information found ways to be shared before the advent of computers and it will go on being shared after the lights go out for good and the disk drives stop spinning. But as computers started to displace newspapers, stereos, television sets and library books, corporate interests decided to start charging rent on the use of information, as opposed to charging for products or services, and they pushed through laws to make that possible. These laws are hard to enforce and the information they are intended to hold for ransom is easy to liberate, with some unintended consequences. It is now possible to buy a DVD of an American film — or any other — in Beijing or Moscow before it even premieres in the United States. It also means that a Chinese or a Russian can generally use any commercial software free of charge, whereas an American has to either pay for it or be threatened with prosecution. The officials in these countries actually like intellectual property laws, because they give them arbitrary authority to prosecute anyone they happen to dislike, but, based on their record of enforcing these laws, they seem to like most people. Finally, let us consider the fact that American corporate equity, with intellectual property included, is being bought up by foreign interests, which are no longer happy accepting US Treasury paper. What this means, in the end, is that Americans will be reduced to paying foreigners for the privilege of using their own creations, while everyone else enjoys them free of charge.
Add to this the dubious American innovation of extending patent law to cover software. Software is basically speech — an expression of the programmer’s thoughts in mathematical or logical constructs — and software patents are limits on such speech, restricting what sorts of things a programmer is allowed to write. According to the very highly respected computer scientist Donald Knuth, the computer revolution of the 1980s would probably never have happened had software patents existed then. The existence of software patents means that any software project may run afoul of some number of patents, which are expressed in vague and tortured legalese, making it legally unsafe to sell software in the United States without entering into various corporate alliances and cross-licensing agreements. The only viable strategy with regard to software patents is to fashion yourself into a sufficiently large nuisance by having plenty of patents of your own and by threatening litigation against anyone who infringes on them, so that anyone thinking of litigating against you would opt to negotiate a cross-licensing arrangement instead. This strategy is only open to large and well-connected software companies, because all the smaller ones would be automatically bankrupted by the exorbitant costs of litigation. Historically, these large companies are also the ones that are the least likely to do innovative work.
This is not to imply that software patents are beneficial even for the software giants. For them, the software patent system is like a large wrecking ball swinging about the software industry, toppling this or that part of it. A recent example is the pending lawsuit filed by Oracle Corporation against Google, based on patents Oracle came to own as a result of acquiring Sun Microsystems. The irony of the situation is that many of the patents in question are essentially nuisance patents, filed by Sun’s engineers as a defensive measure after they had lost a patent infringement lawsuit filed by IBM. Sun lost, essentially, because it didn’t hold enough patents at the time. One of the key patents held by IBM and infringed upon by Sun — the so-called “RISC patent” — basically said, once you strip away all of the ridiculous legalese, that if you make a microprocessor simpler, it will run faster. One of the patents Sun filed in response (by none other than James Gosling, the father of the Java programming language) basically describes a software analogue of using a light switch to control a light bulb. You see, Sun’s engineers were competing to see just how ridiculous a software patent can be and still be granted by the patent office. The definitive answer is that the sky is the limit. The first software patent ever granted was the proverbial lawyer’s nose under the tent.
With regard to computer security, the United States is making strides in making its computers less secure. Computer systems are considered secure if they are very difficult to break into (it is never impossible, unless the power is off or the network cable is unplugged) and not by virtue of the fact that nobody is trying to break into them. In fact, if the general public is prevented from even trying, then we are to assume that they are not secure at all, because they have not been tested in a real world environment. For many years now federal prosecutors in the United States have been generating consternation and outrage in England and beyond by trying to extradite a troubled British youth, Gary McKinnon, who broke into some Department of Defense systems looking for evidence of UFOs. Clearly, American officials find it easier to secure their jails than their computer systems, but since it is not possible to preemptively imprison every potential hacker, this is not an effective workaround. Such prosecutorial zeal is very helpful to professional information thieves, who might want to hack into the government’s systems in order to accomplish something more serious — say, steal a nuclear bomb or two — by making sure that their security remains untested by helpful amateurs.
The third prong of the three-pronged attack on IT is the effort to maximally bureaucratize the process of software development via something called enterprise software. The programmer is now buried under layers of non-programmers: product managers, project managers, solutions architects, various other managers and directors, and let’s not forget marketing and sales. The product, if one ever emerges, is evaluated by technical buyers, not by the poor people who will have to actually use it. The software itself is built up of a multitude of pieces, many of them purchased and licensed separately, and getting these pieces to talk to each other often requires diplomatic efforts by a team of consultants.
Finally, it all has to be written in a language that is maximally bureaucratized as well. Imagine a language whose dictionary defines each noun as a list of other nouns, which are defined elsewhere, followed by a list of verbs that apply specifically to that noun, but only some of which are defined. Now try writing something meaningful in this language. You will have to be creative, because you will have to find ways to navigate the strictures of the language, but you will soon enough find that you are too demoralized to actually say anything new or interesting. Is it any wonder, then, that so few people want to get degrees in computer science? And so it happens that all the best software is now written outside of the large software companies and is free, while horribly bloated, bug-infested, expensive, unstable and only marginally usable software is more often than not the flagship product of one of America’s premier software companies. Information technology is one of the few sectors of the economy that the United States could be proud of, and these developments do not bode well for it.
The Cost of Technological Progress
Whether one succeeds or fails in any given technological endeavor, technological progress itself exacts a high cost on both the natural and the man-made environment. Both in the former Soviet Union and in North America, the landscape has fallen victim to a massive, centrally managed uglification program. Moscow’s central planners put up identical drab and soulless buildings throughout the vastness of Soviet territory, disregarding regional architectural traditions and erasing local culture. America’s land developers have played a largely similar role, with a similarly ghastly result: the United States of Generica, where many places can be told apart only by reading their highway signs. The commonplace result is a place not worth caring about — whether you are from there or not, it is just like most other such places in the world.
The Soviet public’s faith in science and technology was severely shaken by the explosion of nuclear reactor number four at Chernobyl. Not only did the disaster itself expose an obvious lack of technical competence (it was caused, it later turned out, by the technical incompetence of some political appointees), but the lack of truthfulness in addressing the immediate consequences and in communicating the true state of affairs to the public did much to undermine trust in the government, as well as tarnishing the prestige of science and technology overall. Initial public pronouncements that “the reactor core is being cooled” were followed by evidence that there was no reactor core left. Highly radioactive chunks of nuclear fuel and graphite moderator rods that once made up the reactor core were later found scattered around the reactor site. The catastrophe awakened a latent environmentalist sentiment within the population: these were their ancestral lands that were being made radioactive and uninhabitable for generations.
