Reinventing Collapse. Dmitry Orlov
a light bulb. You see, Sun’s engineers were competing to see just how ridiculous a software patent can be and still be granted by the patent office. The definitive answer is that the sky is the limit. The first software patent ever granted was the proverbial lawyer’s nose under the tent.
With regard to computer security, the United States is making strides in making its computers less secure. Computer systems are considered secure if they are very difficult to break into (it is never impossible, unless the power is off or the network cable is unplugged) and not by virtue of the fact that nobody is trying to break into them. In fact, if the general public is prevented from even trying, then we are to assume that they are not secure at all, because they have not been tested in a real world environment. For many years now federal prosecutors in the United States have been generating consternation and outrage in England and beyond by trying to extradite a troubled British youth, Gary McKinnon, who broke into some Department of Defense systems looking for evidence of UFOs. Clearly, American officials find it easier to secure their jails than their computer systems, but since it is not possible to preemptively imprison every potential hacker, this is not an effective workaround. Such prosecutorial zeal is very helpful to professional information thieves, who might want to hack into the government’s systems in order to accomplish something more serious — say, steal a nuclear bomb or two — by making sure that their security remains untested by helpful amateurs.
The third prong of the three-pronged attack on IT is the effort to maximally bureaucratize the process of software development via something called enterprise software. The programmer is now buried under layers of non-programmers: product managers, project managers, solutions architects, various other managers and directors, and let’s not forget marketing and sales. The product, if one ever emerges, is evaluated by technical buyers, not by the poor people who will have to actually use it. The software itself is built up of a multitude of pieces, many of them purchased and licensed separately, and getting these pieces to talk to each other often requires diplomatic efforts by a team of consultants.
Finally, it all has to be written in a language that is maximally bureaucratized as well. Imagine a language whose dictionary defines each noun as a list of other nouns, which are defined elsewhere, followed by a list of verbs that apply specifically to that noun, but only some of which are defined. Now try writing something meaningful in this language. You will have to be creative, because you will have to find ways to navigate the strictures of the language, but you will soon enough find that you are too demoralized to actually say anything new or interesting. Is it any wonder, then, that so few people want to get degrees in computer science? And so it happens that all the best software is now written outside of the large software companies and is free, while horribly bloated, bug-infested, expensive, unstable and only marginally usable software is more often than not the flagship product of one of America’s premier software companies. Information technology is one of the few sectors of the economy that the United States could be proud of, and these developments do not bode well for it.
The Cost of Technological Progress
Whether one succeeds or fails in any given technological endeavor, technological progress itself exacts a high cost on both the natural and the man-made environment. Both in the former Soviet Union and in North America, the landscape has fallen victim to a massive, centrally managed uglification program. Moscow’s central planners put up identical drab and soulless buildings throughout the vastness of Soviet territory, disregarding regional architectural traditions and erasing local culture. America’s land developers have played a largely similar role, with a similarly ghastly result: the United States of Generica, where many places can be told apart only by reading their highway signs. The commonplace result is a place not worth caring about — whether you are from there or not, it is just like most other such places in the world.
The Soviet public’s faith in science and technology was severely shaken by the explosion of nuclear reactor number four at Chernobyl. Not only did the disaster itself expose an obvious lack of technical competence (it was caused, it later turned out, by the technical incompetence of some political appointees), but the lack of truthfulness in addressing the immediate consequences and in communicating the true state of affairs to the public did much to undermine trust in the government, as well as tarnishing the prestige of science and technology overall. Initial public pronouncements that “the reactor core is being cooled” were followed by evidence that there was no reactor core left. Highly radioactive chunks of nuclear fuel and graphite moderator rods that once made up the reactor core were later found scattered around the reactor site. The catastrophe awakened a latent environmentalist sentiment within the population: these were their ancestral lands that were being made radioactive and uninhabitable for generations. Specialists with access to scientific equipment ceased to have faith in the veracity of official government research and began to make and exchange their own measurements of radioactivity and industrial pollutant levels. The results were not encouraging and many started to feel that the Soviet economic development program had to be shut down.
Until 2010, America’s answer to the Chernobyl disaster had been the handling of the humanitarian disaster following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In 2010, it managed to do one better in the aftermath of the blowout, explosion and massive oil spill at BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. The similarities between Katrina and Chernobyl included a lack of truthfulness in addressing the immediate consequences, loss of ancestral lands and political appointeeism (a horse specialist nicknamed “Brownie” was thrust in command, based on his credentials as the college roommate of a friend of the President). After the hurricane, the government continued to claim that the refugees were being evacuated, while in reality they were herded together, turned back by police and national guard troops when they tried to walk out of the disaster zone and allowed to die. As with Chernobyl, the government continued to lie until there was a public outcry, with much damage to the reputations of all concerned.
With the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the analogy with Chernobyl is much more direct, because both events fall into the category of technogenic catastrophes — direct failures of technology — rather than natural disasters. After Chernobyl, Soviet nuclear power stations were retrofitted with safety equipment that has so far prevented another disaster. It is not at all certain that a similar approach can be applied to deepwater drilling because of the already extremely high costs of these operations. Technology which can and sometimes does fail catastrophically, causing unacceptable levels of environmental devastation, but which cannot be retired for economic reasons, amounts to a false choice between physical survival and economic survival.
True to pattern, just as after Katrina, there followed an impressive display of official mendacity, fecklessness and shenanigans. Highlights included a video of retired coast guard admiral Thad Allen declaring that the well has been plugged in the attempted “top kill” operation appearing on news web sites right next to a live webcam of the selfsame well, gushing just as before. A truly astounding feature of BP’s spill mitigation strategy was to disperse the oil (by spraying massive amounts of the toxic dispersant Corexit into the sea) while simultaneously attempting to contain the oil, both at the seafloor and at the surface. Just as you’d expect, dispersal precludes containment. As soon as the well was tentatively cemented shut, the White House rushed to announce that most of the leaked oil had somehow miraculously vanished — in fact, most of the spill has now taken the form of a giant deep underwater plume that stretches for miles and consists of a diffuse suspension of oil droplets. It will remain like this for years, drifting slowly, poisoning the marine food chain of the Gulf and the Atlantic waters beyond.
It remains to be seen which type of catastrophe predominates: natural or technogenic. On the one hand, increasingly frequent killer hurricanes and other extreme weather events, a predicted consequence of ongoing rapid climate change, are likely to repeat the Katrina pattern. On the other hand, now that all the easily-accessed offshore oil fields have been depleted, deepwater exploration and production will continue to become more challenging and more costly. One of the reasons the Deepwater Horizon exploded was that BP tried to drill the world’s deepest oil well, but to do it on the cheap. The relentless pressure to cut costs is not conducive to improved safety, raising the probability of more giant explosions and massive oil leaks. Given the anemic response of the American political establishment to either of these disasters, this is more likely