Digital Barbarism Mark Helprin (grave mercy .txt) 📖

digital world. It’s a seesaw, feast or famine, all or nothing, up or down, on or off, never stopping in the middle, because that takes balance and skill.

Which is precisely the point. What is required, balance and careful consideration, demands in turn effort, control, and restraint. When in 2008 hundreds of children were seized by the state of Texas and removed from a Mormon faction that has more than dabbled in polygamy and child marriage, two principles were contending. The first, that society cannot allow the abuse of innocent children, and, the second, that the state must refrain whenever possible from interfering with the family, much less taking away children. To honor both principles correctly and in balance, all actions had to be considered in case-by-case determinations, which was exactly what the state failed to do.

When there is power, it must be accompanied by discrimination, control, and wariness. It is not enough simply to resist power or simply to accept it. All my life I have been involved with machines—taking them apart, putting them together, making them, repairing them. A large part of Winter’s Tale is concerned with their role, their beauty, and their fascination. But although I embraced them in the book and have embraced them in my life, never have I surrendered to them, and nor should you.

Nature is not a machine. Rather, the machine is a part of nature, a hybrid of sorts, in full thrall to nature’s laws. It has evolved with the mind of man as catalyst and intertwined itself with the landscape as if it were a natural force. The trick is not to subject man and nature to the laws of the machine but rather to control the machine according to the laws and suggestions of nature and human nature. To subscribe to this does not make one a Luddite. They, like their modern-day opposites, had no inkling of such a thing, but simply were afraid of looms. Their contemporary antitheticals are unaware that machines can exercise their own forms of tyranny, and, unaware of this, they appear not to know that it is possible to use machines to escape the tyranny of machines, although it must be done with exceeding care, like setting a backfire or using venom in medicine.

To understand the origins and implications of the Espresso Book Machine, first consider the protection of civil aviation from terrorism, not for the sake of the question itself, but to the extent that it is a model of production. Production in this case is the extraction of threats from a predominantly benign background. It is relevant because it illustrates how pervasive is the lust for bespoke data and customization of all sorts now that these have been made possible on a mass scale by machines with certain qualities that ape intelligence.

In the case of civil aviation, there are complementary approaches, each of which should be pursued in its fullness and bound inextricably to the others, although that rarely happens. The first is hardening and passive defense: the strengthening of cargo holds against the force of small bombs, increased fire protection, fortified cockpit doors, further redundancy in control systems, basic anti-aircraft-missile defense, and the like. The second is threat targeting: the detection of terrorists or their destructive artifacts via various methods of categorization, profiling, selective identification, and investigation, so as to stop them before their intended actions. And the third is screening: preventing any and all means of attack from penetrating an assiduously defended perimeter.

The American tendency has been to focus on the second approach, because it is cheaper and easier than the other two. It should not be surprising that we deal with mortal peril by turning to systems analysis born of the computer age and entirely reliant upon probabilities rather than upon hard-won certainties. This has become our way of life, and its advocates, drunk on the bureaucratic elixir of information-getting, believe in it as if it were religion. Which they must, for in light of its fundamental ineffectiveness continual support requires nothing less than blind faith.

To trust the strategy of allowing preapproved passengers to board aircraft, with less or no security, one would also have to believe in the impossibility or high improbability (neither of which is reasonable to expect) of either a terrorist who has no trail but does have comforting bona fides; someone with comforting bona fides who has a radical change of heart; or someone of a splendidly trustworthy nature and background, whose family is held hostage or who unwittingly carries aboard a device that will destroy his conveyance.

To trust in the effectiveness of spot checks, whether of passengers or cargo, one would have to be not only a person of faith but a player of Russian roulette, as are, if only metaphorically, the executive branch, the Congress (of the judiciary it is hard to tell), and, ultimately and most significantly, Americans themselves. Falsely comforted by cost-benefit analyses, we forgo most passive defense as too costly, and, inversely, we favor threat-targeting. What is done least, although we make a show of it, and because it is difficult and exasperating it looms large in every air passenger’s mind, is screening. The excuse for incomplete screening is that the same benefits can be had more easily with “smart” targeting. But in contradiction of this a slogan from the interwar period is unfortunately apt: “The bomber will always get through.”

When these points are made to officialdom it recoils into the bosom of probabilities. In the mid-nineties, it recoiled from the possibility of a revived national air defense, despite the country’s many tall buildings and dense urban concentration, and the attractiveness to Islamic suicide terrorism of large cities like New York and Chicago. Now it recoils perhaps a little less, but we still lack comprehensive screening.

Almost forty years ago, I was in the Israeli army, seconded to the Air Force. I spoke imprecise but fluent and colloquial army Hebrew, and carried valid military identification and documents as well as American and Israeli