Towards an Appreciative View of Technology
At the Mira Flores lock, the gateway into the Pacific Ocean at the southern end of the Panama Canal, you can listen to one such soundscape: the idling of your vessel’s engine, mixed with the flapping and screeching of seabirds. The draining of the lock causes fresh water to pour into salt water, killing a new batch of freshwater fish every 30-45 minutes. The seabirds circle, waiting for the buffet to open.
The seabirds have adapted to a world created by human forces better than humans themselves.
If they do not strain to transform, they also do not strive for constancy. No doctrine of seabirdism elevates current contingencies into eternal values that imprison. The seabirds feast without worry on the unexpected bounty of salinity-killed fish. They do not ponder whether it is “natural.”
They are thankfully unburdened by the sorts of limiting self-perceptions that we humans enshrine into the doctrine of humanism. I think of humanism as an overweening conception of being flash-frozen into a prescription during a brief window of time in early-modern Europe. A time when humans had just gotten comfortable transforming nature, but had not yet been themselves transformed enough by the consequences to understand what they were doing.
Belonging has become an exclusively human idea to humans. We are still mean little inquisitors at the ongoing trial of Copernicus, resisting decentering realities that cannot be recursively reduced to the human. Man makes gods in his own image, blind to the non-human. And so we distract ourselves with debates about the distinction between natural and artificial while ignoring the far more basic one between human and non-human.
So I rarely listen to music. Music these days feels like a fog descending on my brain, obscuring visibility and tugging me gently inward into a cocoon of human belonging that promises warmth and security, but delivers an unsettling estrangement from non-human realities. Realities that are knocking with increasing urgency at the door of our species-identity.
Technology is more visual landscape than soundscape, but listening to pleasing human rhythms makes it harder to see technological ones. So even when there are no interesting soundscapes, I prefer silence. It is easy to miss frozen visual music when a soothing voice is piping fog into your brain through your ears. Perhaps all songs are lullabies.
But I don’t need to know. One of the minor benefits of an engineering education is a confidence in your ability to fathom function if the need arises, leaving you free to appreciate pure form without a sense of anxiety.
For de Botton, to resort to numbers as a mode of appreciation is inarticulacy. A visible symptom of a lack of poetic eye. It is a very humanist stance. One that reminds me of that famous quote (I forget the source) that claimed that it would take 500 Newton souls to make one Milton soul.
Scale and precision make for a non-verbal aesthetic. To have a true sense of scale is to give up the sense of being human. You cannot identify with the very large and very small if much of your identity is linked to an object that can be contained within a box about six feet long.
The more I study technology, the more I tend to the view that it is a single connected whole. Recurring motifs like container ships can turn into obsessions precisely because they offer glimpses of a cryptic God. An object for the devoutly atheist and anti-humanist soul to seek in perpetuity, but never quite comprehend.
If you read only one book about globalization, make it The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by Marc Levinson (2006).
That was the morning of the funeral of the colorful character at the center of this story, Malcolm McLean. McLean was a hard-driving self-made American trucking magnate who charged into the world of shipping in the 1950s, knowing nothing about the industry, and proceeded, over the course of four decades, to turn that world upside down.
He did that by relentlessly envisioning and driving through an agenda that made ships, railroads and trucks subservient to the intermodal container, and in the process, made globalization possible.
On one end, you have four fragmented and heavily regulated industries in post World-War II mode (railroads, trucking, shipping and port operations). It is a world of breakbulk shipping (mixed discrete cargo), when swaggering, Brando-like longshoremen unloaded trucks packed with an assortment of items, ranging from baskets of fruit and bales of cotton to machine parts and sacks of coffee. These they then transferred to dockside warehouses and again into the holds of ships whose basic geometric design had survived the transitions from sail to steam and steam to diesel. It was a system that was costly, inefficient, almost designed for theft, and mind-numbingly slow, keeping transportation systems stationary and losing money for far too much of their useful lives.
On the other end of the big story (with a climactic moment in the Vietnam war), is the world we now live in: where romantic old-world waterfronts have disappeared and goods move, practically untouched by humans, from anywhere in the world to anywhere else, with an orchestrated elegance that rivals that of the Internet’s packet switching systems.
At the beginning of the story, total port costs ate up a whopping 48% (or $1163 of $2386) of an illustrative shipment of one truckload of medicine from Chicago to Nancy, France, in 1960. In more comprehensible terms, an expert quoted in the book explains: “a four thousand mile shipment might consume 50 percent of its costs in covering just the two ten-mile movements through two ports.” For many goods then, shipping accounted for nearly 25% of total cost for a product sold beyond its local market. Fast forward to today: the book quotes economists Edward Glaeser and Janet Kohlhase: “It is better to assume that moving goods is essentially costless than to assume that moving goods is an important component of the production process.”