Page 127 - Elana Freeland - Under an Ionized Sky

CHAPTER SIX

Mastering the Human Domain

I can assert that the vast majority of the computer systems currently in use, the huge systems that
span our planet—military ones, for example—are beyond our understanding. I do not merely
mean that there is no one left who can grasp their working, but that the time when we could do
that is past and gone. It is no longer possible to understand them.
— Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, “From Judgment to
Calculation,” 1984

Quarry considered VIXAL. He pictured it as a kind of glowing celestial digital cloud,
occasionally swarming to earth. It might be anywhere—in some sweltering, potholed industrial
zone stinking of aviation fuel and resounding to the throb of cicadas beside an international
airport in Southeast Asia or Latin America; or in a cool and leafy business park in the soft, clear
rain of New England or the Rhineland; or occupying a rarely visited and darkened floor of a
brand-new office block in the City of London or Mumbai or São Paolo; or even roosting
undetected on a hundred thousand home computers. It was all around us, he thought, in the very
air we breathed. He looked up at the hidden camera and gave the slightest bow of obeisance.
“Leave them,” he said.
— Robert Harris, The Fear Index, 2012

Any discussion of computers and their role in a planetary lockdown must begin with secrets.
Off the island Antikythera in the Aegean on Maundy Thursday 1900, sponge divers found a
small lump of corroded bronze and wood with gear wheels inside dated between 85 and 50 B.C.
It was a geared computer once used to calculate the past, present, and future positions of the
heavens.
Futurist Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) made it clear that magic and technology are at least
kissing cousins, if not closer. The modern cryptic relationship between machines and their
encoded secrets harks back to soldier-playwright Sophocles (496–406 B.C.) who introduced the
mechane to Greek drama by lowering it onto the stage to provide the deus ex machina for the
plot’s supernatural intervention. Electrical computer ciphers are equally magical in that they
appear at the stroke of a key. The year the Bomb shattered matter (and, some think, the United
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States), its father Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) had a dream in which a deus ex machina called
memex was perched on a doctor’s desk, calling up patients’ files and case histories. In the July