneuverable reentry vehicles makes any kind of mobile deterrent just a temporary expedient. Even submarines, nuclear stability’s ace-in-the-hole, will no longer be secure bastions for nuclear weapons, as thermal and radar imaging from satellites pick up surface perturbations upwelling from their undersea tracks, and as the panoply of antisubmarine warfare is resurrected (as it will be with the rise of China’s submarine fleet), refined, empowered, sensitized, and its weaponry mounted on ballistic missiles that will be able to reach any area of ocean within minutes.

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