Specter of Y2K as metaphor

It is a commonplace to suggest that the world is a dangerous place. Acts of both God and man pose risks. Yet not all risks register equally on our social radar screens. Automobiless kill and maim more Americans than Saddam Hussein ever could, but transit aid stagnates while the president requests a five year hundred ten billion dollar increase in military spending. Hovering over many of these threats is the specter of the Y2K problem. Are the computer networks on which our energy, transportation, medical, and military systems depend going to crash?

As with other threats, how we define and respond to dangers is as illuminating as the external events themselves. The Y2K bug may inflict sporadic difficulties or it may inflict social chaos lasting over several months, with economic damage that will take years to rectify. No one seems to know for sure. Nonetheless, most commentators make three assumptions: 1) prudent individuals can be prepared and will survive. 2) when viewed over the long term, Y2K is but an inadvertent glitch in the onward march of technology, 3) the same corporations that engineered and became so heavily dependent on these interlincks are equal to the task of extricating us.

The president’s commission on Y2K has given recommendations that remind me of the nuclear era. Many citizens of my generation grew up in the shadow of the bomb. Many believed that nuclear war was likely. They worried about its consequences, but they accepted nuclear weapons as a fact of life. The goal was to survive. At points in the Cold War when the nuclear risk seemed the most grave, these citizens purchased or contemplated purchasing bomb shelters.

Today we are urged to prepare for Jan. 1 by accumulating food and heating supplies sufficient for several weeks in case our usual sources are cut off. This advice may be sound, but it neglects at least one important social issue. Just as not everyone was in a position to purchase a bomb shelter, many poor and working class families in Maine cannot afford a few months inventories of food. The inordinate emphasis on individual preparation obscures the important role that governments should play in establishing emergency facilities available to all who needed them.

More fundamentally, we might consider Y2K a metaphor about the current course of our civilization. As with the case of nuclear weaponry, we perhaps should have spent more time investigating the origins of this impasse and less time in buying bomb shelters.

We have created complex and interlocking systems of economic dependence. Our food arrives via trucks that themselves depend on vast infusions of fuel transported from foreign lands. Key messages, both within individual enterprises and across states and regions, are routed by computers and dependent on their viability.

I am surely no technophobe. I was happy to replace my nearly illegible handwriting with a typewriter as early as middle school. I had an electric typewriter in high school. Computers and e mail provide immense assistance in my work. Nonetheless, by the same token, I assume all these technologies are risky. I back up every essay not only on a separate disk but on “hard copy.” I don’t understand why computers “crash” and I assume that every one could do so at any moment.

There is probably a happy median, albeit shifting and tenuous, between a mindless and probably unsustainable technophobia and the technological hubris that grips most moderns, even many on the left. Literal self-sufficiency is neither possible nor desirable. Every Maine community shouldn’t have its own chemical plants and steel mills. But the goods on which life depends, energy and food, should be far more widely accessible via systems far less vulnerable to interruption.

More basically, as we expend the reach and grip of technology, we should adopt as a working assumption the notion that human and mechanical error are inevitable. The more crucial the system is to human life, the greater the emphasis must be on redundancies and even more primitive backups. And finally, valuable as our technologies are, they pale in comparison to our greatest assets, the abilities of the human beings who construct them. When corporate workplaces fail to challenge workers’ intellects or deny them the time and opportunity to develop other interests and skills, more than long run profits are threatened.

Here in Maine, fortunately many of us still heat with wood, and despite Maine’s relative poverty, the practical skills of many of its residents may give us some advantages in coping with Y2K. The ice storm may have been a dress rehearsal. Nonetheless, the issues posed by this computer bug go well beyond it. I find our overdependence on technologies we neither understand nor control far more threatening than the military might of the petty tyrants that so preoccupy our political discourse.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers wishing to contact him may e-mail comments to jbuell@acadia.net.