Tech Dogg's Dox Tox
Posted in Work at 2:43:31 PM on 21 May 2007 | Comments: 0
Vain and futile attempts to master the mutability of technology ruin lives.
More or less anyway.
Don't get your shorts in a bunch. I'm no card-carrying disciple of Cap'n Ludd. I've talked elsewhere about my desperate need and wish to beef up my technical skills and knowledge, which unfortunately I've let go to hell in a handbasket. No really, I love technology. But just moments after I'd posted the aforementioned blog, it dawned on me just how futile it is to even think about trying to keep up with technology, to constantly revivify my knowledge of and skills in it.
Take, for example, the case of my great, great, great grandfather. Born about 1812, a calico (or block) printer by trade, he became an early victim of the technological age, hopping from Ireland, to England, and finally to America every decade or so looking for a new job in which to produce his handwork, and dying a pauper at the tail-end of the Industrial Revolution.
Friedrich Engels, in his book "The Condition of the Working Class in England," first published in Germany in 1845, pretty much sums up the life story of my great, great, great grandfather:
A great number of operatives are employed in the cotton- printing establishments of Lancashire, Derbyshire, and the West of Scotland. In no branch of English industry has mechanical ingenuity produced such brilliant results as here, but in no other has it so crushed the workers. The application of engraved cylinders driven by steam-power, and the discovery of a method of printing four to six colours at once with such cylinders, has as completely superseded hand-work as did the application of machinery to the spinning and weaving of cotton, and these new arrangements in the printing-works have superseded the hand-workers much more than was the case in the production of the fabrics. One man, with the assistance of one child, now does with a machine the work done formerly by 200 block printers; a single machine yields 28 yards of printed cloth per minute. The calico printers are in a very bad way in consequence; the shires of Lancaster, Derby, and Chester produced (according to a petition of the printers to the House of Commons), in the year 1842, 11,000,000 pieces of printed cotton goods: of these, 100,000 were printed by hand exclusively, 900,000 in part with machinery and in part by hand, and 10,000,000 by machinery alone, with four to six colours. As the machinery is chiefly new and undergoes constant improvement, the number of hand-printers is far too great for the available quantity of work, and many of them are therefore starving; the petition puts the number at one-quarter of the whole, while the rest are employed but one or two, in the best case three days in the week, and are ill-paid. Leach asserts of one print-works (Deeply Dale, near Bury, in Lancashire), that the hand-printers did not earn on an average more than five shillings, though lie knows that the machine-printers were pretty well paid. |
The mutability of technology ruined and virtually buried my great, great, great grandfather. He tried to keep up, but the Industrial Revolution peddled faster. He lost. It won. Why?
One Saturday back in the early 1970s,
my father,
a technical writer at Hewlett-Packard's Medical Electronics Division,
took me to work,
probably to give me a better idea of where he disappeared to every day.
After he sat down and propped his feet up on his desk,
he pulled out a red Bic pen,
a pad of graph paper,
and commenced to write his manual
in longhand.
Technical writers didn't need no stinkin' desktop publishing back in 1971! But that's my point, of course. My father was old school. He used pens, paper, and rulers to write documents. And even though he could interpret heavy-duty electronics schematics on the dime and scribble terse and precise technical prose with facile skill, he nonetheless smacked into a steep learning curve and struggled when it came time to produce all that material, by himself, on a computer. Up to that time, the staff secretary had handled all that "production work". In the end, he found himself displaced from a career by more computer-literate, more technically savvy and agile youngsters. He lost. They won. Why?
Although not nearly as severe and catastrophic as my predecessors, my experience hasn't been that much better. Take, for example, some of the skills and knowledge I've developed over the course of my life:
- Any of you youngsters remember COBOL? At my college advisor's suggestion, I spent a semester learning that.
- How about Pascal? I spent an entire academic year learning that.
- How about RUNOFF, roff, nroff, tbl, troff macros, pic, and eqn? I spent almost five years teaching myself everything there was to know about these Unix publishing tools. And for what? Know anyone who still uses RUNOFF, tbl, pic, or eqn?
- How about plain old vanilla, we-don't-need-no-stinkin'-CSS HTML 3.2? I spent months teaching myself that. Only to discover shortly thereafter that I really needed to know more about CSS too, to really take full advantage of the Web's capabilities. Or so they said.
You get my point.
When I start to thinking that I really need to get going and revivify my technical skills, the ghosts of my ancestors loom up in my head and remind me: in the big scheme of things, does it really matter?
Five years from now something new,
something better—which I'll also have to learn about once again—will replace it.
Guaranteed.
My great, great, great grandfather, my father, and I all invested years of our lives, decades even, in trying to learn—with varying success—all we could about our respective, constantly-changing technologies, only to have each one invariably displaced by yet another newer, or faster, or hotter technology.
My great, great, great grandfather was ruined and died a pauper because of changing technology. My father's career was cut short bacause of changing technology. And I'm at risk of becoming irrelevant because of changing technology.
Why?
Because knowledge is power: it's how the socially meek tame the technologically weak.
During the Industrial Revolution, the gearheads—the Arkwrights, Cartwrights, and Grimshaws—who owned the means of production—the steam engines, the spinning jennies, and the factories—maintained power over the workers by constantly changing the technology to decrease their costs. Because they could. In response, the workers, like my great, great, great grandfather, futilely tried to keep up, but failed. Miserably.
The '60's flower power generation, which ripened into the '80's yuppie nerd generation—e.g., The Two Steves—trampled the older generation—e.g., my father—by doing pretty much the same thing, only this time more subtly and surreptitiously with the "personal computer".
The Google™ geeks have similarly grabbed us by the ghoulies and seduced and beguiled us into believing that the "elegant algorithm"—e.g., PageRank™—is the technology of the future, the ultimate moneymaker that'll solve all our financial woes, well, the woes of traditional "bricks and mortar" companies anyway. Companies who produce, embrace, and promote the elegant algorithm certainly aren't suffering nowadays.
It all boils down to a lack of cojones in my opinion. It's why the technological gearheads of the Industrial Revolution exploited the technological airheads of the time, the handwork artisans like my great, great, great grandfather. It's why the 60's flower power pansies turned 80's yuppie herds of nerds exploited the computer-illiterate of that generation, the white-collar workers like my father. And it's why today's gaggles of Google geeks are attempting to foist the elegant algorithm on us all. They're overcompensating.
So why bother? Why bother investing, yet again, more time and effort in learning the latest and hottest new technologies? Why bother trying to revivify my technical knowledge and skills? Will Google be replaced? Yes. Will Java be replaced? Yes. Will Web 2.0 be replaced? Yes. No doubt by, heh heh, Web 3.0. And sometime in the future, I'm going to have to do it all over again. And again. And again. Until I die.
I'll always have second thoughts, but the truth is that I love technology. Always and forever. That's why I bother, I guess. Put it on my gravestone.
