Some years ago when the Web was still young, I came across the writing of the Canadian theologian David Lochhead. While I am not a religious man – in fact I tend to fall into the anti camp – Lochhead’s writing impressed me with its humanity and insights into computer technology.
The other night after shouting at Microsoft’s Word for insisting on inserting a huge space – nearly half a page – between two sections of text and to continuing doing so despite all my best efforts to over-ride it, I began to reflect about what I liked about digital technology and what I hated.
This reminded me of a piece Lochhead wrote in 1988, three years before the Web was born, which I must have first read in about 1995. In “The Magical Computer” Lochhead talks about the relationship of computers to power and of power to magic. If like me you are not a Christian, you may have to strip out some of the overtly Biblical language to get the message. But if you do you may find it reads more powerfully today than it did when I read it nine years ago.
Here’s some of what he had to say:
“Power, technology and magic. The three words belong together. Technology and magic have a long historical relationship. We might call it a sibling rivalry. Magic is technology’s older sister. Both magic and technology can be described as means of controlling and manipulating power. Technology, as we commonly know it, was concerned with the creation of machines and other devices, to protect people from a hostile environment. Technology existed to help human beings dominate their environment. Magic, on the other hand, worked with myth and ritual to accomplish the same ends: protection and domination. Both technology and magic aimed at putting power over the environment in the hand of its user.”
And then on the dangers of the computer’s offer of power:
“There are two temptations of power that the computer offers us. The one temptation — the temptation of the manager, the politician, the bureaucrat — is the temptation of control. We attempt to use the computer to limit the possibilities of the people who we seek to bring under control. The other temptation is that we become beguiled by the possibilities that the computer offers us. We begin to see the computer as a new messiah, as the new magic that frees us from our dependence on grace.”
And continues with the computer’s potential as a possibility machine:
“Those temptations constitute the dark side of computer technology. That dark side is real. But it is not the last word about computers. If computers do allow us to create new possibilities, if computers are at the heart of a new stage in human culture, then those possibilities include the possibilities that the lame will walk, the hungry will be fed, that the victims of violence will be free from fear. The gospel, if I hear it correctly, calls us to create possibilities. The computer is a possibility machine. It is appropriate, then, that the computer be as much at home in the church as it is in other institutions of society. Power needs to be treated with care. Power can dominate. Power can oppress. Power can destroy. Yet the power that creates new possibilities is a power that serves, a power that liberates, a power that heals. Let us use this new magic in the service of the future to which we know we are called by God.”