The Daily Planet #8: Edwards and Hecht on the Technosphere

Yesterday's Daily Planet was on Peter Haff's idea of the Technosphere. Today's link is a discussion of Peter Haff's ideas between Gabrielle Hecht and Paul Edwards.

Paul has written evocatively about the development of Computing Systems and the Earth Systems Sciences in the (first) Cold War and his book on climate simulations (The Vast Machine) is really good. I haven't read Hecht, but this conversation is a reason why I should. I am ambivalent about his wisdom when he says things like:

Look at the climate negotiations: twenty-six years of work to achieve … what? A weak, not-really-binding agreement that won't even keep the world below a 3.5°C temperature rise even if every nation does exactly what it promised? I'm not optimistic about politics on that scale...On the other hand, there's real power in leadership, and certain kinds of visionary technopolitics could perform the example-setting that's so desperately needed.

I love the little asides in the transcript, like when it demarcates the speakers:

Paul (rudely interrupting)....

Gabrielle (moving right along, taking no notice)

I wish more transcripts made an attempt to convey the emotional tone of the conversation.

Being born into infrastructures means being pre-enrolled, from the very beginning of your life, in supporting, maintaining, and possibly extending infrastructures. You (we) pay your (our) electricity bill. You watch TV. You use a cellphone, the Internet, sewers, roads, cars, airplanes, and trains. And you pay for them. To some extent, you may even personally maintain some of those things--adding oil to your car engine, fixing your home router, cleaning out your clogged storm drain. Millions of people work full-time maintaining those things. So in some sense, we work for infrastructure as much as infrastructure works for us. And as Haff points out, if a major piece of it, such as a chunk of the power grid, goes down temporarily, a huge swarm of both human and automatic, machinic activity immediately puts it back online. It defends itself and self-repairs, as if it were autonomous.