The
cyber attack on Sony Pictures, besides being an amazingly effective act of
corporate sabotage, provides some interesting insights into the fundamental
nature of technology.
In
my book (Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology) I describe
four characteristics that are widely (not universally) shared by technological
systems. These are underlying, inter-related qualities that appear repeatedly in technological
applications, regardless of the specific field of endeavor in which they
appear, and so can be said to define technology’s inherent tendencies or
dispositions.
The
four characteristics are:
1.
Technology is by nature expansive.
2.
Technology is by nature rational, direct, and aggressive.
3.
Technology by its nature combines or converges with other technologies.
4.
Technology by its nature strives for control.
Here are some of the ways the
Sony hack demonstrates those characteristics:
Technology is by nature expansive.
The philosopher of technology Langdon Winner sums up this
point nicely: “If there is a distinctive path that modern technological change
has followed it is that 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.”
The motion picture industry is another technological system
that’s steadily widened its reach, not quite as quickly, but fast enough. The
number of theater screens in the U.S. rose from 5,000 in 1907 to 18,000 in
1914; there are now nearly 40,000. By the 1950s theatrical movies were also
being shown on TV; by the 1960s the TV networks were making movies of their
own. Today we no longer need theaters or TV sets to watch a film; they’re
available in airplanes, in cars, or on our smartphones while riding the subway
to work.
All these modes of expansion have been in progress
internationally as well as domestically, of course. Indeed, the Sony hack affirms in bizarre fashion just how thoroughly the combined technologies of the Internet and motion pictures
have penetrated global culture: Through their agency two marginally talented comedians have caused the leaders of two nuclear nations to trade threats with one another.
There’s considerable irony in the fact that there doesn’t
seem to be much the United States can do to respond to the attack, given that
North Korea is relatively backward, technologically, and therefore doesn’t
depend on the sorts of computer networks that would be our most likely targets
of reprisal.
Technology is by nature rational, direct, and
aggressive.
Computer software, hardware, and the Internet are mechanical
and mathematical (algorithmic) systems that run by logical rules, rigorously
following specific instructions. In that sense they are relentlessly rational.
They respond to those instructions when received without consideration of what
happens outside the system and without moral judgement. “Good" for a
machine means that it works; "bad" means it doesn't. The single most
important value for a technological system is efficiency—results.
We have a habit of underestimating how faithfully technology follows instructions. We needn’t assign human-like powers of decision to
machines, as Stanley Kubrick did to HAL in 2001, for disaster to occur.
“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” showed that blind obedience is all that’s
required.
Technology by its nature combines or converges with other
technologies.
Technology is irrepressibly catalytic. Invention leads to
other inventions; individual technologies and technological systems can be
assembled into new combinations; techniques invented for one purpose are
applicable to any number of other uses and spread outward into the culture,
spawning still other uses. Bronze casting techniques developed for the molding
of church bells became useful in the manufacture of cannons. Henry Ford
borrowed the concept of the assembly line from the slaughter houses in Chicago
(dis-assembly lines, actually); McDonald’s applied the idea to
hamburgers.
The microprocessor has spawned wave after unprecedented wave
of technological convergence. Computers have merged with telephones and
televisions and Wall Street trading and household appliances and games and
genetics and, soon we’re told, the human brain. Inventors are often the last
ones to realize the ways their inventions will be used. The Internet wasn’t
designed to be the world’s largest shopping mall, or as a weapon to be used by
thieves and terrorists, but it’s certainly proving itself handy for those
purposes.
The Sony hack demonstrates the processes of convergence and
diffusion in fairly obvious ways. In earlier days movies played in theaters for
a few weeks and disappeared. Now, thanks in large part to the powers of
digitization, theaters are the first step in a very long distribution chain
that includes pay-per-view, pay cable, DVD, Netflix, Amazon, On Demand, Hulu,
and any number of other channels, both licit and illicit, not to mention
old-fashioned “free” TV. Sony's hackers both learned of the "The Interview" and killed it via the web. How long will it be before pirated copies of the film show up there? Not long, I’d wager, if they haven’t already.
“The Interview” episode also demonstrates the fabled
democratization of technology, which is another way of describing technological
diffusion. The tools needed to become a computer hacker are very easy to come
by, and plenty of people seem to have acquired the skills to use them. Daily,
it seems, we learn of the latest fruits of their labors.
Technology by its nature strives for control.
Long before before human beings learned about agriculture,
we were using technology to gain control, over the threats of nature and our
enemies. Indeed, a substantial body of anthropological opinion holds that the
use of tools is what made us human in the first place. Nowhere has that point
been made more eloquently than in the famous opening sequence of 2001.
The lust for control is just as prevalent in the jungles of
business enterprise today, and international corporations like Sony use every
technology at their disposal to maintain and extend it. Indeed, the fact that
there is a Sony Pictures studio is a manifestation of a hardware company
deciding, as the home video revolution took off, that it needed to have control
of a steady supply of software to play on that hardware. The studios would
undoubtedly still own the theaters, too, if the Supreme Court would let them. Convergence and control go hand in hand. Their
offspring is giganticism.
The problem, as any spiritual guru will tell you, is that
control is an illusion, nowhere more so than in the application of massively
complex technological systems. Technologies allow companies to broaden their
reach globally, but in doing so vulnerabilities inevitably arise. This is true
partly because every system has glitches, and partly because the more powerful
a technology is the greater influence it exerts on its surroundings. The
effects radiate out promiscuously, and uncontrollably. Sony’s executives have
spent a horrifying week watching a steady stream of unexpected consequences
unfold.
©Doug
Hill, 2014
