Regardless of what may be reasonably inferred from the title, I do not completely predate computers making my expertise, like my self, suspect. Aside from the fact that people have been fashioning widgets for purposes of calculation since before cuneiform and the abacus; ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer) made it “online” some 8 years ahead of me - 1946. In one second this contraption could perform one of the following: 5,000 additions, 357 multiplications or 38 divisions (not simultaneously and not until the necessary keypunch cards had been properly prepared, collated and mechanically fed into its analog structure). The ENIAC weighed 25 tons and had a footprint of 680 sf feet. Its original task to generate artillery trajectory tables for WWII could have have become the proverbial “beating of swords into plowshares” when after the war ENIAC was harnessed to calculate solar ignition and weather analysis; but along came money and the math requirement for the hydrogen bomb - Go Team National Security by 'anonymous incineration' . ! - the same lame “national security“ argument Armament Inc. uses today to maintain it’s place at head of the line for the public dole.
note: the original vacuum tube diodes used for logic gates short-circuited when cockroaches crossed at just the right instant giving birth to the expression “debug” to describe repairing a computer "glitch" - more recognized today as (OE) operator error
Barely out of adolescence the inexorable massing of 0’s and 1’s officially penetrated my analog consciousness in a conversation with John H____, father of my Indian Guide boyhood chum Mark; H_____ when consulted with the elder Mr. H____, who at that time was an unemployed aerospace engineer, turned potter, turned Apple distributor while Steven Jobs might still answer the phone: “so Mr. H____, tell me about these computer things.” John H____ fixed me with his ice cube blue eyes; ruddy cheeks; impish grin and chortled in a WC Fields-esque drawl, “Computers will become as important to we puny humans somewhere between the invention of the wheel, and a change of life form for our species from carbon-based to silicon-based.” Take a minute to suss that statement completely . · . Picture being able to get cash at 1:00 am in the morning no longer yoked to bank hours for cash transactions, yet a public library on the other side of the country could now automatically post a notice of delinquency and levy $50 fine for a book you haven’t seem since high school. The first practical cell phone I can remember was with a young couple - neighbors from my 2nd marriage. He busted a hump delivering bottled water and she drove their 280Z. The only thing I could see the phone did for their marriage was to make him that much crazier when she left him and their two girls while she sallied forth to Vegas for a “self-esteem” junket.
The unreality of how much computers have conquered our existence is much like its binary origin - on or off; yes or no; +5v/-5v. In 1994, I sent an email to a brand new website with a funny name - Google; like googol - “a number that is equal to one followed by 100 zeroes.” In my email I said it made more sense for the cursor to default in the Graphic User Interface (GUI) - the next day the window opened with the cursor in the GUI (pronounced gooey), and their email access disappeared from the home screen. The seeming miracle of efficiency for the computer age is nothing compared to what it might have been; not even in the same galaxy. The scientists of Computer Languages pursued an esoteric ideal of a “4th Generation Computer Programming Language" - the ability to program a computer with a spoken language syntax. Google could have made that leap with its search engine, except that as Bob Dylan has described other terrain in our cultural landscape “greed got in the way.” - In 1999 there were a 457 (IPOs) Initial Public Offerings, mostly internet and tech companies; 117 of those companies on their first day of trading doubled their opening value - an ROI of 100%: return on investment (%) = (Net profit / Investment) x 100
In the BBC’s “Century of Self” the origins and strategies of 20 century business advertising are explained such that Google’s venal orientation is clearly recognizable amidst its “bells, whistles and surging portfolio” however much a pale echo of the dot.com Boom!. The simple venal equation remains the same “how little can you spend and how much profit can you take". The Harvard School of Business model may have been dethroned by the sheer mass of today’s data stream, subverting but not forsaking the value hierarchy Mark Twain once described comprised of “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” One of my favorite numerical accelerations has been the spiral of CEO pay to Worker pay; today that ratio is clocking in around 900% - for each $1 an average a US worker earns, an average US CEO will earn $900. Computer advocates have confused ratios with value or worth; the domain masters believe increased value is derived from Ad traffic, missing the colossal power of what might have been with 7 billion other similarly dynamic, hard-charging entrepreneurial human spirits each making command decisions on behalf of the greater good by providing 4th generation programming power to mankind rather than hoarding the bits and bandwidth like misers of old.
The obtuse narrowness of vision for those designing and effectuating algorithms, so weighted by ROI contamination, the business edifices of today resemble the great pyramids of Giza except for being completely inverted and lacking completely 'brick and mortar' substance - resting on the pinnacles just as leadership presses the apex of its excess into the back of humankind - ‘ole French proverb, “plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes.” The greatest delusion of any sycophant-surrounded domain master is whether the personal expression of the 7 billion other humans on this planet will ever be mute regardless of the filters, or whether a handful of people are even capable of database management on today’s scale no matter how many different ways they slice the barcodes. Leadership mirrors the media fantasy of a more and more homogenous human community, as though the flawed relations of an increasingly hostile world are rendered manageable by a few pretty pictures and some oft-repeated homilies - PowerPoint writ large. The capacity to conjure the virtual, is something out of a bad Gothic Novel. We now have dual sets of etiquette - one for person-to-person and the one in which facebook shares your personal data with human resources, The NSA, IRS, DMV and your ex-wife, but rather than providing a more clear sense of that person each successive data handler snips off what applies to whatever application being used to compile whichever version of your data and in so doing distort completely the answer for any question which may have been answered in simple open human interaction - questions which ought to have been put to the putzes and their AI (Artificial Intelligence) thugs who've created a cascading climate catastrophe using joysticks instead of phalluses, or fallopian Tubes whichever the case may be.
jts 12/9/2014
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