Technopoly (18 page)

The fourth problem with polling is that it shifts the locus of responsibility between political leaders and their constituents. It is true enough that congressmen are supposed to represent the interests of their constituents. But it is also true that congressmen are expected to use their own judgment about what is in the public’s best interests. For this, they must consult their own experience and knowledge. Before the ascendance of polling, political leaders, though never indifferent to the opinions of their constituents, were largely judged on their capacity to make decisions based on such wisdom as they possessed; that is,
political leaders were responsible for the decisions they made. With the refinement and extension of the polling process, they are under increasing pressure to forgo deciding anything for themselves and to defer to the opinions of the voters, no matter how ill-informed and shortsighted those opinions might be.

We can see this process of responsibility-shift even more clearly in the case of the statistically based ratings of television shows. The definition of a “good” television show has become purely and simply a matter of its having high ratings. A “bad” show has low ratings. The responsibility of a television writer, therefore, begins and ends with his or her ability to create a show that many millions of viewers will watch. The writer, in a word, is entirely responsible to the audience. There is no need for the writer to consult tradition, aesthetic standards, thematic plausibility, refinements of taste, or even plain comprehensibility. The iron rule of public opinion is all that matters. Television executives are fond of claiming that their medium is the most democratic institution in America: a plebiscite is held every week to determine which programs will survive. This claim is given added weight by a second claim: creative artists have never been indifferent to the preferences and opinions of their audiences. Writers, for example, write
for
people, for their approbation and understanding. But writers also write for themselves and because they have something they want to say, not always because readers have something they want to hear. By giving constant deference to public preferences, polling changes the motivation of writers; their entire effort is to increase “the numbers.” Popular literature now depends more than ever on the wishes of the audience, not the creativity of the artist.

Before leaving the subject of the technology of statistics, I must call attention to the fact that statistics creates an enormous amount of completely useless information, which compounds the always difficult task of locating that which is useful to a culture. This is more than a case of “information-overload.” It is
a matter of “information-trivia,” which has the effect of placing all information on an equal level. No one has expressed this misuse of a technology better than the
New Yorker
magazine cartoonist Mankoff. Showing an attentive man watching television news, Mankoff has the newscaster saying, “A preliminary census report indicates that for the first time in our nation’s history female anthropologists outnumber male professional golfers.” When statistics and computers are joined, volumes of garbage are generated in public discourse. Those who have watched television sports programs will know that Mankoff’s cartoon is, in fact, less of a parody than a documentary. Useless, meaningless statistics flood the attention of the viewer. Sports-casters call them “graphics” in an effort to suggest that the information, graphically presented, is a vital supplement to the action of the game. For example: “Since 1984, the Buffalo Bills have won only two games in which they were four points ahead with less than six minutes to play.” Or this: “In only 17 percent of the times he has pitched at Shea Stadium has Dwight Gooden struck out the third and fourth hitters less than three times when they came to bat with more than one runner on base.”
⁵
What is one to do with this or to make of it? And yet there seems to be a market for useless information. Those who read
USA Today
, for example, are offered on the front page of each issue an idiotic statistic of the day that looks something like this: “The four leading states in banana consumption from 1980 through 1989 are Kansas, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Louisiana. Oddly, Nevada, which was ninth in 1989, fell to twenty-sixth last year, which is exactly where it ranks in kiwi consumption.”
⁶

It is surprising how frequently such blather will serve as the backbone of conversations which are essentially meaningless. I have heard New Yorkers, with a triumphant flourish, offer out-of-towners the statistic that New York City is only eighth in the nation in per-capita violent crimes and then decline to go outside because it was past 6:00 p.m.

I do not say, of course, that all such statistical statements are useless. If we learn that one out of every four black males between the ages of twenty and thirty has spent some time in prison, and that the nation’s expenditure for the education of black children is 23 percent less than it is for white children, we may have some statistical facts that will help us to see a cause-and-effect relationship, and thereby suggest a course of action. But statistics, like any other technology, has a tendency to run out of control, to occupy more of our mental space than it warrants, to invade realms of discourse where it can only wreak havoc. When it is out of control, statistics buries in a heap of trivia what is necessary to know.

And there is another point, which in fact is the core of this chapter. Some technologies come in disguise. Rudyard Kipling called them “technologies in repose.” They do not look like technologies, and because of that they do their work, for good or ill, without much criticism or even awareness. This applies not only to IQ tests and to polls and to all systems of ranking and grading but to credit cards, accounting procedures, and achievement tests. It applies in the educational world to what are called “academic courses,” as well. A course is a technology for learning. I have “taught” about two hundred of them and do not know why each one lasts exactly fifteen weeks, or why each meeting lasts exactly one hour and fifty minutes. If the answer is that this is done for administrative convenience, then a course is a fraudulent technology. It is put forward as a desirable structure for learning when in fact it is only a structure for allocating space, for convenient record-keeping, and for control of faculty time. The point is that the origin of and raison d’être for a course are concealed from us. We come to believe it exists for one reason when it exists for quite another. One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies.
⁷

Perhaps the most interesting example of such lack of awareness is the widespread belief that modern business invented the technology of management. Management is a system of power and control designed to make maximum use of relevant knowledge, the hierarchical organization of human abilities, and the flow of information from bottom to top and back again. It is generally assumed that management was created by business enterprises as a rational response to the economic and technological demands of the Industrial Revolution. But research by Alfred Chandler, Sidney Pollard, and especially Keith Hoskin and Richard Macve reveals a quite different picture and leads to a startling conclusion: modern business did not invent management; management invented modern business.
⁸

The most likely place for management to have originated is, of course, in Great Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But there is no evidence that British industry knew anything about management as late as 1830, nor did there exist anything approximating a “managerial class.” Management was created in the United States “out of the blue,” as Hoskin and Macve say. It was not a creation of any obvious needs of American industry, which was only a marginal force in the world economy in the mid-nineteenth century. The roots of management may be traced to a new educational system, introduced in 1817 to the United States Military Academy by the academy’s fourth superintendent, Sylvanus Thayer. Thayer made two innovations. The first, borrowed from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, was to grade examinations by giving numerical marks. As I have previously noted, the grading of student papers originated in Cambridge University toward the end of the eighteenth century, and the practice was taken up by several schools on the Continent. Thayer’s use of this technology is probably the first instance of it in America. As every teacher knows, the numerical mark changes the entire experience and meaning of learning. It introduces a fierce competition
among students by providing sharply differentiated symbols of success and failure. Grading provides an “objective” measure of human performance and creates the unshakable illusion that accurate calculations can be made of worthiness. The human being becomes, to use Michel Foucault’s phrase, “a calculable person.”

Thayer’s second innovation, apparently his own invention, was a line-and-staff system. He divided the academy into two divisions, each organized hierarchically. As Hoskin and Macve describe it: “Daily, weekly and monthly reports were required, all in writing. There were continual relays of written communication and command, going from the bottom to the top of each line, before being consolidated and passed to the central ‘Staff Office.’ ” Thayer rejected the traditional leader’s role of direct, visible command. He ruled indirectly through the medium of written reports, charts, memos, personnel files, etc., not unlike the way a modern CEO functions.

We do not know how most of the two hundred cadets at the academy reacted to Thayer’s new system (which Hoskin and Macve term the “grammatocentric principle,” meaning that everything was organized around the use of writing). But we do know that two of them, Daniel Tyler and George Whistler, were impressed. Both were in the graduating class of 1819, and took with them their lieutenant’s rank and Thayer’s general approach to organizations.

Daniel Tyler, working at the Springfield Armory, did a time-and-motion study in 1832 (sixty years before Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” got under way) and established objectively based norms of production for every job in the armory. Workers were kept under surveillance, and their actual productivity was measured against the established productivity norms. Tyler also introduced quality control and inventory accounting. The result of all these methods was a dramatic increase in productivity and decrease in costs.

Meanwhile, George Whistler (incidentally, the father of James Whistler and therefore the husband of “Whistler’s Mother”), having become the chief engineer of the Western Railroad, developed a managerial system in 1839 that would have made Sylvanus Thayer proud. He organized the railroad along hierarchical lines, beginning with a central staff office, descending to regional managers and then local managers. He employed, to great effect, the grammatocentric principle, which he had no doubt learned well at the academy when serving in the staff office as cadet staff sergeant major.

The principles of calculability and grammatocentrism are, of course, the foundation of modern systems of management. Calculability led inevitably to such ideas as detailed accounting systems, inventory control, and productivity norms. Grammatocentrism promoted the idea that the best way to run a business is to know it through reports of those lower down the line. One manages, in other words, by the “numbers” and by being removed from the everyday realities of production.

It is worth saying that the basic structure of business management originated in nonbusiness contexts. Still, it did not take very long for American businesses to begin to adopt the principles of Thayer, Tyler, and Whistler, and by doing so they created what we now think of as a modern corporation. Indeed, management defines what we mean by a corporation, and has led John Kenneth Galbraith to remark in
The New Industrial State:
“More perhaps than machinery, massive and complex business organizations are the tangible manifestation of advanced technology.”

There are two reasons why the case of management is instructive. First, as suggested by Galbraith, management, like the zero, statistics, IQ measurement, grading papers, or polling, functions as does any technology. It is not made up of mechanical parts, of course. It is made up of procedures and rules designed to standardize behavior. We may call any such system
of procedures and rules a technique; and there is nothing to fear from techniques, unless, like so much of our machinery, they become autonomous. There’s the rub. In a Technopoly, we tend to believe that only through the autonomy of techniques (and machinery) can we achieve our goals. This idea is all the more dangerous because no one can reasonably object to the rational use of techniques to achieve human purposes. Indeed, I am not disputing that the technique known as management may be the best way for modern business to conduct its affairs. We are technical creatures, and through our predilection for and our ability to create techniques we achieve high levels of clarity and efficiency. As I said earlier, language itself is a kind of technique—an invisible technology—and through it we achieve more than clarity and efficiency. We achieve humanity—or inhumanity. The question with language, as with any other technique or machine, is and always has been, Who is to be the master? Will we control it, or will it control us? The argument, in short, is not with technique. The argument is with the triumph of technique, with techniques that become sanctified and rule out the possibilities of other ones. Technique, like any other technology, tends to function independently of the system it serves. It becomes autonomous, in the manner of a robot that no longer obeys its master.

Second, management is an important example of how an “invisible technology” works subversively but powerfully to create a new way of doing things, a classic instance of the tail wagging the dog. It is entirely possible for business and other institutions to operate without a highly technicalized management structure, however hard for us to imagine. We have grown so accustomed to it that we are near to believing management is an aspect of the natural order of things, just as students and teachers have come to believe that education would be impossible without the structure of a college “course.” And politicians believe they would be adrift without the assistance of public-opinion
polling. When a method of doing things becomes so deeply associated with an institution that we no longer know which came first—the method or the institution—then it is difficult to change the institution or even to imagine alternative methods for achieving its purposes.