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Can our digital technology leave a legacy of quality and value?
House of Stone
by Del Miller
November 2, 1999
The San Andreas fault runs just a few miles from here, a long scar across the land that marks where this part of California grinds northward against the rest of the state. The fault follows a generally straight line from the Golden Gate to the Sea of Cortez, except in these parts where it kinks into a huge, lazy S-curve that concentrates the irresistable tectonic forces of the Pacific and North American Plates. In the serpentine coil of the San Andreas, this force has, over geologic time, lifted the San Gabriel mountains two miles high in countless, inchwise nudges. Eons of flowing water carved out the deep canyon where I live and lined the stream with boulders and stones from the mountain above.
Walking down the winding canyon road, a canopy of two century old oaks block out the sun, the very stream that formed the canyon is on my right and on the left is a stone wall which for eight decades has held back the mountain above. The wall is beautiful in a massively permanent sort of way, integrated into the mountain, both in form and substance. No two sections of the wall are identical, its architecture changing with the terrain and according to the whim of the stonemason, it is a winding dragon of stone, a perfect blend of nature and of the hand of man.
Now the contour of the wall swells seemlessly, almost organically, into a small stone building, once a garage for a Model T, I suppose, but since relegated by Detroit's passion for upsizing into a small storage building. The walls are two feet thick and embedded deeply into the masonry terrace which climbs the mountain face. The doors are built from solid oak and high up in the steeply pitched gable is a stained glass window, a lasting touch of the builder's pride.
I linger a bit, admiring the simple, enduring beauty of this old structure, then move on. Around the next bend I find a sweaty neighbor building his own storage building. He is nailing a thin plywood skin onto a spindly frame of widely spaced two-by-fours roofed with pale green, fiberglass sheeting. The shack is propped up on concrete blocks to raise the floor over the rocky ground.
He stops his hammering and steps back to exchange pleasantries and to admire his work. I guess he expects from me a compliment on his efforts, but instead I find myself glancing up the road at the old stone house. This inadvertent, unsubtle comparison makes him instantly defensive and he explains that he could never afford to build a structure of stone. He pauses and adds that a coat of paint and his new creation will look, "just fine."
I give him a polite nod of understanding and take my leave, but I don't really understand at all. How could a building, however shabby, made of manufactured components from thousands of miles away, cost less to build than a few bags of cement and the rocks beneath his feet, free for the taking?
If the builder of the old stone house had paused in his labors to daydream of the future, he might have envisioned that eighty years of technological advance would result in machinery that would make the life of the stonemason so much easier. He might imagine a machine that delivers the stones to the mason's hands, forms the walls straight and true and injects the mortar as he works. What a wonderful world that would be: A new house built in a day, but built to last centuries.
But something entirely different occurred. We instead invested our technology in awesome equipment to clear-cut forests, in giant lumber mills that peel the tree trunks into cardboard thin sheets and glue them together in presses the size of office buildings. Then, sawn to size and shipped across the continent on fossil fueled trucks, the finished product is sold by a lumber yard for less than it would cost to pick up rocks for free.
It is hard to imagine that the enormous megabillion dollar infrastructure of the timber industry is inherently more cost effective than would a more workaday engineering solution that streamlined the labor of the stonemason. Had, at the time, there been a reasoned debate on the matter, perhaps we might have chosen differently, but the chaotic processes by which society makes its decisions took the path that has filled our landscape and our culture with impermanence, fragile constructions painted and frilled to appear as more than they are.
Instead of a structure of inherent beauty that might last centuries, my neighbor's shanty will deteriorate and fall apart in a dozen or so increasingly decrepit years, a short-lived eyesore on an eight-million year old mountain. His choice mirrors the decisions that the larger society has made. We could have decided to build houses of stone or to build houses of straw.
Why did we choose straw?
Crossroads
I look about me and see today's society at a similar crossroads. The digital world is replete with tools of immense power -- tools we can use in any number of ways to build any sort of society we choose. Millions of computers, linked into an immense global web could make this world a better place by educating us, inspiring us and by tearing down the artificial borders that have always divided the tribes of man.
In a breathtakingly short time, our digital infrastructure has become the bastion of popular commerce. The dot.com mentality has swept the internet, where websites are judged solely on the fleeting and questionable merit of millions of undiscerning mouseclicks, as if judging sculpture by the blink rate of a the viewers' eyes. Computers are transforming into mere instruments of the entertainment industry, the content dumbed down to the Top-40 common denominator and blipped across our minds in hyperactive flash and noise. Games and movies drive the consumer offerings while the rest of the market panders to the quarterly goals of corporate IT.
I don't mean to judge the values and tastes of others, but I'm troubled at the means by which society generates them. As I examine the economic mechanisms that drive our culture's technology decisions I see no counterbalance to the sheer overwhelming weight of commerce. There is no voice with heart or soul that speaks to our colletive conscience as we lurch forward. Money drives all.
It seems that every decision is by the numbers, ruled by a faceless system completely owned by the principle of acquisition. Can this be the sole and ultimate purpose for the highest technological achievement in human history? Is that all there is?
But what can we do?
In our rush to live our lives, it is so easy to forget that the computers, the internet and the digital games are not the ends in themselves. They are merely a potential for creating change. How we choose to use that potential and for what ends is up to us. For all the evangelizing we do for the Macintosh and all the drum-beating we do in its name, it is only a computer, a machine, bits of plastic and silicon and metal. Whatever value there is in the Mac it is there because we have given it that value through our own will and our own actions. If we claim that the Macintosh is a revolution, then our actions must translate into a force for change or else what good is a revolution?
Anyone who studies the peculiar community surrounding the Macintosh would have to admit that there is something astonishing going on. Our little family shares a unique history of inidividualism, a tradition of fighting for what we believe in and a bond than transcends almost all social boundaries. We have made the Macintosh a vehicle for such a cultural phemonenon that the computer itself has become less important than the principle we share. The Macintosh Way is more than a slogan, it is, in essence, a philosophy of life and a statement about quality that transcends computers. If we all lived The Macintosh Way, it might be a better world.
As with any tool, the power really lies in the hands of the individual that wields it. So the decisions that we make in our digital future will come from us, here at the front lines of the computer revolution. We obviously can't all change the world on a daily basis, but somewhere in the back of our minds, sandwiched between our jobs, our family and our limited leisure time, can we not keep a dream burning to make the world a better place? Can we make the electronic future a house of stone, built on quality and values, rather than a house of straw, a hollow, impermanent, uninspiring world?
Not long ago, a reader named Clint Kawanishi sent me a thoughtful letter, pondering how we will use our technology to shape the future. He wondered if those people who have followed their passion down The Macintosh Way might somehow follow a different path than than those that diminished their humanity in a soulless, thoughtless march of technology and if that different path might lead to a better future for all. The answer, I'm afraid, is that I do not know, but standing in front of the old stone house, I recalled Clint's letter and my thoughts grew into this essay.
Now, many reading this story will forget it with the very next page, but perhaps a few will not. Maybe one person will take Clints thoughts to heart and might start a new company or create a new product, write an important book that will make the world a better place, or make a contribution beyond the boundaries of the electronic world -- and leave a legacy of lasting value and quality...
...and my friend Clint will have changed the world.
Copyright 1999, Del Miller. All rights reserved.
Del also writes the "Difference Engine" column at www.macopinion.com
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