Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) on the “dictatorship of technology” (1978)

Vaclav Havel:

Technology — that child of modern science, which in turn is a child of modern metaphysics — is out of humanity’s control, has ceased to serve us, has enslaved us and compelled us to participate in the preparation of our own destruction. And humanity can find no way out: we have no idea and no faith, and even less do we have a political conception to help us bring things back under human control. We look on helplessly as that coldly functioning machine we have created inevitably engulfs us, tearing us away from our natural affiliations (for instance, from our habitat in the widest sense of that word, including our habitat in the biosphere) just as it removes us from the experience of Being and casts us into the world of “existences.” This situation has already been described from many different angles and many individuals and social groups have sought, often painfully, to find ways out of it (for instance, through oriental thought or by forming communes). The only social, or rather political, attempt to do something about it that contains the necessary element of universality (responsibility to and for the whole) is the desperate and, given the turmoil the world is in, fading voice of the ecological movement, and even there the attempt is limited to a particular notion of how to use technology to oppose the dictatorship of technology.

“The Power of the Powerless,” XX, Paul Wilson tr. The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, edited by John Keane, with an Introduction by Steven Lukes (London: Hutchinson, 1985). On-line at http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/archive/files/havel-power-of-the-powerless_be62e5917d.pdf, accessed 20111218. See also http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/index.php?sec=2&id=5&setln=2

Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) on law (1978)

Vaclav Havel:

Like ideology, the legal code is an essential instrument of ritual communication outside the power structure. It is the legal code that gives the exercise of power a form, a framework, a set of rules. It is the legal code that enables all components of the system to communicate, to put themselves in a good light, to establish their own legitimacy. It provides their whole game with its rules and engineers with their technology. Can the exercise of post-totalitarian power be imagined at all without this universal ritual making it all possible, serving as a common language to bind the relevant sectors of the power structure together? The more important the position occupied by the repressive apparatus in the power structure, the more important that it function according to some kind of formal code.

…

It is possible to imagine a society with good laws that are fully respected but in which it is impossible to live. Conversely, one can imagine life being quite bearable even where the laws are imperfect and imperfectly applied. The most important thing is always the quality of that life and whether or not the laws enhance life or repress it, not merely whether they are upheld or not. (Often strict observance of the law could have a disastrous impact on human dignity.) The key to a humane, dignified, rich, and happy life does not lie either in the constitution or in the Criminal Code. These merely establish what may or may not be done and, thus, they can make life easier or more difficult. They limit or permit, they punish, tolerate, or defend, but they can never give life substance or meaning. The struggle for what is called “legality” must constantly keep this legality in perspective against the background of life as it really is. Without keeping one’s eyes open to the real dimensions of life’s beauty and misery, and without a moral relationship to life, this struggle will sooner or later come to grief on the rocks of some self-justifying system of scholastics. Without really wanting to, one would thus become more and more like the observer who comes to conclusions about our system only on the basis of trial documents and is satisfied if all the appropriate regulations have been observed.

“The Power of the Powerless,” XVII, Paul Wilson tr. The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, edited by John Keane, with an Introduction by Steven Lukes (London: Hutchinson, 1985). On-line at http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/archive/files/havel-power-of-the-powerless_be62e5917d.pdf, accessed 20111218. See also http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/index.php?sec=2&id=5&setln=2

Edsger Dijkstra on the name of the field Computer Science (2001)

Edsger Dijkstra, from an an oral history interview with Philip Frana in 2001:

In many places, departments of computer science were founded before the shape of the intellectual discipline stood clearly out. … You also find it reflected in the names of scientific societies, such as the Association of Computing Machinery. … It’s the British Computer Society and it was the Dutch who had Het Nederlands Rekenmachine Genootschap; without knowing Dutch, you can hear the word “machine” in that name. And you got the departments of Computer Science, … rather than the department of computing science or the department of computation. Europe was later, it had coined the term Informatics, … Informatique. … Tony Hoare was a Professor of Computation. … At a given moment it — today the English prefer Information Technology, IT and Information Systems IS. I think the timing has forced the American departments to start too early. And they still suffer from it. Here, at UT, you can still observe it: it is the Department of Computer Sciences. … If you start to think about it, you can only laugh, but that time there were at least as many computer sciences as there were professors.

Edsger W. Dijkstra, OH 330. Oral history interview by Philip L. Frana, 2 August 2001, Austin, Texas. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. http://purl.umn.edu/107247. Pp. 23–24 of PDF.

Non-paean to Steve Jobs

What with all the starry-eyed tributes to Steve Jobs, I found this harsher piece by Maureen Dowd refreshing: The Limits of Magical Thinking (NYT, 20111025). In 850 words, she remembers his mood swings, obsession with control, and unpleasant behavior in relationships with women.

Two reflections:

• It’s not clear to me that knowing more details about someone’s life — especially those based on hearsay — necessarily increases my understanding of how his mind is organized, and that is one of the central things to think about in this life. But at a minimum, hearing unpleasant details in a brief, literate column is an antidote to the overreporting about celebrities that gushes through much of the media.
• During the years when I was a a strictly non-technical consumer of technology, I was enthusiastic about the Macintosh brand and Apple, and their underdog status didn’t lessen their charm. More recently I have felt turned off by Apple’s restrictive design decisions, to say nothing of its marketing gleam. Jobs’ business successes have ripened my preference for drab graphics and command-line interfaces.