2020: A Year of Perfect Hindsight
James Wesley Rawles January 1, 2020
As we begin the year 2020, I’d like to reflect on what I’ve seen and experienced, since I was born in 1960. In my novel
Patriots, a couple of my characters used the now-cliched phrase: “Hindsight is 20/20.” But I must say that in many ways that it truly is. With the benefit of some hindsight, I have formulated a few observations for 2020 — a year of 20/20 hindsight:
Technology
When I was growing up, computers were enormous lumbering beasts that were primarily batch-programmed with
Hollerith punched cards. I had the advantage of attending Livermore High School, where those of us enrolled in a computer class could log on to one of the four Cray-designed Lawrence Livermore Laboratories mainframe computers. (As I recall, two of these were the
CDC-7600 model.) Starting in 1977, we did so via
a Texas Instruments Silent 700 terminal with an acoustic phone handset coupler. (Remember those?) Following high school, I still wrote all of my college papers on an electric typewriter. The first Apple Macintosh computer wasn’t released until the year I graduated from college: 1984. In 1986 I bought my first Apple. It was a
Macintosh Plus — the faster, “big memory” upgraded model with 1 MB of RAM and a 8 MHz Motorola 68000 processor. That cost around $1,800. Over the winter of 1990-1991, I wrote the first iteration of my novel
Patriots on that Mac, and released it as shareware, under the title
The Gray Nineties. At the same time, I was
using a “fast” 4,800 baud modem to access AmericaOnline (AOL). This was all before the first web browser became available for Macs, in 1993. By today’s standards, this recitation may seem quite Stone Age. But back then it was considered cutting edge home computing.
I’m writing this in the last week of 2019. Computers are now so ubiquitous that most people carry them around in their pockets. A $200 smartphone has the processing speed of a million dollar Cray mainframe of the 1970s. It also has more storage capacity than a wall rack full of
10.5-inch memory tapes.
The Velocity of Data Retrieval
One of the key benefits of new technology is what some term the
velocity of data retrieval. When I was growing up, people would get into arguments about history or trivia. These tiffs could only be settled with either a check in a Book of Facts, a set of encyclopedias, or a phone call to the library. There, they had someone on staff with the job title of Reference Librarian. She sat a desk strategically near the library’s Reference section. She had a phone with an extra long handset cord — a
25-foot-long phone cord. She was a miracle worker. Our local Reference Librarian, named Beverly, seemingly knew just where to look. Sometimes after a multi-minute delay, she’d be back on the phone, with a cheery: “I found what you needed…” Back in the 1960s that was considered very fast fact-checking. But the serious, detailed fact checking was done
by mail. Today, of course, most urbanites carry a smart phone, and they can retrieve arcane facts and figures in just seconds. The main concern now is that people depend on Wikipedia, which has a
notorious liberal sociopolitical bias, and is also
notoriously pranked and vanadalized.
Surveillance
All of the advance in computing and surveillance technology that I’ve described is a two-edged sword. The same tools that are driving our economy and solving crimes can be used to target us for tyranny. Surveillance cameras are now ubiquitous. When I was growing up in the 1960s I remember seeing
just one surveillance camera in our town. It was trained on the door of our local bank, to identify exiting bank robbers. There are now cameras built into almost every computer screen, every smartphone (sometimes two cameras!), and most television screens. Worst of all, are the A.I.-enabled surveillance systems working in the background, parsing billions of images and looking for patterns of behavior.
Up until the 1990s, surveillance cameras required human watchers, or post-facto review of footage from crime scenes. But now, facial recognition is in play. It used to be that just cars with toll transponders were tracked. But now, automatic license plate reader (ALPR) systems are operating, scanning constantly, and cross-correlating movements. It is noteworthy that ALPRs are used both in fixed positions scanning traffic going by,
and mounted on police patrol cars. So only a car parked behind a garage door is safe from being scanned. Facebook recently admitted that they are tracking people, even if they have “tracking” turned off.
Geolocation of every cellular phone has become almost standard practice. Almost every day, there is a new revelation about surveillance and intelligence gathering in every app and social media service. And even genetic history services like
23andMe have been compromised. With these advances in surveillance technologies, the Creepy Factor is rising, constantly. It seems that if you touch any tech, there simply is no more privacy nor anonymity.
Politics
In retrospect, I can see that over the past 30 year politics, political campaigns, and the court of public opinion were fully weaponized. The hounding of President DJT is of course the most-publicized example. Another is
the Covington High School boys, who were horribly castigated by the mass media, just for grinning and hooting at a man who was acting like a buffoon.
Back in the 1980s, we began to hear the old Soviet term Political Correctness begin to be applied to American society. And in the 1990s, “non-PC” speech and behavior was beginning to be frowned upon, and cause for scorn and after 2000, even public humiliation. Just two weeks ago, we learned that non-PC behavior is now
grounds for prosecution, and incarceration. (Can you see
a double standard?) Some might say that if Adolfo Martinez had instead
bought a rainbow flag and then burned it, then it would be considered protected speech. But I’m not so sure about that. We need only
look to Canada, for a glimpse of what the near future might be like, for the United States. Disapproval of non-PC speech and behavior has gone from simply frowning, to shaming, to public mocking, to civil suits, and now criminal felony prosecutions. That “progression” has been seen in just one generation. This cascading shift in worldviews was not fully apparent, back in the 1980s, and 1990s. But now, in retrospect, it certainly is.
