[tt] David Edgerton: Slower technology

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David Edgerton: Slower technology
Prospect
January 25, 2007

First, the summary from the "Magazine and Journal Reader" feature of the 
daily bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 7.2.22
http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/02/2007022201j.htm

A glance at the February issue of Prospect: Rethinking technology
as not just the new

"Invention-centered time lines are entrenched in our understanding
of technology and history," he says. The technology of 1900, for
instance, is taken to be the automobile or electricity; that of
1950, rockets and the first computers. To truly understand
"technology in society," Mr. Edgerton writes, "one needs to study
technologies that are in wide use and are not necessarily so whizzy
or so new."

True "technology," he writes, is about more than just "novelties in
information technology," such as iPods. It also means the basic
resources that society is still enormously dependent on. Wood, for
instance, "has become ever more important," he says, and despite
"all the talk of paperless offices," paper consumption has
increased. Consider the case of furniture giant IKEA, he writes.
The company profits from designing and selling furniture made of
wood products. Its biggest-selling product is not a computer desk,
Mr. Edgerton points out, but a bookcase.

The examples of iron and steel also show how "in a world in which,
according to the new economy gurus," people with sharp computer
skills "will rule a dematerialized and weightless economy, the
seemingly old stuff grows everywhere," Mr. Edgerton says. "Global
steel production is growing at 6 percent," he says, which is "the
same sort of rate as in the post-Second World War boom."

Iron "is perhaps the great material of the poor world," he writes.
"Whole cities of tens of millions are now roofed with corrugated
iron, just one example of a rapidly expanding old industry."

"Instead of the standard time lines of modernity measured out in
particular inventions, we need a sense of inventions and
technologies in which old and new merge in complex ways," Mr.
Edgerton concludes.

--Jason M. Breslow

   ______________________________________________________________


Our thinking about technology is deficient. We are over- impressed by 
apparent novelty, by speed, noise and general whizziness. We need a 
more grown-up way of thinking about the past, present and future of 
technology.

The term "technology" has in recent decades become closely associated 
with invention, innovation, creativity and the future. Today it 
sometimes seems to mean little more than novelties in information 
technology. Students of technology have a narrow focus: they study 
research and development, patents and the early stages of technical 
developments. But to understand technology in society, one needs to 
study technologies that are in wide use and are not necessarily so 
whizzy or so new.

Invention-centred timelines are entrenched in our understanding of 
technology and history. The technology of 1900 is taken to be the 
motor car, electricity and synthetic chemicals; that of 1950, rockets, 
nuclear weapons and power, and computers; that of 2000, biotechnology, 
information technology and nanotechnology. These are the bread and 
butter of historical texts, museum displays, television documentaries 
and many of the long-wave theories of economic development. We all 
seem to have absorbed the same account of the trajectory of modernity. 
What we have is an account that is highly biased towards the early 
stages of very few technologies.

We can illustrate the point with some counter-examples. The number of 
horses in US agriculture, by far the most mechanised in the world in 
the early 20th century, didn't peak until 1915. Even in the second 
world war the horse was crucial at least to some combatants. The 
Wehrmacht marched on the Soviet Union with more horses than Napoleon; 
it even had more horses per soldier. The horse was more important than 
the V2 rocket to the Nazis; indeed the V2 was economically and 
militarily irrational, killing more people working for the Germans 
than for the Allies. After 1945, one of the greatest unheralded 
changes was the massive rise in the land and labour productivity of 
agriculture, which was much faster than that of industry. This was 
down to many factors, among them synthetic nitrate, irrigation, new 
crop varieties and tractors, all techniques that were at best decades 
old. Chemistry is missing from our history of the 20th century, 
despite the importance of fertilisers and all sorts of new materials, 
from plastics to herbicides.

Remarkably, that great pre-industrial fuel and construction material, 
wood, has become ever more important. Paper consumption increases, for 
all the talk of paperless offices. Packaging booms: think of all those 
Amazon books in cardboard covers arriving by post. And consider the 
case of Ikea. Ingvar Kamprad, its founder, is on some estimates richer 
than Bill Gates. He makes money from designing and selling wood 
furniture using Fordist mass production techniques. His 
biggest-selling product is not a computer desk, but the "Billy" 
bookcase. Ikea subverts the modern and postmodern notions of what we 
are in another way-it has shifted part of the production and 
transportation of furniture away from specialist employees back to the 
household. He has created a new urban peasantry, who have to load, 
transport and build furniture.

Wood is at the centre of one of the first eco-economic wars. A few 
miles north of the town of Fray Bentos, Uruguay, on the river Uruguay, 
the Finnish firm Botnia is building a wood-pulp mill. The factory will 
process timber from Uruguay's new plantations. The visual and chemical 
pollution that will allegedly result has caused Argentinean 
environmentalists to obstruct two of the international bridges that 
cross the river between Argentina and Uruguay and to threaten the 
third crossing, at Salto, as well as ferry services from Buenos Aires. 
This is a major regional dispute resulting in great damage to the 
Uruguayan economy.

The new is often older than we think. A few years ago, Naomi Klein's 
No Logo was all the rage in anti-globalisation circles, and indeed 
beyond. Klein's argument was that we are moving into a radically novel 
world in which money is made in marketing and design (the logo), while 
production is put out to the global poor working in wretched 
conditions. Yet one can find much earlier examples. In 1865, a 
brilliantly marketed new biotechnological product appeared in Europe. 
Liebig's extract of meat was named after the greatest chemist of the 
mid-19th century, Justus von Liebig, a professor in Munich until his 
death in 1873. Liebig had improved a process for turning meat into a 
concentrated extract (of negligible nutritive value), and lent his 
prestige to the Anglo-Belgian enterprise-the Liebig Extract of Meat 
Company (Lemco). Liebig's name, and signature, became a powerful 
brand. The company produced illustrated advertising cards that figure 
in the history of advertising, and the rarer ones change hands for 
thousands of pounds in antique shops today. A version of the meat 
extract was renamed Oxo in the 1890s for the British market, a brand 
that is important to this day. It was produced by the Liebig company 
in Fray Bentos, hence the trade name for the company's corned beef and 
meat pies.

While Britain killed its own cattle in comparatively tiny 
slaughterhouses, as it would do for very many decades to come, the 
Fray Bentos plant was perhaps briefly the largest single 
slaughterhouse in the world. It dispatched over 200,000 cattle a year 
and employed over a thousand workers at busy times. This scale of 
operation was all the more remarkable because Liebig was not freezing 
or chilling meat-the business of some of the great Chicago 
meatpackers, like Swift or Armour. These meatpackers would themselves 
come to Uruguay and Argentina to supply meat mainly to Britain, easily 
the largest importer of meat in the world. Nearly half of Britain's 
meat came from the other side of the equator. Globalisation made 
possible by technology is hardly new. In this case, beef, and its 
processing, made Uruguay rich. (With moderate good fortune, a southern 
Spaniard or Italian would have multiplied their income many times over 
by moving to the River Plate in the first half of the 20th century; 
today the reverse would be true.)

The Fray Bentos factory was extended and rebuilt. Then the whole 
complex was taken over in 1924 by the Vestey family, the only real 
rivals to the American meatpackers. The Vesteys ran it until the 
1960s, with hardly any new investment. Nationalisation kept it going 
until 1979. Long use ensured its preservation, and today the plant is 
one of the most extraordinary industrial monuments in the world. Part 
of the plant is now a museum known as the Museum of the Industrial 
Revolution. It is a good title, for the plant is perhaps the only 
memorial to vitally important and long-lasting technologies of the 
late 19th and early 20th centuries. For anyone interested in 
industrial and technological history, the history of killing, 
globalisation, food preservation, refrigeration, and the modern 
office, it is a must-see. Nothing like it is left in Chicago.

Yet this is a museum of technology where none of these 20th-century 
technologies were invented. Neither Liebig's extract, nor the 
refrigeration equipment, nor the motor car, nor the Hereford cattle 
were originally made by locals. By the standard definitions of what is 
significant in the history of technology, Uruguay does not exist, yet 
as an intensive user of imported technologies, it was far more 
important than much of the northern hemisphere.

The special conditions of Uruguay make visible what is common to the 
whole world, including the richest parts. Wherever you go, most 
technology is imported. Even in Britain or Japan, invention is highly 
concentrated and specialised, and no more the common property of 
Britons or Japanese than it is of Uruguayans. Most technology in both 
countries has origins abroad too. In Britain, as in Uruguay, a great 
deal of old stuff is still in use, from Victorian sewers and railways 
to a high proportion of the houses we live in.

Consider the Falklands war. It is perhaps not so surprising that 
Argentina had a cruiser built in the US in the 1930s (the ill-fated 
Belgrano) and an aircraft carrier built in Britain in 1945; what is 
less well appreciated is that Britain bombed Port Stanley airport with 
aircraft designed in the 1940s, and sunk the Belgrano with torpedoes 
designed in the 1920s. That is not a sign of backwardness-the US 
bombed Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iraq again with B-52 bombers 
designed and built in the 1950s.

These examples come from slow-growing rich countries. But far from 
being stuck in the past, poor countries have seen rapid transformation 
in the 20th century, whether in terms of population growth or 
politics. New kinds of technologies of poverty emerged in the 20th 
century that did not replicate the older technologies of rich 
countries. Thus Bogota is not a version of early 20th-century London, 
nor is Lagos of Bucharest. Bogota and Lagos are themselves nothing 
like what they were in 1900. They are new places. And these new cities 
are made of industrial materials: recycled machine-cut wood, cement, 
asbestos-cement, breeze blocks and corrugated iron. The last is 
perhaps the great material of the poor world, one whose reach is 
extending, including into very poor rural areas. Whole cities of tens 
of millions are now roofed with corrugated iron, just one example of a 
rapidly expanding old industry.

In a world in which, according to the new economy gurus, the digerati 
will rule a dematerialised and weightless economy, the seemingly old 
stuff grows everywhere. Global steel production is growing at 6 per 
cent, the same sort of rate as in the post-second world war boom. 
World trade in manufactures is booming, carried in vast container 
ships rather than on the information superhighway. The world's 
shipping fleet continues to expand, and ports have become big news, 
along with the price of copper, oil and soybeans.

The cases above, and many others, suggest that we need, at the least, 
a new sense of technological time. Instead of the standard timelines 
of modernity measured out in particular inventions, we need a sense of 
inventions and technologies in which old and new merge in complex 
ways. Most arguments about innovation today tell us that we are living 
in a radically new world that can learn nothing from the past. What we 
should learn from the past is how old this argument is, and how wrong 
it has nearly always been.n

To visit the Fray Bentos factory, see www.anglo.8m.com or contact Rene 
Boretto on rboretto at adinet.com.uy