RIP Tom Magliozzi, gentle guide for the technologically perplexed

Tom Magliozzi

Like thousands of others, I was sad to read on Monday of the death of Tom Magliozzi, one half of Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers, of public radio’s extremely popular show, Car Talk. 

The bad jokes and worse puns of Tom and his brother Ray have been keeping us smiling on weekend mornings for years — still do, in reruns, even though they stopped doing live shows in 2012. Sure, it was interesting to hear them analyze the car problems people called in about, but the real attraction has been Click and Clack’s gregarious, wise-cracking, self-deprecating personalities. I can’t remember ever hearing them make a caller feel stupid. I doubt they ever did.

The show’s chemistry has always stuck me as paradoxical. The atmosphere seemed so easy-going, so comfortable, so normal, but it was appealing largely, I suspect, because that sort of interaction isn’t really normal any more. More than any show I can think of, Car Talk conveyed a feeling of inclusion that’s missing from the stressed out, brusque, impersonal interactions that prevail in the everyday experience of many, if not most people today, me included. For all I know, off the air Tom and Ray’s lives were filled with torment, but on the air they seem tuned to the frequency of a kinder, gentler era.

Another thing that struck me listening to Car Talk was how perfectly it embodied an apophthegm formulated by the futurist John Naisbitt in his 1982 book, Megatrends: High tech/high touch.

John Naisbitt

For those too young to remember, Megatrends was a publishing phenomenon, selling something like 14 million copies. At a time when the digital revolution was just starting to disrupt life as we know it, Megatrends offered, as the paperback’s cover put it, “a roadmap to the 21st century….…a new way of looking at America’s future and a new way of understanding the jumble of the present.” 

Some of Naisbitt’s predictions were wrong, as any futurist’s will be, and others were hardly groundbreaking. Nonetheless, some of the trends he identified turned out to be not only accurate, but genuinely important. High tech/high touch, I believe, is one of them. 

The basic idea of high tech/high touch is fairly obvious. Although we’re attracted by the powers and conveniences new technologies offer, they also can convey, collectively as well as individually, a coldness that puts us off. As Naisbitt put it, “The more high tech in our society, the more we will want to create high-touch environments, with soft edges balancing the hard edges of technology.” 

Naisbitt cited gardening, yoga, and meditation as examples of the antidotes we self-administer to counteract the depersonalization of our technicized workaday grind. Whether Steve Jobs ever read Megatrends, I don’t know, but his fabled fondness for skeuomorphs in Apple design reflected precisely the people-friendly qualities Naisbitt said technology products need. 

An Apple skeuomorph design: the iBooks "bookshelf"

“When high tech and high touch are out of balance,” Naisbitt wrote, “an annoying dissonance results….High tech dissonance infuriates people.” 

That seems to sum up how the airline industry has gone so frightfully wrong today. Google tries to strike a bit of high tech/high touch balance with the animations it regularly puts on its homepage, while Facebook tries to preserve that balance by concealing how aggressively it exploits its users' personal information. Social media in general is a massive manifestation of the high tech/high touch principle. 

You might think that the car problems Tom and Ray addressed don’t qualify as “high tech,” but I’d disagree. In fact cars and computers are both technologies we depend on utterly but don’t have a clue how to fix ourselves. For most of us this was true even before the innards of our automobiles became thoroughly computerized, and it’s more true now that they are. We’re as vulnerable facing a car that won’t start as we are a computer that’s frozen. Naked we stand at the mercy of He or She Who Knows.

Which is precisely why Car Talk has always been so existentially reassuring. Click and Clack were guides we could trust to ferry us safely across the chasm of technological uncertainty. Their infectious good humor simultaneously dispelled the mystery surrounding our machines and told us we needn't be ashamed of our ignorance. 

Not all mechanics, or all IT people, are like that, although more and more tech companies are pretending to be, following Amazon’s lead. Of course, as successful as it is, I’m pretty sure Car Talk really does operate on a scale considerably closer to the human than Amazon, or Apple, or their numerous imitators. 

Tom Magliozzi, you will be missed.

©Doug Hill, 2014

In Praise of the Counterpunchers

"

"Please, Sir. I want some more."

The humanities are in retreat. For years science and technology have been running roughshod over the arts in the nation's colleges and universities, a thrashing turning now into rout.

This is hardly news. A consistent string of news articles and commentaries have documented the humanities' decline, including an especially downbeat dispatch a little over a week ago in the New York Times. 

In June a burst of coverage greeted the release of "The Heart of the Matter," an earnest series of recommendations and equally earnest short film produced under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Backed by a prestige-dripping commission of actors, journalists, musicians, directors, academics, jurists, executives and politicians, "The Heart of the Matter" sounded what the Times called a "rallying cry against the entrenched idea that the humanities and social sciences are luxuries that employment-minded students can ill afford." In our race for results, the commission urged, the quest for meaning must never be abandoned.

Alas, it's a reflection of the triumph of technique that earnestness at this point doesn't begin to cut it. Celebrity endorsements won't reverse the trend, either. The truth is that the humanities have been losing this fight for centuries. And while they still have a place at the table, like Oliver Twist, the paucity of their portion will always leave them begging for more.  

In my book I describe four characteristics that define the fundamental nature of technology. One of those characteristics is continuous expansion. Technique always seeks to widen its sphere of influence; it is never content with stasis. As the political scientist Langdon Winner put it, “technology goes where it has never been. Technological development proceeds steadily from what it has already transformed and used up toward that which is still untouched.” 

Another defining characteristic of the nature of technology is its aggressive single-mindedness. Individual technologies can be subtle and flexible, but overall technology drives forward toward its goal without the slightest consideration of such niceties as fairness, good will or the common good. "Technique worships nothing, respects nothing," Jacques Ellul said. "It can be accepted or rejected. If it is accepted, subjection to its laws necessarily follows."   

These two principles help explain why the humanities have declined. Like a bully on the playground, technique is pushing them aside. The “creative class,” to use Richard Florida’s term, will thrive only to the extent it is able to produce products that satisfy the purposes of technique.

The humanities’ diminishment is in direct proportion to technique’s ascension, an ascension that has increased at an exponential rate since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Over the past several decades the social sciences tried to justify their existence by adopting “scientific” methodologies, concessionary moves that failed to arrest their dwindling enrollments. Meanwhile psychology has been subsumed by pharmacology and literature professors are applying Big Data techniques to analyze Elizabethan novels.

The Material Girl

None of this is to say that technique’s advance has taken place without human participation and assent. To the contrary, although we pay lip service to our interest in meaning, we humans simply respond more immediately and more directly to the sorts of tangible things that technique produces, the more direct and immediate the better. Madonna had it right, and her timing was excellent. We do indeed live in a material world, and it's getting more material by the minute.  

The historian of ideas Arthur Lovejoy anticipated Madonna's perception when he delineated the distinction between the "official philosophy" that dominates Western culture and the philosophy that men and women, in their heart of hearts, actually believe. The former testifies to the existence of realities superior to those of everyday existence; the latter clings to realities somewhat closer to hand. As emotionally appealing as the "metaphysical pathos" of the official philosophy might be, Lovejoy said, most people will always harbor at least a scintilla of doubt, "since they have never been able to deny to the things disclosed by the senses a genuine and imposing and highly important realness."

Alfred North Whitehead offered a more succinct expression of the same idea. "The basis of all authority," he said, "is the supremacy of fact over thought."  

Technology will dominate, then, but the humanities will never be crushed completely. One reason that's so is their effectiveness as counterpunchers. If intangibility is their weakness, they command the power of resentment. Eloquence, anger and humor are the tools with which the artist exacts revenge.

Francis Bacon

One of the early aggressors against whom the seekers of Higher Truth had to defend themselves was Francis Bacon. His introduction of the scientific method was accompanied by an unending string of attacks on the philosophers of ancient Greece for their worthless navel-gazing. Like children, he said, "they are prone to talking, and incapable of generation, their wisdom being loquacious and unproductive of effects." The "real and legitimate goal of the sciences," Bacon added, "is the endowment of human life with new inventions and riches."

Jonathan Swift

Legions of scientific wannabes followed Bacon's lead to become dedicated experimental tinkerers in whatever the Enlightenment's version of garages might have been. Meanwhile Jonathan Swift stood to one side and argued, with droll, often scatological amusement, that the emperor had no clothes. Those who read Gulliver's Travels in the days before literature classes were eliminated may recall Gulliver's visits to the Academies of Balnibarbi (parodies of Salomon's House, the utopian research center envisioned in Bacon's New Atlantis), where scientists labored to produce sunshine from cucumbers and to reverse the process of digestion by turning human excrement into food. Embraced in greeting by the filth-encrusted investigator conducting the latter experiment, Gulliver remarked parenthetically that this had been "a Compliment I could well have excused."

C.P. Snow

A more recent battle in what might be called the Arena of Empiricism unfolded in 1959, when C.P. Snow presented his famous lecture, "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution." The cultures to which the title referred were those of literary intellectuals on the one hand and of scientists on the other. While it's true Snow criticized the scientists for knowing little more of literature than Dickens, by far the bulk of his disdain was reserved for the intellectuals. Sounding a lot like Bacon, Snow said the scientists had "the future in their bones," while the ranks of literature were filled with "natural Luddites" who "wished the future did not exist."

F.R. Leavis

Again, a partisan of the humanities launched a spirited counterattack, this one fueled not by satire but by undiluted rage. Manning the barricades was F. R. Leavis, a longtime professor of literature at Downing College, Cambridge. Leavis was well known in English intellectual circles as a staunch defender of the unsurpassed sublimity of the great authors, whom he saw as holding up an increasingly vital standard of excellence in the face of an onrushing tide of modern mediocrity. Snow's lecture represented to Leavis the perfect embodiment of that mediocrity, and thus a clarion call to repel the barbarians at the gate. 

From his opening paragraph Leavis's attack was relentless. Snow's lecture demonstrated "an utter lack of intellectual distinction and an embarrassing vulgarity of style," its logic proceeding "with so extreme a naïveté of unconsciousness and irresponsibility that to call it a movement of thought is to flatter it." Snow made the classic mistake of those who saw salvation in industrial progress, Leavis said: he equated wealth with well being. The results of such a belief were on display for all to see in modern America: "the energy, the triumphant technology, the productivity, the high standard of living and the life impoverishment—the human emptiness; emptiness and boredom craving alcohol—of one kind or another."

Steve Jobs

The uncompromising spleen of Leavis's tirade certainly outdid the conciliatory platitudes of the "The Heart of the Matter," but to no greater effect. Neither fire and brimstone nor earnest entreaty will rescue the humanities from their fate. Meaning will remain the underdog in a world that increasingly demands the goods to which it has increasingly grown accustomed. Even Steve Jobs's self-proclaimed skill at integrating technology with the liberal arts wasn't as great an achievement in co-existence as is commonly believed. The appeal of artful technology is less a product of its art than its technology. Elegant design is great, but people pay for gadgets mainly because they work.

One hears often in response to the current hegemony of science and technology that the pendulum will eventually swing back toward the humanities, restoring them to their place in the sun. Perhaps, but the pendulum has been swinging in the opposite direction for a very long time now, and it still seems to be gaining momentum. All the more reason to enjoy and applaud the well-aimed salvo from the sidelines.

Madonna Image: Bob Peak/TV Guide

©Doug Hill, 2013

On Immovable Technologies

There are some Big Ideas in the philosophy of technology that I find very helpful in understanding what's going on in the world of machines today. One of those ideas is a concept known as "technological momentum."

Technological momentum is a phrase coined by the historian Thomas Parke Hughes to describe the tendency of successful technological systems to become entrenched over time, growing increasingly resistant to change. This resistance is a product of both physical and psychological commitments. We invest materially in factories and emotionally in careers. Equipment and infrastructure accumulate and intertwine; dependence and force of habit build.

Professor Hughes' label has its problems, for reasons I'll explain, but before I do let me note two recent examples of technological momentum in action. Both, as they say, are ripped from the headlines.

Carol Bartz

The first example involves comments made earlier this month at a Fortune magazine forum by Carol Bartz, fired last year as president and chief executive officer of Yahoo. According to the NewYork Times, at one point Bartz was asked if she had any advice for her successor in those roles, Marissa Mayer. Bartz replied that Mayer shouldn't kid herself about quick turnarounds at a company as large as Yahoo. When informed of proposed changes in policy, she recalled, staff members there typically responded with agreement to her face and defiance in private. Bartz came away from the experience amazed by "how stuck individuals can be, much less 14,000 people." 

“It’s very, very hard to affect culture," she said. "And you can get surprised thinking you’re farther down the path of change than you really are because, frankly, most of us like the way things are.”

The second example involves an even bigger tech brand, Microsoft. In August Vanity Fair magazine ran a lengthy dissection of the company’s creative decline under the stewardship of its Chief Executive Officer, Steven Ballmer. 

Steven Ballmer

The article portrays Ballmer presiding over a “lumbering” behemoth, "pumping out" tried and true products (Windows and Office) while failing to exploit opportunities (search, music, mobile) that have turned other companies (Google, Apple) into global icons. “Every little thing you want to write has to build off of Windows or other existing products,” a software engineer told reporter Kurt Eichenwald. “It can be very confusing, because a lot of the time the problems you’re trying to solve aren’t the ones that you have with your product, but because you have to go through the mental exercise of how this framework works. It just slows you down.”

That comment suggests why Professor Hughes’ "technological momentum" label isn't ideal. Momentum implies movement, but often as not the dynamics he’s describing lead to paralysis. Computer programmers refer to the acquired intractability of older software systems as problems of "legacy" or "lock-in," terms that may more accurately convey the obstinacy involved.

The fact that a software program can be an obstacle to change underscores a point touched on earlier: technological momentum is about more than stubborn geezers stuck in their ways. Technological systems become entrenched because they’re made out of real-world stuff. Companies can replace operating systems and assembly lines, but not without a lot of energy and expense, and inevitably the replacements have to incorporate some of what came before. An entire society’s commitment to a technology becomes almost impossible to reverse. America’s highway systems won’t be dismantled any time soon; the problem is keeping them repaired. 

Technological momentum tells us that technological systems tend to be self-perpetuating. There’s irony in that because the quality we typically associate with technology is progress, not stagnation. In fact both things are true: technological systems can be both disruptive and obstructionist, sometimes both at the same time. It’s also true, as any football fan knows, that momentum – forward momentum, that is – can be lost or regained. Steve Jobs did both at Apple, and Steve Ballmer is in the process, with the introduction of a new operating system, a new music service, a new phone system, and a new tablet computer, of trying to pull off the same trick at Microsoft. 

The greatest example of technological momentum is technology itself. Technology is astonishingly creative within its own realm, but it's incapable of recognizing any realm outside itself. To the degree that we fail to recognize that fact – which these days is almost completely – we surrender ourselves to the technological paradigm. Even sane people are beginning to think that the only way we'll be able to save the planet from environmental catastrophe is by the invention of some ingenious technique. Individual ambitions aim in the same direction; everyone’s out to make a dent in the universe on the scale of Gates or Zuckerberg or Jobs. These dreamers may consider themselves consummate innovators, but their thinking is still trapped in a box labeled “Technology.”

Image credits: Bartz, Tony Avelar/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Closed Mind illustration: Harry Campbell

©Doug Hill, 2012