David Brin

A related and even more worrisome trend is the decline of rigorously vetted expert knowledge. You wouldn’t expect this to be a problem in an era when humanity knows more — and shares information more openly — with every passing year, month and day. Wikipedia is a compendium vastly larger than all previous encyclopedias combined, drawing millions to contribute from their own areas of micro-expertise. But the very freedom that makes the Internet so attractive also undermines the influence of gatekeepers who used to sift and extol some things over others, helping people to pick gold from dross.

In the past, their lists and guides ranged from the “Seven Liberal Arts” of Martianus Capella to “The Great Books of the Western World,” from Emily Post’s “Etiquette” to the Boy Scout Manual, from compulsory curricula to expert scientific testimony. Together, this shared canon gave civilized people common reference points. Only now, anyone can post a list — or a hundred — on Facebook. Prioritization is personal, and facts are deemed a matter of opinion.

Carr and others worry how 6 billion ships will navigate when they can no longer even agree upon a north star.

Of course, an impulse toward nostalgia has been rife in every era. When have grandparents not proclaimed that people were better, and the grass much greener, back in their day? Even the grouches’ ultimate dire consequence has remained the same: the end of the world. Jeremiahs of past eras envisioned it arriving as divine retribution for fallen grace, while today’s predict a doom wrought by human hands — propelled by intemperate, reckless or ill-disciplined minds. The difference, from a certain angle, is small.

Take the dour mutterings of another grumbler, Internet entrepreneur Mark Pesce, whose dark rumination at last year’s Personal Democracy Forum anticipates a dismal near-future commonwealth. One wherein expertise is lost and democracy becomes a tyranny of lobotomized imitation and short-tempered reflex, as viral YouTube moments spread everywhere instantaneously, getting everybody laughing or nodding or seething to the same memes — an extreme resonance of reciprocal mimicry or hyper-mimesis. And everybody hyper-empowered to react impulsively at almost the speed of thought.

“All of our mass social institutions, developed at the start of the liberal era, are backed up against the same buzz saw,” Pesce said. “Politics, as the most encompassing of our mass institutions, now balances on a knife edge between a past which no longer works and a future of chaos.”

From there, it seems only a small step is needed to incite the sort of riled-up rabble that used to burst forth in every small town; only, future flash mobs will encompass the globe. Pesce’s scenario is starkly similar to dystopias that science fiction authors Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth portrayed, back in the 1950s, as in “The Marching Morons,” or Ray Bradbury in “Fahrenheit 451,” with civilization homogenizing into a bland paste of imitation and dullard sameness, punctuated by intervals of mass hysteria.

Indeed, it is this very sameness — the “flat world” celebrated by pundit Thomas Friedman — that could demolish global peace, rather than save it. Arguing that an insufficiency of variety will eliminate our ability to inventively solve problems, Pesce dramatically extrapolates: “Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for a rapid descent into the Bellum omnia contra omnes, Thomas Hobbes’ war of all against all … Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyper-empowerment. After the arms race comes the war.”

Wow. Isn’t that cheery? Well, with Michael Crichton no longer around to propound that there “are things mankind was never meant to know,” perhaps Carr and Pesce are auditioning to fill in, offering the next vivid anthem for a rising renunciation movement — the nostalgic murmur that technology and “progress” may have already gone too far.

Responding to all of this — on the Encyclopaedia Britannica Blog — Clay Shirky, the technology forecaster and author of “Here Comes Everybody,” presents an equally impressive array of evidence showing that the ability of individuals to autonomously scan, correlate and creatively utilize vast amounts of information is rising faster, almost daily. In the human experience, never before have so many been able to perceive, explore, compare, analyze and argue over evidence that questions rigid assumptions. How can this not lead to insights and exciting new breakthroughs at an accelerating pace?

Perhaps even fast enough to get us ahead of all our modern perplexities and problems.

Nor is this refrain new. From Jefferson and Franklin to Teilhard de Chardin and J.D. Bernal, the tech-happy zealots of progress have proclaimed a rebellious faith in human self-improvement via accumulating wisdom and ever-improving methodology.

Even some artists and writers began siding with the future, as when Bruno Bettelheim finally admitted that it was OK to read fairy tales, or when H.G. Wells stood up to Henry James over whether stories can involve social and scientific change. Confronting stodgy culture mavens, modernists and science fiction writers spurned the classical notion of “eternal verities” and the assumption that all generations will repeat the same stupidities, proclaiming instead that children can make new and different mistakes! Or even (sometimes) learn from the blunders of their parents.

Before the Internet was more than an experimental glimmer, Marshall McLuhan fizzed: “But all the conservatism in the world does not offer even token resistance to the ecological sweep of the new electric media.”

This surge of tech-zealotry is taken further — to a degree that seems almost fetishistic — by fans of a looming “positive singularity,” in which a humanity that is aided by loyal and super-smart artificial intelligence (AI) will soon transcend all known limitations, toppling all barriers before an unstoppable can-do spirit. All we need is to keep exponentiating knowledge and computing power at the rate we have, and soon those AI assistants will cure all ailments, deliver clean energy, and solve the riddle of our minds. Singulatarians such as Ray Kurzweil and John Smart foresee a rosy Aquarian age just ahead, one of accelerating openness and proliferating connectedness, unleashing human potential in something radiantly self-propelled and exponentially cornucopian.

Oy! Teilhard’s bodhisattva has returned! And part of me wants to believe the transcendentalists, who think we’ll all have godlike powers just in time to end poverty, save the planet, and give the baby boomers eternal life. Hal-AI-lujah!

But, alas, even the coiner of the term “technological singularity” — author Vernor Vinge — will tell you that it ain’t necessarily so. If these wonders are going to come to pass, it won’t happen in a way that’s smooth, organic, automatic or pain-free. As Edward Tenner pointed out in “Why Things Bite Back,” there are always surprising, unintended consequences. The ultimate, pragmatic purpose of free debate is to find most of these error modes before well-made plans go awry. A practical aim that is forgotten by those who worship self-expression entirely for its own sake.

Anyway, emergent properties help those who help themselves. Very few good things ever happened as gifts of circumstance, without iteration and hard work. Above all, we’ll need to improve the tools of the Enlightenment, at an ever-increasing pace, so that Howard Rheingold’s vaunted citizen-centered smart mobs really are more smart than mobs!

Too bad for us, then. Because, looking at today’s lobotomizing social nets, avatar worlds and dismal “collaborationware,” any rational oddsmaker would have to favor the grouches by a 10-point spread.

So, is the Google era empowering us to be better, smarter, more agile thinkers? Or devolving us into distracted, manic scatterbrains? Is technology-improved discourse going to turn us all into avid, participatory problem solvers? Or will the Web’s centrifugal effects spin us all into little islands of shared conviction — midget Nuremberg rallies — where facts become irrelevant and any opinion can be a memic god?

Alas, both sides are right. And both are missing key points. If I must simplistically choose between Teilhardists and renunciators, my sentiments go with the optimists who helped bring us to this party we’re all enjoying — the worldwide culture and Internet that lets me share these thoughts with you and that empowers the grouches to be heard. Luddism has always been a lame and deep-down hypocritical option.

But no, this latest tiff seems to boil down to another of the infamously oversimplifying dichotomies that author Robert Wright dismantles in his important book, “Nonzero.” No. 1 on our agenda of “ways I might grow up this year” ought to be giving up the foul habit of believing such tradeoffs. Like the hoary and obsolete “left-right political axis,” or the either-or choice we are too frequently offered between safety and freedom.

But let’s illustrate just how far off base both the mystics and the curmudgeons are, by offering a step-back perspective.

Only a generation ago, intellectuals wrung their hands over what then seemed inevitable: that the rapidly increasing pace of discovery and knowledge accumulation would force individuals to specialize more and more.

It may be hard to convey just how seriously this trend was taken 30 or so years ago. Sober academics foresaw an era when students might study half a lifetime, just to begin researching some subfield of a subfield, excruciatingly narrow and dauntingly deep, never knowing if they were duplicating work done by others, never cross-fertilizing or sharing with other domains. It reflected the one monotonic trend of the 20th century — a professionalization of all things.

It’s funny, though. You just don’t hear much about fear of overspecialization anymore. Yet has the tsunami of new knowledge ceased? If anything, it has speeded up. Then why did that worry go away?

As it turned out, several counter-trends (some of them having nothing to do with the Internet) seem to have transformed the intellectual landscape. Today, most scientists seem far more eclectic, agile and cross-disciplinary than ever. They seek insights and collaboration far afield from their specialties. Institutions like the Sixth College at the University of California at San Diego deliberately blend the arts and sciences, belying C.P. Snow’s “two cultures forever schism’d.” Moreover, the spread of avocations and ancillary expertise suggests that the professionalization trend has finally met its match in a looming age of amateurs.)

If anything, our worry has mutated. Instead of fretting about specialists “knowing more and more about less and less,” today’s info glut has had an inverse effect — to spread people’s attention so widely that they — in effect — know just a little about a vast range of topics. No longer do our pessimists fear “narrow-mindedness” as much as “shallow-mindedness.”

Indeed, doesn’t Carr have a point, viewing today’s blogosphere as superficial, facile and often frivolous? When pundit mistress Arianna Huffington crows about there being 50,000 new blogs established every day, calling them a “first draft of history,” is that flattering to history?

Don’t get me wrong — I want to believe this story. My own metaphor compares today’s frenzy of participatory self-expression to a body’s immune system that might sniff out every dark abuse or crime or unexamined mistake. I still believe the age of amateurs has that potential. But, in darker moments, I wonder. If our bodies were this inefficient — with such an astronomical ratio of silliness to quality — we’d explode from all the excess white blood cells before ever benefiting from the few that usefully attack an error or disease.

Above all, can you name a problem that all this “discourse” has profoundly or permanently solved — in a world where problems proliferate and accumulate at a record pace? No, let’s make the challenge simpler: Can Shirky or Huffington point to even one stupidity that has been decisively disproved online? Ever?

Sure, there are good things. Professional journalism has added many innovative cadres and layers that show more agility and zest than the old newspapers and broadcasting networks, often aided or driven by a stratum of actinically focused semipro bloggers. I am well aware of — and grateful to — the many excellent political and historical fact-checking sites that debunk all kinds of mystical or paranoid nuttiness. But still, the nutty things never go away, do they? Debunking only serves to damp each fever down a little, for a while, but the infections remain. Every last one of them.

What the blogosphere and Facebook cosmos do best is to engender the raw material of productive discourse — opinion. Massive, pyroclastic flows of opinion. (Including this one.) They can be creative and entrancing. But they are only one-half of a truly creative process.

Such processes that work — markets, democracy, science — foster not only the introduction of fresh variety and new things but also a winnowing of those that don’t work. Commerce selects for better products and companies. In elections, the truth eventually (if tardily) expels bad leaders. Science corrects or abandons failed theories. It’s messy and flawed, but we owe almost everything we have to the way these “accountability arenas” imitate the ultimate creative process, evolution, by not only engendering creativity but also culling unsuccessful mutations. To make room for more.

Today’s Web and blogosphere have just one part of this two-stage rhythm. Sure, bullshit makes great fertilizer. But (mixing metaphors a bit) shouldn’t there be ways to let pearls rise and noxious stuff go away, like phlogiston and Baal worship? Beyond imagination and creativity and opinion, we also need a dance of Shiva, destroying the insipid, vicious and untrue.

To the nostalgists, there is only one way of accomplishing this — the 4,000-year-old prescription of hierarchy. But all those censors, priests and credentialed arbiters of taste had their chance, and all our instincts, as children of the Enlightenment, rebel against ever letting them get a grip on culture once again! Authoritarian gatekeepers would only wind up stifling what makes the Net special.

But there is another option. A market could replicate the creative (and creatively destructive) power of evolution in the realm of good and bad ideas, just as our older markets sift and cull myriad goods and services. That is, if the Web offered tools of critical appraisal and discourse. Tools up to the task.

Tentative efforts have been taken to provide this second half of the cycle, where amateur participants might manifest, en masse, the kind of selective judgment that elite gatekeepers and list makers used to provide. Wikipedia makes a real effort. A few debate and disputation sites have tried to foster formal set-tos between groups opposing each other over issues like gun control, experimenting with procedures that might turn debate from a shouting and preening match into a relentless and meticulous exploration of what’s true and what’s not. But these crude efforts have been given a just scintilla of the attention and investment that go to the fashionable, honey pot concepts: social networks and avatar spaces, “emotional” self-expression, photo/art/film sharing, and ever more ways to gush opinions.

Am I sounding like one of the curmudgeons? Look, I like all that stuff. Heck, I can self-express with the best of ‘em. It’s how I make my living! But all by itself, it is never, ever going to bring us to a singularity — or even a culture of relatively effective problem solvers.

Note that my complaint isn’t the same as Carr’s about our fellow citizens becoming “nekulturny” and losing the ability to read (as in the Walter Tevis novel “Mockingbird.”) Sure, I wish (for example) that some of the attention and money devoted to shallow movie sci-fi remakes would turn to the higher form of science fiction, with its nuanced Gedanken experiments about speculative change. But we’re in no danger of losing the best mental skills and tools and memes of the past. It’s a laughable fret.

What we need to remember is that there is nothing unique about today’s quandary. Ever since the arrival of glass lenses and movable type, the amount that each person can see and know has multiplied, with new tools ranging from newspapers and lithographs to steamships and telegraphs, to radio and so on. And every time, conservative nostalgists claimed that normal people could not adapt, that such godlike powers should be reserved to an elite, or perhaps renounced.

Meanwhile, enthusiasts zealously greeted every memory and vision prosthetic — from the printing press to lending libraries to television — with hosannas, forecasting an apotheosis of reason and light. In 1894, philanthropist John Jacob Astor wrote a bestselling novel about the year 2001, a future transformed by science, technology, enterprise and human goodwill.

Of course, life can be ironic. Astor died with a famed flourish of noblesse oblige aboard the sinking Titanic — the first of many garish calamities that began quenching this naive zeal for progress. For a while. And so it has gone, a bipolar see-saw between optimists and pessimists.

In reality, the vision and memory prosthetics brought on consequences that were always far more complicated than either set of idealists expected. Out of all this ruction, just one thing made it possible for us to advance, ensuring that the net effects would be positive. That one thing was the pragmatic mind set of the Enlightenment.

So let’s conclude by returning to a core point of the cyber-grumblers. Yes, for sure, some millions, perhaps billions, will become couch or Net potatoes. Unimaginative, fad-following and imitative. But there is a simple answer.

So what? Those people will matter as little tomorrow as couch potatoes who stay glued to television matter today.

Meanwhile, however, a large minority — the “creative minority” that Toynbee called essential for any civilization’s success — will continue to feel repelled by homogeneity and sameness. They’ll seek out the unusual and surprising. Centrifugally driven by a need to be different, they’ll nurture hobbies that turn into avocations that transform into niches of profound expertise.

Already we are in an era when no worthwhile skill is ever lost, if it can draw the eye of some small corps of amateurs. Today there are more expert flint-knappers than in the Paleolithic. More sword makers than during the Middle Ages. Vastly more surface area of hobbyist telescopes than instruments owned by all governments and universities, put together. Following the DIY banner of Make magazine, networks of neighbors have started setting up chemical sensors that will weave into hyper-environmental webs. Can you look at all this and see the same species of thoughtless, imitative monkeys that Mark Pesce does?

Well, we are varied. We contain multitudes. And that is the point! Those who relish images of either gloom or apotheosis forget how we got here, through a glorious, wonderful, messy mix of evolution and hard work and brilliance, standing on the shoulders of those who sweated earlier progress. Now we sprint toward success or collapse. If we fail, it will be because we just barely missed a once-in-a-species (perhaps even once-on-a-planet) chance to get it right.

I don’t plan to let that happen. Do you?

No, what’s needed is not the blithe enthusiasm preached by Ray Kurzweil and Clay Shirky. Nor Nicholas Carr’s dyspeptic homesickness. What is called for is a clear-eyed, practical look at what’s missing from today’s Web. Tools that might help turn quasar levels of gushing opinion into something like discourse, so that several billion people can do more than just express a myriad of rumors and shallow impulses, but test, compare and actually reach some conclusions now and then.

But what matters even more is to step back from yet another tiresome dichotomy, between fizzy enthusiasm and testy nostalgia. Earlier phases of the great Enlightenment experiment managed to do this by taking a wider perspective. By taking nothing for granted.

If we prove incapable of doing this, then maybe those who worry about the latest generation’s devolution are right after all.

Lacking magic wands, we have another tool, money, in limited amounts. That, combined with ingenuity and goodwill, can take care of some short-term things. Stop the dying. Provide food, shelter and basic sanitation. Help the Haitians to restore basic utilities and bury their dead. Repair the ports and roads enough to get commerce flowing again. So far, no arguments.

It’s when we start talking about longer-term solutions that the discussion gets clouded by preconceptions, dogma and real-world practicalities. Sixty years after the Marshall Plan proved that foreign assistance can work, some of the time, we still find our best-meant schemes mired by bureaucratic inefficiency, corruption, and unintended consequences. Nor does any political side have a perfect recipe. If the American left has often shown itself to be treacly and naive, the right is already back to its old, cynical sneer, deriding “the failed and discredited utopian fantasy of so-called Nation Building” — an actual neoconservative mantra, up till the very month that they plunged the U.S. into the most costly, inefficient, corruption-ridden and ill-conceived nation-building exercise ever undertaken. Now, the mantra that went dormant for a while is back.

In contrast to Iraq, Haiti has several traits that make it seem a rather good candidate for national makeover. It is small, nearby, desperate, and yet peaceful enough to be a possible test case. (Our misadventures in Somalia and elsewhere show how necessary the “peaceful” component is.)

On the downside, Haiti also suffers from crippling deficiencies of infrastructure, education and reliable civil law. Still, despite the challenges, suppose we wanted to really accomplish epochal and effective change in Haiti? Aside from humanitarian aid, what endeavors would be most helpful over the long run? Let’s try a few suggestions that aren’t on the regular lists.

1) Cooking. It sounds simple, even banal. But a major driver of Haiti’s tragic deforestation is the chopping of wood to prepare meals. For years we’ve seen articles and news features about innovative solar cookers, meant to wean people in developing nations off firewood — a worthy notion, in principle. Too bad it hasn’t proved popular among the poor women who need to boil up the rice and beans now — without spending hours worrying about clouds blocking the sun. (Better, more efficient wood-burning stoves have started making a difference in parts of Africa.)

A more prosaic palliative might be to establish communal kitchen facilities all over the island, where families could not only get food aid, but have access to shared, gas-fired cookers to prepare it. But whatever approach is found to be best, we need to be clear about one unintended consequence of food aid: Distributing uncooked rice, without taking into account the energy cost of preparation, is tantamount to killing trees.

2) Reward local self-organization. Infrastructure projects and jobs should flow toward those neighborhoods that manage to organize themselves to better benefit from the aid. Those that remove the trash, that set up kitchens, that have work crews ready for labor every day, and present a fait accompli structure that can be relied upon should get top priority.

It may sound callous to base help on something other than flat-out need. But word would soon spread, leveraging upon islands of enthusiasm and competence, without imposing any preconceptions upon how locals organize themselves. Moreover, if there is one thing that so many neighborhoods have, right now, it is underemployed hands. However they do it, via communes or co-ops or by working with local landowners, this would seem to be the simplest way to bypass corrupt officialdom, relying instead on simple metrics, right there on the ground. (See an article in the L.A. Times about such neighborhood committees, already in motion.)

3) Empower law and civil society. Much has been said about the micro-finance revolution that has been pioneered in the developing world by Grameen Bank and other institutions that lend very small amounts to many tiny businesses in a community, creating webs of credit and trust and invigorating local enterprise. Engaging the spirit of enterprise is now in vogue and it has been suggested that everybody in Haiti should be given $100 and a prepaid cellphone, and unleashed to develop their own self-interest.

At a somewhat more elevated level, go look up the work of Hernando de Soto (not the explorer, but the radical economist-reformer). The nation of Peru instituted his plan to simply give the people clear title to the land they already own, so they can then improve or borrow against it. The resulting surge in the market economy proved that left and right could work together, when not trapped by rigid-idiotic dogma, resulting in a boom in that Andean nation. To save time, might Peru’s reform laws simply be instituted in Haiti across the board, with the one proviso that they be translated into Creole?

Unfortunately, right now is the very time when those with property rights in Port-au-Prince are most likely to be bought out, cents on the dollar, by Haiti’s own oligarchs. (See a silver lining to this, below.)

4) Take advantage of the quake. Now, with the capital city in ruins, may be the ideal the time for urban planning in Port-au-Prince.

Sure, those words sound pathetically ’60s-ish. But I am not talking about utopian nitpicking, meddlesome zoning regulations or overspecifying architecture (though there are modern alternatives to cinder-block construction that could be cheaper, faster and much more quake resistant … and this would be a good time to start setting up firms over there, trained in these alternative methods. Also, imprisoning a few corrupt building inspectors, who share responsibility for recent deaths, might do a world of good.)

No, what I mean by “urban planning” is the very basics. Core essentials that are utterly pragmatic and that would best be done now, at the very moment that Port-au-Prince lies shattered.

As soon as people are being fed and all the children are safe, even next month, corridors and rights of way should be laid down and razed — wide swaths stretching from the port to downtown, to the airport, and to the factory zone.

Yes, superficially it sounds horrible — plowing aside the tottering shops that still stand after the quake, simply in order to create broad paths of urban renewal. But the benefits — to all Haitians — would be overwhelming, for a reason that seems to have escaped the attention of every aid organization or NGO that I know.

If done well, such corridors would allow very cheap installation of the organic elements needed by a modern city, the circulatory, pulmonary, lymphatic, nervous and other systems of a future, healthy metropolis. I’m talking about mass transit, sewer, water, fiber-optics, gas, electricity, sewers … and so on.

All of these services are fantastically expensive — in nations like the U.S. — primarily due to right-of-way costs and having to insert or maintain them through already-existing streets. The actual conduits themselves (e.g., rails, sewer pipe, water pipe, optical fiber) are fairly cheap, if laid down in a linear fashion. (Commuter trolley lines can be established aboveground at first. But if the land siting is done right, a trenched subway can go in later, alongside, at trivial added expense and without even interrupting service.)

Combine this with the laying down of several grand boulevards, parks and public spaces, and you could have the makings of a great and impressive city, rising from the ashes, drawing commerce and (even more important) proud confidence among its citizens.

Opportunities to wrest long-term good, by redesigning after disaster, go back a long way. Periclean Athens, with its magnificent Parthenon, rose from the ashes of Persian occupation and destruction. San Francisco’s current street grid was enhanced after the Great Quake of 1906. Baron Haussman rebuilt Paris, with its grand boulevards, without a propelling catastrophe (unless you call Emperor Napolean III a calamity). A more recent example is the way MCI and Sprint got their start — pioneering the new era of cheap long-distance calling — simply by following existing rail and gas rights-of-way into big cities. Clearly, there are billions in real value, to a nation and to investors, in establishing rights of way and then exploiting them as efficiently as possible.

On the other hand, Christopher Wren proposed great boulevards for London after the Great Fire in 1666, and others suggested modernization after the 1940 Blitz. But, except for the deeply delved Underground, these opportunities were successfully evaded and today’s London streets are a medieval mess. In my hometown, Los Angeles, legend asserts that GM, Firestone and Standard Oil not only made sure that the Red Car inter-urban transit system was shut down (that seemed likely anyway, given Californians’ car infatuation) but that all the rights of way got sold off, so that any future mass transit system could only come at grotesque cost.

In comparison, Port-au-Prince today has a surprisingly promising basis to work from. The city already has a few four-lane boulevards. Route de Delmas heads southeastward, pretty straight, from an area near the port into the suburbs. Route National No. 1 passes Parliament, the port, and then the airport before heading to Cite Soleil’s infamous slum. But these existing paths are already constricted. Moreover, they are ironically unuseful for the ambitious endeavor I’m describing here, for the very reason that they are vital for current national life. To rip them up would be both expensive and counterproductive, doing more harm than good.

(Worth noting is that the narrow, inadequate and obsolete airport at Port-au-Prince, which had lacked even a parallel taxi-way, is now being expanded, ad hoc, in a manner similar to the process described here.)

Port-au-Prince needs to be a city with a set of clear rights of way, if it is to establish inexpensive, capacious and flexible utility and transport corridors. One that lacks such rights of way will not.

Note that all of this needn’t be done rapaciously, e.g., imagine if the poor and displaced got shares in the soon-to-be-valuable plots that would front upon the new boulevards, and first options at the resulting apartments. In the short term, such pieces of paper would hardly make up for being asked to get their shacks out of the way of bulldozers. But the shares would grow much more valuable, in time.

Is such fairness really likely, especially in Haiti? Of course not. Already the country’s few dozen elite, oligarchic families are swooping in — partly to perform beneficent acts of noblesse oblige, and partly to seek opportunities within the chaos. If my suggestion were undertaken entirely on the oligarchs’ terms, with elites owning all the utilities and boulevard frontages, excluding even the people who used to live there, it would be a travesty.

But travesties are normal for Haiti. In this case, at least there’d be boulevards, parks, utilities, sanitation, trolleys, fiber-broadband, Wi-Fi and commerce. The people, participating in that new economy, could then engage in politics — the torts and courts and rights and wrongs — later, and good luck to them.

Anyway, what if foreign influences leaped onto this project first, with strong intent to make fairness a top priority? Note that a single billionaire could, right now, offer to do this in Port-au-Prince. His share, downstream, could be worth billions, without incurring bad karma because, with just a little care at the start, noting who lived where, the chief beneficiaries would still be the poorest citizens of Haiti.

This prospect — making money by increasing the value of a city that then becomes a wonder and source of pride for all — would seem at least worth pondering.

Only, quietly and without fanfare, or even any comment or notice by software pundits, we have drifted into a situation where almost none of the millions of personal computers in America offers a line-programming language simple enough for kids to pick up fast. Not even the one that was a software lingua franca on nearly all machines, only a decade or so ago. And that is not only a problem for Ben and me; it is a problem for our nation and civilization.

Oh, today’s desktops and laptops offer plenty of other fancy things — a dizzying array of sophisticated services that grow more dazzling by the week. Heck, I am part of that creative spasm.

Only there’s a rub. Most of these later innovations were brought to us by programmers who first honed their abilities with line-programming languages like BASIC. Yes, they mostly use higher level languages now, stacking and organizing object-oriented services, or using other hifalutin processes that come prepackaged and ready to use, the way an artist uses pre-packaged paints. (Very few painters still grind their own pigments. Should they?)

And yet the thought processes that today’s best programmers learned at the line-coding level still serve these designers well. Renowned tech artist and digital-rendering wizard Sheldon Brown, leader of the Center for Computing in the Arts, says: “In my Electronics for the Arts course, each student built their own single board computer, whose CPU contained a BASIC ROM [a chip permanently encoded with BASIC software]. We first did this with 8052′s and then with a chip called the BASIC Stamp. The PC was just the terminal interface to these computers, whose programs would be burned into flash memory. These lucky art students were grinding their own computer architectures along with their code pigments — along their way to controlling robotic sculptures and installation environments.”

But today, very few young people are learning those deeper patterns. Indeed, they seem to be forbidden any access to that world at all.

And yet, they are tantalized! Ben has long complained that his math textbooks all featured little type-it-in-yourself programs at the end of each chapter — alongside the problem sets — offering the student a chance to try out some simple algorithm on a computer. Usually, it’s an equation or iterative process illustrating the principle that the chapter discussed. These “TRY IT IN BASIC” exercises often take just a dozen or so lines of text. The aim is both to illustrate the chapter’s topic (e.g. statistics) and to offer a little taste of programming.

Only no student tries these exercises. Not my son or any of his classmates. Nor anybody they know. Indeed, I would be shocked if more than a few dozen students in the whole nation actually type in those lines that are still published in countless textbooks across the land. Those who want to (like Ben) simply cannot.

Now, I have been complaining about this for three years. But whenever I mention the problem to some computer industry maven at a conference or social gathering, the answer is always the same: “There are still BASIC programs in textbooks?”

At least a dozen senior Microsoft officials have given me the exact same response. After taking this to be a symptom of cluelessness in the textbook industry, they then talk about how obsolete BASIC is, and how many more things you can do with higher-level languages. “Don’t worry,” they invariably add, “the newer textbooks won’t have any of those little BASIC passages in them.”

All of which is absolutely true. BASIC is actually quite tedious and absurd for getting done the vast array of vivid and ambitious goals that are typical of a modern programmer. Clearly, any kid who wants to accomplish much in the modern world would not use it for very long. And, of course, it is obvious that newer texts will abandon “TRY IT IN BASIC” as a teaching technique, if they haven’t already.

But all of this misses the point. Those textbook exercises were easy, effective, universal, pedagogically interesting — and nothing even remotely like them can be done with any language other than BASIC. Typing in a simple algorithm yourself, seeing exactly how the computer calculates and iterates in a manner you could duplicate with pencil and paper — say, running an experiment in coin flipping, or making a dot change its position on a screen, propelled by math and logic, and only by math and logic: All of this is priceless. As it was priceless 20 years ago. Only 20 years ago, it was physically possible for millions of kids to do it. Today it is not.

In effect, we have allowed a situation to develop that is like a civilization devouring its seed corn. If an enemy had set out to do this to us — quietly arranging so that almost no school child in America can tinker with line coding on his or her own — any reasonably patriotic person would have called it an act of war.

Am I being overly dramatic? Then consider a shift in perspective.

First ponder the notion of programming as a series of layers. At the bottom-most level is machine code. I showed my son the essentials on scratch paper, explaining the roots of Alan Turing’s “general computer” and how it was ingeniously implemented in the first four-bit integrated processor, Intel’s miraculous 1971 4004 chip, unleashing a generation of nerdy guys to move bits around in little clusters, adding and subtracting clumps of ones and zeroes, creating the first calculators and early desktop computers like the legendary Altair.

This level of coding is still vital, but only at the realm of specialists at the big CPU houses. It is important for guys like Ben to know about machine code — that it’s down there, like DNA in your cell — but a bright kid doesn’t need to actually do it, in order to be computer-literate. (Ben wants to, though. Anyone know a good kit?)

The layer above that is often called assembler, though there are many various ways that user intent can be interpreted down to the bit level without actually flicking a series of on-off switches. Sets of machine instructions are grouped, assembled and correlated with (for example) ASCII-coded commands. Some call this the “boringest” level. Think of the hormones swirling through your body. Even a glimpse puts me to sleep. But at least I know that it is there.

The third layer of this cake is the operating system of your computer. Call it BIOS and DOS, along with a lot of other names. This was where guys like Gates and Wozniak truly propelled a whole industry and way of life, by letting the new desktops communicate with their users, exchange information with storage disks and actually show stuff on a screen. Cool.

Meanwhile, the same guys were offering — at the fourth layer — a programming language that folks could use to create new software of their very own. BASIC was derived from academic research tools like beloved old FORTRAN (in which my doctoral research was coded onto punched paper cards, yeesh). It was crude. It was dry. It was unsuitable for the world of the graphic user interface. BASIC had a lot of nasty habits. But it liberated several million bright minds to poke and explore and aspire as never before.

The “scripting” languages that serve as entry-level tools for today’s aspiring programmers — like Perl and Python — don’t make this experience accessible to students in the same way. BASIC was close enough to the algorithm that you could actually follow the reasoning of the machine as it made choices and followed logical pathways. Repeating this point for emphasis: You could even do it all yourself, following along on paper, for a few iterations, verifying that the dot on the screen was moving by the sheer power of mathematics, alone. Wow! (Indeed, I would love to sit with my son and write “Pong” from scratch. The rule set — the math — is so simple. And he would never see the world the same, no matter how many higher-level languages he then moves on to.)

The closest parallel I can think of is the WWII generation of my father — guys for whom the ultra in high tech was automobiles. What fraction of them tore apart jalopies at home? Or at least became adept at diagnosing and repairing the always fragile machines of that era? One result of that free and happy spasm of techie fascination was utterly strategic. When the “Arsenal of Democracy” began churning out swarms of tanks and trucks and jeeps, these were sent to the front and almost overnight an infantry division might be mechanized, in the sure and confident expectation that there would be thousands of young men ready (or trainable) to maintain these tools of war. (Can your kid even change the oil nowadays? Or a tire?)

The parallel technology of the ’70s generation was IT. Not every boomer soldered an Altair from a kit, or mastered the arcana of DBASE. But enough of them did so that we got the Internet and Web. We got Moore’s Law and other marvels. We got a chance to ride another great technological wave.

So, what’s the parallel hobby skill today? What tech-marvel has boys and girls enthralled, tinkering away, becoming expert in something dazzling and practical and new? Shooting ersatz aliens in “Halo”? Dressing up avatars in “The Sims”? Oh sure, there’s creativity in creating cool movies and Web pages. But except for the very few who will make new media films, do you see a great wave of technological empowerment coming out of all this?

OK, I can hear the sneers. Are these the rants of a grouchy old boomer? Feh, kids today! (And get the #$#*! off my lawn!)

Fact is, I just wanted to give my son a chance to sample some of the wizardry standing behind the curtain, before he became lost in the avatar-filled and glossy-rendered streets of Oz. Like the hero in “TRON,” or “The Matrix,” I want him to be a user who can see the lines that weave through the fabric of cyberspace — or at least know some history about where it all came from. At the very minimum, he ought to be able to type those examples in his math books and use the computer the way it was originally designed to be used: to compute.

Hence, imagine my frustration when I discovered that it simply could not be done.

Yes, yes: For three years I have heard all the rationalized answers. No kid should even want BASIC, they say. There are higher-level languages like C++ (Ben is already — at age 14 — on page 200 of his self-teaching C++ book!) and yes, there are better education programs like Logo. Hey, what about Visual Basic! Others suggested downloadable versions like q-basic, y-basic, alphabetabasic…

Indeed, I found one that was actually easy to download, easy to turn on, and that simply let us type in some of those little example programs, without demanding that we already be manual-chomping fanatics in order to even get started using the damn thing. Chipmunk Basic for the Macintosh actually started right up and let us have a little clean, algorithmic fun. Extremely limited, but helpful. All of the others, every last one of them, was either too high-level (missing the whole point!) or else far, far too onerous to figure out or use. Certainly not meant to be turn-key usable by any junior high school student. Appeals for help online proved utterly futile.

Until, at last, Ben himself came up with a solution. An elegant solution of startling simplicity. Essentially: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

While trawling through eBay, one day, he came across listings for archaic 1980s-era computers like the Apple II. “Say, Dad, didn’t you write your first novel on one of those?” he asked.

“Actually, my second. ‘Startide Rising.’ On an Apple II with Integer Basic and a serial number in five digits. It got stolen, pity. But my first novel, ‘Sundiver,’ was written on this clever device called a typewrit –”

“Well, look, Dad. Have you seen what it costs to buy one of those old Apples online, in its original box? Hey, what could we do with it?”

“Huh?” I stared in amazement.

Then, gradually, I realized the practical possibilities.

Let’s cut to the chase. We did not wind up buying an Apple II. Instead (for various reasons) we bought a Commodore 64 (in original box) for $25. It arrived in good shape. It took us maybe three minutes to attach an old TV. We flicked the power switch … and up came a command line. In BASIC.

Uh. Problem solved?

I guess. At least far better than any other thing we’ve tried!

We are now typing in programs from books, having fun making dots move (and thus knowing why the dots move, at the command of math, and not magic). There are still problems, like getting an operating system to make the 5141c disk drive work right. Most of the old floppies are unreadable. But who cares? (Ben thinks that loading programs to and from tape is so cool. I gurgle and choke remembering my old Sinclair … but whatever.)

What matters is that we got over a wretched educational barrier. And now Ben can study C++ with a better idea where it all came from. In the nick of time.

Problem solved? Again, at one level.

And yet, can you see the irony? Are any of the masters of the information age even able to see the irony?

This is not just a matter of cheating a generation, telling them to simply be consumers of software, instead of the innovators that their uncles were. No, this goes way beyond that. In medical school, professors insist that students have some knowledge of chemistry and DNA before they are allowed to cut open folks. In architecture, you are at least exposed to some physics.

But in the high-tech, razzle-dazzle world of software? According to the masters of IT, line coding is not a deep-fabric topic worth studying. Not a layer that lies beneath, holding up the world of object-oriented programming. Rather, it is obsolete! Or, at best, something to be done in Bangalore. Or by old guys in their 50s, guaranteeing them job security, the same way that COBOL programmers were all dragged out of retirement and given new cars full of Jolt Cola during the Y2K crisis.

All right, here’s a challenge. Get past all the rationalizations. (Because that is what they are.) It would be trivial for Microsoft to provide a version of BASIC that kids could use, whenever they wanted, to type in all those textbook examples. Maybe with some cool tutorial suites to guide them along, plus samples of higher-order tools. It would take up a scintilla of disk space and maybe even encourage many of them to move on up. To (for example) Visual Basic!

Or else, hold a big meeting and choose another lingua franca, so long as it can be universal enough to use in texts, the way that BASIC was.

Instead, we are told that “those textbooks are archaic” and that students should be doing “something else.” Only then watch the endless bickering over what that “something else” should be — with the net result that there is no lingua franca at all, no “basic” language so common that textbook publishers can reliably use it as a pedagogical aide.

The textbook writers and publishers aren’t the ones who are obsolete, out-of-touch and wrong. It is people who have yanked the rug out from under teachers and students all across the land.

Let me reiterate. Kids are not doing “something else” other than BASIC. Not millions of them. Not hundreds or tens of thousands of them. Hardly any of them, in fact. It is not their fault. Because some of them, like my son, really want to. But they can’t. Not without turning into time travelers, the way we did, by giving up (briefly) on the present and diving into the past. (I also plan to teach him how to change the oil and fix a tire!) By using the tools of a bygone era to learn more about tomorrow.

If this is a test, then Ben and I passed it, ingeniously. In contrast, Microsoft and Apple and all the big-time education-computerizing reformers of the MIT Media Lab are failing, miserably. For all of their high-flown education initiatives (like the “$100 laptop”), they seem bent on providing information consumption devices, not tools that teach creative thinking and technological mastery.

Web access for the poor would be great. But machines that kids out there can understand and program themselves? To those who shape our technical world, the notion remains not just inaccessible, but strangely inconceivable.

Typically we are told, often and passionately, that Big Brother may abuse these new powers. Or else our privacy and rights will be violated by some other group. Perhaps a commercial, aristocratic, bureaucratic, intellectual, foreign, criminal or technological elite. (Pick your favorite bogeyman.)

Because one or more of these centers of power might use the new tools to see better, we’re told that we should all be very afraid. Indeed, our only hope may be to squelch or fiercely control the onslaught of change. For the sake of safety and liberty, we are offered one prescription: We must limit the power of others to see.

Half a century ago, amid an era of despair, George Orwell created one of the most oppressive metaphors in literature with the telescreen system used to surveil and control the people in his novel “1984.” We have been raised to a high degree of sensitivity by Orwell’s self-preventing prophecy, and others like it. Attuned to wariness, today’s activists preach that any growth in the state’s ability to see will take us down a path of no return, toward the endless hell of Big Brother.

But consider. The worst aspect of Orwell’s telescreen — the trait guaranteeing tyranny — was not that agents of the state could use it to see. The one thing that despots truly need is to avoid accountability. In “1984,” this is achieved by keeping the telescreen aimed in just one direction! By preventing the people from looking back.

While a flood of new discoveries may seem daunting, they should not undermine the core values of a calm and knowledgeable citizenry. Quite the opposite: While privacy may have to be redefined, the new technologies of surveillance should and will be the primary countervailing force against tyranny.

In any event, none of those who denounce the new technologies have shown how it will be possible to stop this rising tide.

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Consider a few examples:

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology will soon replace the simple, passive bar codes on packaged goods, substituting inexpensive chips that respond to microwave interrogation, making every box of toothpaste or razor blades part of a vast, automatic inventory accounting system. Wal-Mart announced in 2003 that it will require its top 100 suppliers to use RFID on all large cartons, for purposes of warehouse inventory keeping. But that is only the beginning. Inevitably as prices fall, RFID chips will be incorporated into most products and packaging.

Supermarket checkout will become a breeze, when you simply push your cart past a scanner and grab a printout receipt, with every purchase automatically debited from your account.

Does that sound simultaneously creepy and useful? Well, it goes much further. Under development are smart washers that will read the tags on clothing and adjust their cycles accordingly, and smart medicine cabinets that track tagged prescriptions, in order to warn which ones have expired or need refilling. Cars and desks and computers will adjust to your preferred settings as you approach. Paramedics may download your health status — including allergies and dangerous drug-conflicts — even if you are unconscious or unable to speak.

There’s a downside. A wonderful 1960s paranoia satire, “The President’s Analyst,” offered prophetic warning against implanted devices, inserted into people, that would allow them to be tracked by big business and government. But who needs implantation when your clothing and innocuous possessions will carry cheap tags of their own that can be associated with their owners? Already some schools — especially in Asia — are experimenting with RFID systems that will locate all students, at all times.

Oh, there will be fun to be had, for a while, in fooling these systems with minor acts of irreverent rebellion. Picture kids swapping clothes and possessions, furtively, in order to leave muddled trails. Still, such measures will not accomplish much over extended periods. Tracking on vast scales, national and worldwide, will emerge in rapid order. And if we try to stop it with legislation, the chief effect will only be to drive the surveillance into secret networks that are just as pervasive. Only they will operate at levels we cannot supervise, study, discuss or understand.

Wait, there’s more. For example, a new Internet protocol (IPv6) will vastly expand available address space in the virtual world.

The present IP, offering 32-bit data labels, can now offer every living human a unique online address, limiting direct access to something like 10 billion Web pages or specific computers. In contrast, IPv6 will use 128 bits. This will allow the virtual tagging of every cubic centimeter of the earth’s surface, from sea level to mountaintop, spreading a multidimensional data overlay across the planet. Every tagged or manmade object may participate, from your wristwatch to a nearby lamppost, vending machine or trash can — even most of the discarded contents of the trash can.

Every interest group will find some kind of opportunity in this new world. Want to protect forests? Each and every tree on earth might have a chip fired into its bark from the air, alerting a network if furtive loggers start transporting stolen hardwoods. Or the same method could track whoever steals your morning paper. Not long after this, teens and children will purchase rolls of ultra-cheap digital eyes and casually stick them onto walls. Millions of those “penny cams” will join in the fun, contributing to the vast IPv6 datasphere.

Oh, this new Internet protocol will offer many benefits — for example, embedded systems for data tracking and verification. In the short term, expanded powers of vision may embolden tyrants. But over the long run, these systems could help to empower citizens and enhance mutual trust.

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In the mid-’90s, when I began writing “The Transparent Society,” it seemed dismaying to note that Great Britain had almost 150,000 CCD police cameras scanning public streets. Today, they number in the millions.

In the United States, a similar proliferation, though just as rapid, has been somewhat masked by a different national tradition — that of dispersed ownership. As pointed out by UC-San Diego researcher Mohan Trivedi, American constabularies have few cameras of their own. Instead, they rely on vast numbers of security monitors operated by small and large companies, banks, markets and private individuals, who scan ever larger swaths of urban landscape. Nearly all of the footage that helped solve the Oklahoma City bombing and the D.C. sniper episode — as well as documenting the events of 9/11 — came from unofficial sources.

This unique system can be both effective and inexpensive for state agencies, especially when the public is inclined to cooperate, as in searches for missing children. Still, there are many irksome drawbacks to officials who may want more pervasive and direct surveillance. For one thing, the present method relies upon high levels of mutual trust and goodwill between authorities and the owners of those cameras — whether they be convenience-store corporations or videocam-equipped private citizens. Moreover, while many crimes are solved with help from private cameras, more police are also held accountable for well-documented lapses in professional behavior.

This tattletale trend began with the infamous beating of Rodney King, more than a decade ago, and has continued at an accelerating pace. Among recently exposed events were those that aroused disgust (the tormenting of live birds in the Pilgrim’s Pride slaughterhouse) and shook America’s stature in the world (the prisoner abuse by jailers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq). Each time the lesson is the same one: that professionals should attend to their professionalism, or else the citizens and consumers who pay their wages will find out and — eventually — hold them accountable.

(Those wishing to promote the trend might look into Project Witness which supplies cameras to underdogs around the world.)

Will American authorities decide to abandon this quaint social bargain of shared access to sensors under dispersed ownership? As the price of electronic gear plummets, it will become easy and cheap for our professional protectors to purchase their own dedicated systems of surveillance, like those already operating in Britain, Singapore and elsewhere. Systems that “look down from above” (surveillance) without any irksome public involvement.

Or might authorities simply use our networks without asking? A decade ago, the U.S. government fought activist groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, claiming a need to unlock commercial-level encryption codes at will, for the sake of law enforcement and national defense. Both sides won apparent victories. High-level commercial encryption became widely available. And the government came to realize that it doesn’t matter. It never did.

Shall I go on?

Driven partly by security demands, a multitude of biometric technologies will identify individuals by scanning physical attributes, from fingerprints, iris patterns, faces and voices to brainwaves and possibly unique chemical signatures. Starting with those now entering and leaving the United States, whole classes of people will grow accustomed to routine identification in this way. Indeed, citizens may start to demand more extensive use of biometric identification, as a safety measure against identity theft. When your car recognizes your face, and all the stores can verify your fingerprint, what need will you have for keys or a credit card?

Naturally, this is yet another trend that has put privacy activists in a lather. They worry — with some justification — about civil liberties implications when the police or FBI might scan multitudes (say, at a sporting event) in search of fugitives or suspects. Automatic software agents will recognize individuals who pass through one camera view, then perform a smooth handoff to the next camera, and the next, planting a “tail” on dozens, hundreds, or tens of thousands of people at a time.

And yes, without a doubt this method could become a potent tool for some future Big Brother.

So? Should that legitimate and plausible fear be addressed by reflexively blaming technology and seeking ways to restrict its use? Or by finding ways that technology may work for us, instead of against us?

Suppose you could ban or limit a particular identification technique. (Mind you, I’ve seen no evidence that it can be done.) The sheer number of different, overlapping biometric approaches will make that whole approach fruitless. In fact, human beings fizz and froth with unique traits that can be spotted at a glance, even with our old-fashioned senses. Our ancestors relied on this fact, building and correlating lists of people who merited trust or worry, from among the few thousands that they met in person. In a global village of 10 billion souls, machines will do the same thing for us by prosthetically amplifying vision and augmenting memory.

With so many identification methodologies working independently and in parallel, our children may find the word “anonymous” impossibly quaint, perhaps even incomprehensible. But that needn’t mean an end to freedom — or even privacy. Although it will undoubtedly mean a redefinition of what we think privacy means.

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But onward with our scan of panopticonic technologies. Beyond RFID, IPv6 and biometrics there are smart cards, smart highways, smart airports, smart automobiles, smart televisions, smart homes and so on.

The shared adjective may be premature. These systems will provide improved service long before anything like actual “artificial intelligence” comes online. Yet machinery needn’t be strictly intelligent in order to transform our lives. Moreover, distributed “smart” units will also gather information, joining together in cross-correlating networks that recognize travelers, perform security checks, negotiate micro-transactions, detect criminal activity, warn of potential danger and anticipate desires. When these parts fully interlink, the emerging entity may not be self-aware, but it will certainly know the whereabouts of its myriad parts.

Location awareness will pervade the electronic world, thanks to ever more sophisticated radio transceivers, GPS chips, and government-backed emergency location initiatives like Enhanced-911 in the United States and Enhanced-112 in Europe. Cellphones, computers and cars will report position and unique identity in real time, with (or possibly without) owner consent. Lives will be saved, property recovered, and missing children found. But these benefits aren’t the real reason that location awareness and reporting will spread to nearly every device. As described by science fiction author Vernor Vinge, it is going to happen because the capability will cost next to nothing as an integrated part of wireless technology. In the future, you can assume that almost any electronic device will be trackable, though citizens still have time to debate who may do the tracking.

The flood of information has to go someplace. Already databases fill with information about private individuals, from tax and medical records to credit ratings; from travel habits and retail purchases to which movies they recently downloaded on their TiVo personal video recorder. Yahoo’s HotJobs recently began selling “self” background checks, offering job seekers a chance to vet their own personal, financial and legal data — the same information that companies might use to judge them. (True, a dating service that already screens for felons, recently expanded its partnership with database provider Rapsheets to review public records and verify a user’s single status.) Data aggregators like Acxiom Corp., of Arkansas, or ChoicePoint, of Georgia, go even further, listing your car loans, outstanding liens and judgments, any professional or pilot or gun licenses, credit checks, and real estate you might own — all of it gathered from legal and open sources.

On the plus side, you’ll be able to find and counter those rumors and slanderous untruths that can slash from the dark. The ability of others to harm you with lies may decline drastically. On the other hand, it will be simple for almost anybody using these methods to appraise the background of anyone else, including all sorts of unpleasant things that are inconveniently true. In other words, the rest of us will be able to do what elites (define them as you wish, from government to aristocrats to criminal masterminds) already can.

Some perceive this trend as ultimately empowering, while others see it as inherently oppressive. For example, activist groups from the ACLU to the Electronic Privacy Information Center call for European-style legislation aiming to seal the data behind perfect firewalls into separate, isolated clusters that cannot cross-link or overlap. And in the short term, such efforts may prove beneficial. New database filters may help users find information they legitimately need while protecting personal privacy … for a while, buying us time to innovate for the long term.

But we mustn’t fool ourselves. No firewall, program or machine has ever been perfect, or perfectly implemented by fallible human beings. Whether the law officially allows it or not, can any effort by mere mortals prevent data from leaking? (And just one brief leak can spill a giant database into public knowledge, forever.) Cross-correlation will swiftly draw conclusions that are far more significant than the mere sum of the parts, adding up to a profoundly detailed picture of every citizen, down to details of personal taste.

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Here’s a related tidbit from the Washington Post: Minnesota entrepreneur Larry Colson has developed WebVoter, a program that lets Republican activists in the state report their neighbors’ political views into a central database that the Bush-Cheney campaign can use to send them targeted campaign literature. The Bush campaign has a similar program on its Web site. And here’s Colson’s response to anyone who feels a privacy qualm or two about this program: “[It's] not as if we’re asking for Social Security number and make and model and serial number of car. We’re asking for party preference … Party preference is not something that is such a personal piece of data.”

That statement may be somewhat true in today’s America. We tend to shrug over each other’s harmless or opinionated eccentricities. But can that trait last very long when powerful groups scrutinize us, without being scrutinized back? In the long run, tolerance depends on the ability of any tolerated minority to enforce its right to be left alone. This is achieved assertively, not by hiding. And assertiveness is empowered by knowledge.

The picture so far may seem daunting enough. Only now add a flood of new sensors. We have already seen the swift and inexpensive transformation of mere cellphones into a much more general, portable, electronic tool by adding the capabilities of a digital camera, audio recorder and PDA. But have we fully grasped the implications, when any well-equipped pedestrian might swiftly transform into an ad hoc photojournalist — or peeping Tom — depending on opportunity or inclination?

On the near horizon are wearable multimedia devices, with displays that blend into your sunglasses, along with computational, data-storage and communications capabilities woven into the very clothes you wear. The term “augmented reality” will apply when these tools overlay your subjective view of the world with digitally supplied facts, directions or commentary. You will expect — and rely on — rapid answers to queries about any person or object in sight. In essence, this will be no different than querying your neuron-based memories about people in the village where you grew up. Only we had a million years to get used to tracking reputations that way. The new prosthetics that expand memory will prove awkward at first.

Today we worry about drivers who use cellphones at the wheel. Tomorrow will it be distracted pedestrians, muttering to no one as they walk? Will we grunt and babble while strolling along, like village idiots of yore?

Maybe not. Having detected nerve signals near the larynx that are preparatory to forming words, scientists at NASA Ames Research Center lately proposed subvocal speech systems — like those forecast in my 1989 novel “Earth” — that will accept commands without audible sounds. They would be potentially useful in spacesuits, noisy environments and to reduce the inevitable babble when we are all linked by wireless all the time.

Taking this trend in more general terms, volition sensing may pick up an even wider variety of cues, empowering you to converse, give commands, or participate in faraway events without speaking aloud or showing superficial signs.

Is this the pre-dawn of tech-mediated telepathy? It may be closer than you think. Advertising agencies are already funding research groups that use PET scans and fMRI to study the immediate reactions of test subjects to marketing techniques and images. “We are crossing the chasm” said Adam Koval, chief operating officer of Thought Sciences, a division of Bright House, an Atlanta advertising and consulting firm whose clients include Home Depot, Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola, “and bringing a new paradigm in analytic rigor to the world of marketing and advertising.” Those who decry such studies face a tough burden, since all of the test subjects are paid volunteers. But how about when these methods leave the laboratory and hit the street? It is eerie to imagine a future when sensitive devices might scan your very thoughts when you pass by. Clearly there must be limits, only how? Will you be better able to protect yourself if these technologies are banned (and thus driven underground) or regulated, with a free market that might offer us all pocket detectors, to catch scanners in the act?

Microsoft recently unveiled Sensecam, a camera disguisable as jewelry that automatically records scores of images per hour from the wearer’s point of view, digitally documenting an ongoing daily photo-diary. Such “Boswell machinery” may go far beyond egomania. For example, what good will your wallet do to a mugger when images of the crime are automatically broadcast across the Web? Soon, cyber-witnessing of public events, business deals, crimes and accidents will be routine. In movie parlance, you will have to assume that everybody you meet is carrying a “wire.”

Meanwhile, you can be sure that military technologies will continue spinning off civilian versions, as happened with infrared night vision. Take “sniffers” designed to warn of environmental or chemical dangers on the battlefield. Soon, cheap and plentiful sensors will find their way into neighborhood storm drains, onto lampposts, or even your home faucet, giving rapid warnings of local pollution. Neighborhood or activist groups that create detector networks will have autonomous access to data rivaling that of local governments. Of course, a better-informed citizenry is sure to be more effective…

…and far more noisy.

The same spinoff effect has emerged from military development of inexpensive UAV battlefield reconnaissance drones. Some of the “toys” offered by Draganfly Innovations can cruise independently for more than an hour along a GPS-guided path, transmit 2.4 GHz digital video, then return automatically to the hobbyist owner. In other companies and laboratories, the aim is toward miniaturization, developing micro-flyers that can assist an infantry squad in an urban skirmish or carry eavesdropping equipment into the lair of a suspected terrorist. Again, civilian models are already starting to emerge. There may already be some in your neighborhood.

Cheap, innumerable eyes in the sky. One might envision dozens of potentially harmful uses … hundreds of beneficial ones … and millions of others in between ranging from irksome to innocuous … all leading toward a fundamental change in the way each of us relates to the horizon that so cruelly constrained the imagination of our ancestors. Just as baby boomers grew accustomed to viewing faraway places through the magical — though professionally mediated — channel of network television, so the next generation will simply assume that there is always another independent way to glimpse real-time events, either far away or just above the streets where they live.

Should we push for yet another unenforceable law to guard our backyards against peeping Toms and their drone planes? Or perhaps we’d be better off simply insisting that the companies that make the little robot spies give us the means to trace them back to their nosy pilots. In other words, looking back may be a more effective way to protect privacy.

One might aim for reciprocal transparency using new technology. For example, Swiss researcher Marc Langheinrich’s personal digital assistant application detects nearby sensors and then lists what kind of information they’re collecting. At a more radical and polemical level, there is the sousveillance movement, led by University of Toronto professor Steve Mann. Playing off “surveillance” (overlooking from above), Mann’s coined term suggests that we should all get in the habit of looking from below, proving that we are sovereign and alert citizens down here, not helpless sheep. Mann contends that private individuals will be empowered to do this by new senses, dramatically augmented by wearable electronic devices.

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We have skimmed over a wide range of new technologies, from RFID chips and stick-on penny cameras to new Internet address protocols and numerous means of biometric identification. From database mining and aggregation to sensors that detect chemical pollution or the volition to speak or act before your muscles get a chance to move. From omni-surveillance to universal localization. From eyes in the sky to those that may invade your personal space.

Note a common theme. Every device or function that’s been described here serves to enhance some human sensory capability, from sight and hearing to memory. And while some may fret and fume, there is no historical precedent for a civilization refusing such prosthetics when they become available.

Such trends cannot be boiled down to a simple matter of good news or bad. While technologies of distributed vision may soon empower common folk in dramatic ways, giving a boost to participatory democracy by highly informed citizens, you will not hear that side of the message from most pundits, who habitually portray the very same technologies in a darker light, predicting that machines are about to destroy privacy, undermine values and ultimately enslave us.

In fact, the next century will be much too demanding for fixed perspectives. (Or rigid us-vs.-them ideologies.) Agility will be far more useful, plus a little healthy contrariness.

When in the company of reflexive pessimists — or knee-jerk optimists — the wise among us will be those saying … “Yes, but…”

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Which way will the pendulum of good and bad news finally swing?

We are frequently told that there is a fundamental choice to be made in a tragic trade-off between safety and freedom. While agents of the state, like Attorney General John Ashcroft, demand new powers of surveillance — purportedly the better to protect us — champions of civil liberties such as the ACLU warn against surrendering traditional constraints upon what the government is allowed to see. For example, they decry provisions of the PATRIOT Act that open broader channels of inspection, detection, search and data collection, predicting that such steps take us on the road toward Big Brother.

While they are right to fear such an outcome, they could not be more wrong about the specifics. As I discuss in greater detail elsewhere, the very idea of a trade-off between security and freedom is one of the most insidious and dismal notions I have ever heard — a perfect example of a devil’s dichotomy. We modern citizens are living proof that people can and should have both. Freedom and safety, in fact, work together, not in opposition. Furthermore, I refuse to let anybody tell me that I must choose between liberty for my children and their safety! I refuse, and so should you.

As we’ve seen throughout this article, and a myriad other possible examples, there is no way that we will ever succeed in limiting the power of the elites to see and know. If our freedom depends on blinding the mighty, then we haven’t a prayer.

Fortunately, that isn’t what really matters after all. Moreover, John Ashcroft clearly knows it. By far the most worrisome and dangerous parts of the PATRIOT Act are those that remove the tools of supervision, allowing agents of the state to act secretly, without checks or accountability. (Ironically, these are the very portions that the ACLU and other groups have most neglected.)

In comparison, a few controversial alterations of procedure for search warrants are pretty minor. After all, appropriate levels of surveillance may shift as society and technology experience changes in a new century. (The Founders never heard of a wiretap, for example.)

But our need to watch the watchers will only grow.

It is a monopoly of vision that we need to fear above all else. So long as most of the eyes are owned by the citizens themselves, there will remain a chance for us to keep arguing knowledgeably among ourselves, debating and bickering, as sovereign, educated citizens should.

It will not be a convenient or anonymous world. Privacy may have to be redefined much closer to home. There will be a lot of noise.

But we will not drown under a rising tide of overwhelming technology. Keeping our heads, we will remain free to guide our ships across these rising waters — to choose a destiny of our own.

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This article is condensed from a longer work under construction. Inquire c/o David Brin.

Naturally, I enjoyed the “Lord of the Rings” (LOTR) trilogy as a kid, during its first big boom in the 1960s. I mean, what was there not to like? As William Goldman said about another great fantasy, “The Princess Bride,” it has “Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True Love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad Men. Good Men. Beautifulest Ladies. Spiders. Dragons. Eagles. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Magic. Chases. Escapes. Miracles.”

In 1997, voters in a BBC poll named “The Lord of the Rings” the greatest book of the 20th century. In 1999, Amazon.com customers chose it as the greatest book of the millennium.

Of course there is much more to this work than mere fantasy escapism. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote his epic — including its prequel, “The Hobbit” — during the dark middle decades of the 20th century, a time when modernity appeared to have failed in one spectacle of technologically amplified bloodshed after another.

LOTR clearly reflected this era. Only, in contrast to the real world, Tolkien’s portrayal of “good” resisting a darkly threatening “evil” offered something sadly lacking in the real struggles against Nazi or Communist tyrannies — a role for individual champions. His elves and hobbits and über-human warriors performed the same role that Lancelot and Merlin and Odysseus did in older fables, and that superheroes still do in comic books. Through doughty Frodo, noble Aragorn and the ethereal Galadriel, he proclaimed the paramount importance — above nations and civilizations — of the indomitable Romantic hero.

All right, I read Tolkien’s epic trilogy a bit unconventionally, starting with “The Two Towers” and backfilling as I went along. Likewise, I may be a bit off-kilter in liking, best of all, the unofficial companion volume to LOTR — perhaps the funniest work penned in English — the Harvard Lampoon’s 1968 parody, titled “Bored of the Rings.”

Nonetheless, I deem Tolkien’s trilogy to be one of the finest works of literary universe-building ever, with a lovingly textured internal consistency that’s excelled only by J.R.R.T.’s penchant for crafting “lost” dialects. Long before there was a Klingon Language Institute, expert aficionados — amateurs in the classic sense of the word — were busy translating Shakespeare and the Bible into High Elvish, Dwarvish and other Tolkien-generated tongues.

And yes, LOTR opened the door to a vast popular eruption of heroic fantasy. With exacting devotion to Tolkien’s masterly architecture, his followers scrupulously copied the rhythms, ambience and formulas that worked so well.

Indeed, the popularity of this formula is deeply thought-provoking. Millions of people who live in a time of genuine miracles — in which the great-grandchildren of illiterate peasants may routinely fly through the sky, roam the Internet, view far-off worlds and elect their own leaders — slip into delighted wonder at the notion of a wizard hitchhiking a ride from an eagle. Many even find themselves yearning for a society of towering lords and loyal, kowtowing vassals.

Wouldn’t life seem richer, finer if we still had kings? If the guardians of wisdom kept their wonders locked up in high wizard towers, instead of rushing onto PBS the way our unseemly “scientists” do today? Weren’t miracles more exciting when they were doled out by a precious few, instead of being commercialized, bottled and marketed to the masses for $1.95?

Didn’t we stop going to the moon because it had become boring?

Just look at how people felt about Princess Diana. No democratically elected public servant was ever so adored. Democracy doesn’t have the pomp, the majesty, the sense of being above accountability. One of the paramount promoters of the fantasy-mythic tradition, George Lucas, expressed it this way:

“There’s a reason why kings built large palaces, sat on thrones and wore rubies all over. There’s a whole social need for that, not to oppress the masses, but to impress the masses and make them proud and allow them to feel good about their culture, their government and their ruler so that they are left feeling that a ruler has the right to rule over them, so that they feel good rather than disgusted about being ruled.”

This yearning makes sense if you remember that arbitrary lords and chiefs did rule us for 99.44 percent of human existence. It’s only been 200 years or so — an eye blink — that “scientific enlightenment” began waging its rebellion against the nearly universal pattern called feudalism, a hierarchic system that ruled our ancestors in every culture that developed both metallurgy and agriculture. Wherever human beings acquired both plows and swords, gangs of large men picked up the latter and took other men’s women and wheat. (Sexist language is meaningfully accurate here; those cultures had no word for “sexism,” it was simply assumed.)

They then proceeded to announce rules and “traditions” ensuring that their sons would inherit everything.

Putting aside cultural superficialities, on every continent society quickly shaped itself into a pyramid with a few well-armed bullies at the top — accompanied by some fast-talking guys with painted faces or spangled cloaks, who curried favor by weaving stories to explain why the bullies should remain on top.

Only something exceptional started happening. Bit by bit, the elements began taking shape for a new social and intellectual movement, one finally capable of challenging the alliance of warrior lords, priests, bards and secretive magicians.

Timidly at first, guilds and townsfolk rallied together and lent their support to kings, thereby easing oppression by local lords. Long before Aristotle became a tool of the establishment, his rediscovery during the High Middle Ages offered some relief from dour anti-intellectualism. Then Renaissance humanism offered a philosophical basis for valuing the individual human being as worthy in its own right. The Reformation freed sanctity and morality from control by a narrow, self-chosen club; it also legitimized self-betterment through hard work in this world, not the next. Then Galileo and Newton showed that creation’s clockwork can be understood, even appreciated in its elegance, not just endured.

Still, the entire notion of progress remained nebulous and ill-formed. Society’s essential pyramidal shape remained intact till a full suite of elements and tools were finally in place for a true revolution — one so fundamental, coming with such heady, empowering suddenness, that participants gave it a name filled with hubristic portent: Enlightenment.

The word wasn’t ill-chosen, for it bespoke illuminating a path ahead — which, in turn, implied the unprecedented notion that “forward” is a direction worth taking, instead of lamenting over a preferred past. Progress — and boy, did we take to it. In two or three centuries our levels of education, health, liberation, tolerance and confident diversity have been momentously, utterly transformed.

The very shape of society changed from the once-universal pyramid toward a diamond configuration, wherein a comfortable and well-educated middle class actually outnumbers the poor. For the very first time. Anywhere.

We can argue endlessly about the accuracy and implications of this “diamond” analogy — and its vast remaining imperfections — but not over the fact that a profound shift has occurred, driven by a genuine scientific-technical-educational revolution.

And yet, almost from its birth, the Enlightenment Movement was confronted by an ironic counterrevolution, rejecting the very notion of progress. The Romantic Movement erupted as a rebellion against the rebellion.

In fairness, it didn’t start out that way. The first Romantics stood with their Enlightenment predecessors against feudalism and clericalism and welcomed the French Revolution as a step toward a kind of utopian universal brotherhood. Even today, men like Thomas Jefferson stand as icons of both Enlightenment and Romanticism.

But this changed when the industrial revolution hit full stride. Suddenly, where once gentry and clergy ruled, there were arrogant new powers striding about. An entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. A new intellectual elite of science. And a clanking, noisome ruction of impudent machinery.

Even democracy began to seem less classically pure when it was taken off a pedestal to be practiced for real by farmers, shopkeepers and a rising middle class, all of them arguing, wheedling and conniving amid an incredible din.

Temblors began splitting a chasm between Romantics and Enlightenment pragmatists. The alliance that had been so formidable against feudalism began turning against itself. Trenches soon aligned along the most obvious fault line, down the middle — between future and past.

In this conflict, J.R.R. Tolkien stood firmly for the past.

Calling the scientific worldview “soul-less,” he joined Keats and Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, Henry James and many European-trained philosophers in spurning the modern emphasis on pragmatic experimentation, production, universal literacy, progress, cooperative enterprise, democracy, city life and flattened social orders.

In contrast to these “sterile” pursuits, Romantics extolled the traditional, the personal, the particular, the subjective, the rural, the hierarchical and the metaphorical.

By the turn of the century, Romanticism was fast losing all vestige of its initial empathy for the concerns of common folk. One solitary artist — or entertainer or lost prince or angry poet — loomed larger in importance, by far, than a thousand craft workers, teachers or engineers (a value system shared today by the mythic engine of Hollywood). Just as in Homer’s time, 10,000 foot soldiers mattered less than Achilles’ heel.

This fits the very plot of “Lord of the Rings,” in which the good guys strive to preserve and restore as much as they can of an older, graceful and “natural” hierarchy, against the disturbing, quasi-industrial and vaguely technological ambience of Mordor, with its smokestack imagery and manufactured power rings that can be used by anybody, not just an elite few. (Recall the scene where Saruman turns away from the “good” side and immediately starts ripping up trees, replacing them with mining pits and smoky forges. The anti-industrial imagery could not be more explicit.)

Consider the rings. Those man-made wonders are deemed cursed, damning anyone who dares to use them, especially those nine normal humans who tried to rise up, using tools to equalize and then usurp the rightful powers of their betters — the High Elves.

The nine Ringwraiths aren’t just evil henchmen and cardboard monsters. In my opinion, they are among the most important figures of the epic. Tolkien himself calls them tragic figures and dwells on their background. These fallen mortals — men who were hauled into service to the “dark side” — can be looked upon as cautionary figures, conveying the universal lesson that “power corrupts.”

On that much we can all agree. But I think there’s more to the Ringwraiths. To me, they distill the classical Greek notion of hubris — a concept that Romantics often embrace — the idea that pain and damnation await any mortal whose ambition aims too high. Don’t try putting on the trappings or emblems or powers that rightfully belong to your betters. Above all, don’t try to decipher and redistribute mysteries.

In other words, exactly the same morality tale preached in “Star Wars.” Romanticism has come full circle, now unctuously praising the very same lords — the über-men — that it started out bravely opposing.

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I’m not suggesting that Romanticism is never right in its critique of the Enlightenment. Scientific advancement badly needs the constant light of public scrutiny, or else the “advances” can easily go sour. The most blatant example of this is what we’re doing to the environment today.

(An aside, in self-defense. Some readers may assign “left” or “right” political significance to what I say here. But both Romantics and pragmatists can be found in every modern political movement. For example, as a staunch environmentalist, I can still comment on the Romantic elitism of many who share the same cause. Enlightenment’s child — suspicion of authority — often comes paired with the quintessential romantic image: a smug loner who despises the masses. They get mixed together, even though they arise from different traditions. One way to tell them apart is to observe whether a character sneers only at power-abusers — or at everybody: Is his or her ire aimed solely upward, toward some cruel elite, or downward too, despising fellow citizens and neighbors as clueless sheep?)

Moreover, Enlightenment can never completely replace older modes of thinking. The need for stirring, illogical tales and images runs deep within us all. (Some of us earn a good living that way.) Without romance, we’d be sorry creatures, indeed.

Still, scientific/progressive society has been known to listen to its critics, and not just now and then. Name one feudal society whose leaders did that.

Were any orcs or “dark men” offered coalition positions in King Aragorn’s cabinet, at the end of the War of the Ring? Was Mordor given a benign Marshall Plan?

I think not.

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Which brings us to another of the really cool things about fantasy — identifying with a side that’s 100 percent good. You can revel as they utterly annihilate foes who deserve to be exterminated because they are 100 percent distilled evil. This may not be politically correct, but then, political correctness is really a bastard offspring of egalitarian-scientific enlightenment. Witness the sometimes saccharine p.c.-sweetness of “Star Trek.”

Romanticism never made any pretense at equality. It is hyperdiscriminatory, by nature. (Have you ever actually read Byron or Shelley?) Whole classes of people are less worthy, less deserving of life, than other classes. The Nazis were archetypal Romantics.

The urge to crush some demonized enemy resonates deeply within us, dating from ages far earlier than feudalism. Hence, the vicarious thrill we feel over the slaughter of orc foot soldiers at Helm’s Deep. Then again as Ents flatten even more goblin grunts at Saruman’s citadel, taking no prisoners, never sparing a thought for all the orphaned orclings and grieving widorcs. And again at Minas Tirith, and again at the Gondor Docks and again … Well, they’re only orcs, after all.

Lev Grossman made a similar point in a recent Time Magazine article, when he asked, “Where are the women? Peter Jackson filled out Liv Tyler’s role for the movies (it’s much less prominent in Tolkien’s version), but the Fellowship is still as much a boys’ club as Augusta National.”

Let’s not ignore but instead openly acknowledge the underlying racism and belief in aristocracy that J.R.R. Tolkien wove into the books, without even much attempt at subtlety. Nor do I much blame him. He couldn’t help it, coming from the imperialist and class-ridden culture that raised him.

Moreover, the characters whom the reader comes to know best — Frodo, Sam and even the king-in-waiting, Aragorn — are themselves not very snooty or racist. Aragorn has an easygoing, common touch — much like Luke Skywalker, the only unpatronizing Jedi. The snootiest and most relentlessly aristocratic characters in LOTR stand off in the wings — for example, the preachy, secretive and patronizing elf-lords Elrond and Galadriel, coaxing maximum effort from their allies while letting others do the fighting for them.

(I’d point out endless parallels with a fellow named Yoda, but that would stir up too many hornets at once!)

In fact, J.R.R. Tolkien was himself far more critical of the situation portrayed in his universe than any but a few of his myriad readers ever chose to notice. Certainly more self-critical than most of his contemporary readers or those watching the new film trilogy.

In several places, Tolkien openly stated his authorial judgment that the elves who made the Three Rings were ultimately to blame, having set the stage for tragedy in Middle Earth. They made their own rings (preceding Sauron’s One Ring) in order to control the world, stopping time and preventing change, forbidding anything to die and decay and thus blocking the potential for new growth. In an oft-quoted letter, Tolkien wrote:

“They wanted to have their cake and eat it: to live in the mortal historical Middle Earth because they had become fond of it … and so tried to stop its change and history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce.”

There are moments scattered throughout LOTR when Tolkien seems to be warning that Romanticism can lead one down the road to genocide. He was disturbed to see the Nazis, for example, embrace many of the same Nordic mythic stories and symbols that he used as source material.

In other books, like “The Silmarillion,” Tolkien went deeper into this self-exploration, even going so far as to cast an analytical eye upon the elvish hierarchs of Middle Earth, in much the same way that Isaac Asimov reevaluated his Second Foundation and the meddlesome-patronizing robots of his famed science fictional universe. (This is the kind of self-examination the “Star Wars” cosmos desperately needs, alas, while there’s still time.)

Indeed, many academics have cited the obvious parallel between the retreat of the High Elves in LOTR — who abandon Middle Earth to return “west across the sea” — and the dissolution of the British Empire that began with the emancipation of India about the same time that Tolkien was writing his epic. In fairness, J.R.R.T. did not rail against this change: He saw it as regrettable but inevitable — like the end of his mythical Third Age, an approaching time of iron, when aloofly noble figures like Elrond and Galadriel must go back whence they came.

But those self-critiques never had the widespread readership or influence of the original LOTR. And ultimately, Tolkien could never bring himself to cross the gap that another Oxbridge don was writing about at roughly the same time — the infamous “two cultures” gulf that C.P. Snow mapped between the world of science and the world of the arts.

Try as he might, and even confronted with the blatant Romantic excesses of Nazism, Tolkien could not escape his own deep conviction that democratic enlightenment and modernity made up the greater evil. That hated trend, he feared, would ruin all the beauty that he found in tradition. In aristocratic-mystical hierarchies. In the ways of the past.

It all seems rather a pity, in light of what happened later, during the final third of the 20th century. For Snow’s gap between two cultures began to be crossed, time and again, by unfettered spirits who simply refused to accept primly drawn categories. I wish Tolkien could have lived to see how easily this chasm is traversed now, in both directions, by technologically savvy artists and by scientists who love art.

Indeed, science fiction bridged the two-cultures gap with a superhighway. But that’s another story.

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Having trouble picturing this dichotomy I’m painting? Between Romantics and followers of Ben Franklin’s pragmatic Enlightenment?

Well here’s another way of looking at it, focusing on how people view the time orientation of wisdom.

All creatures live embedded in time, though only human beings lift their heads to comment on it, lamenting the past or worrying over the future. Unique portions of our brains handle this temporal skepsis. Prefrontal lobes, the “lamps on our brows,” ponder tomorrow, while swaths of older cortex can flood with vivid memories of yesterday, triggered by the merest sensory tickle — as when a single aromatic whiff sent Proust back to roam his mother’s kitchen for 80,000 words.

Obsession with either past or future can almost define a civilization. Worldwide, most cultures believed in some lost golden age when people knew more, mused loftier thoughts and were closer to the gods — but then fell from grace. Under this dour but recurrent worldview, men and women of a later, coarser era can only look back with envy, hearkening to remnants of ancient wisdom.

Recognize this motif? It drenches every page of “Lord of the Rings.” It is the old classic, the eternal verity — the worst of all human clichés.

Only a few societies ever dared to contradict this dogma of nostalgia. Our own scientific West, with its impudent notion of progress, brashly relocated any “golden age” to the future, something we might work toward, a human construct for our grandchildren to achieve with craft, sweat and good will — assuming that we manage to prepare them. Implicit is the postulate that our offspring can and should be better than us, a glimmering hope that is nurtured (a bit) by two generations of steadily rising IQ scores.

Of course, the very notion of progress is anathema to nostalgic Romantics. These Romantics needn’t be anti-technological, though they almost always reject science. I’ve already mentioned a renowned sci-fi pop-epic that, despite techie furnishings, relentlessly preaches the nostalgist party line — an ideal society ought to be ruled by secretive-mystical elites, unaccountable and self-chosen based on inherent qualities of blood. The only good knowledge is old knowledge. (No wonder it all happened “long ago, in a galaxy far away.”)

Let me avow upfront that I share the more recent, upstart belief in universities, democratic accountability, science and human improvability — one that questions the fated persistence of “eternal” stupidities. Above all, any “golden age” lies in our future. It has to. Or what are we striving for?

Anyway, people with my view had better be right. Because if humanity is as obstinate as the cynics and Romantics believe, we shall surely go extinct quite soon.

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This may seem a dour picture I am painting, especially in light of the surge in popularity of feudal-magical fantasy.

Was Enlightenment a transient thing, already starting to flicker out as we return to our older fascinations? Back to Joseph Campbell-style heroes and traditional epics, with their paeans to kings and traditional, pyramid-shaped hierarchies? There are those who see this cloud rolling over us, a returning fog of Romanticism.

“Change and technology are so pervasive a part of daily life that for the most part there’s no magic to it anymore,” says Vivian Sobchack, a professor of film and television studies at UCLA. “The promise of science and technology has been normalized. The utopian vision we had didn’t come to pass. The magic would have to come from somewhere else, and we found it in fantasy.”

She has a point. Witness the most amazing accomplishment of NASA — managing to turn the exploration of space into a huge snore.

Or, as Lev Grossman put it in his Time essay:

“Popular culture is the most sensitive barometer we have for gauging shifts in the national mood, and it’s registering a big one right now. Our fascination with science fiction reflected a deep collective faith that technology would lead us to a cyberutopia of robot butlers serving virtual mai tais. With ‘The Two Towers,’ the new installment of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, about to storm the box office, we are seeing what might be called the enchanting of America. A darker, more pessimistic attitude toward technology and the future has taken hold, and the evidence is our new preoccupation with fantasy, a nostalgic, sentimental, magical vision of a medieval age. The future just isn’t what it used to be — and the past seems to be gaining on us.”

Grossman’s view is intelligent and thought-provoking — though at the surface also quite easy to disprove.

For example, which cyberutopias might he be talking about?

“Soylent Green”? “Blade Runner”? “Rollerball”? “Silent Running”? “1984″? “Fail-Safe”? “The China Syndrome”? “Terminator”? “The Hot Zone”? “Logan’s Run”? “The Postman”? “Fahrenheit 451″?

These don’t strike me as exactly utopias.

For the life of me, I cannot picture more than one truly optimistic portrayal of future society in all of TV or film sci-fi. With the sole exception of “Star Trek,” most of the SF we’ve viewed in the last 40 years has been relentlessly critical of perceived technological or social trends. Far from utopian, these films have served us well by dramatizing potential failures. To coin a term, they have been self-preventing prophecies, helping us work out our fears and exploring dark possibilities.

Yes, one result has been a lessened sense of confidence, a sadly stylish fatalism in an era of unprecedented goodness and competence. Paradoxical, yes. But by any metric, these dark warning tales have been far more useful than all those sword and sorcery flicks that try to teach us about good and evil by portraying the former as always pretty and the latter, always, with red, glowing eyes.

May I offer a final little mind-stretching exercise? Let’s start by remembering that history is written by the victors.

How do we know that Hitler was as bad as we are told?

We know because we live in a democracy that has given Holocaust deniers plenty of opportunities to make their case, and all they ever come up with is blatant drivel, ridiculous scenarios that are laughably easy to disprove. We see and hear countless witnesses to the Nazi horrors, conveyed via a press that, for all its faults, is relatively free. As implausible as the story of deliberate mass genocide might have seemed, in fiction, the reality was undeniably true, and worse than anything previously imagined.

Allied propagandists did not have to make up any of it.

But things were different in kingdoms of old, where one official party line was promulgated and alternative sources of information got routinely squelched. And that’s in every kingdom, mind you. Go ahead, name one where it didn’t happen. (Note how the Norman propagandists went to work on poor old King Harold, even as his body was cooling after the Battle of Hastings.)

My point? Well, LOTR is obviously an account written after the Ring War ended, long ago. Right? An account created by the victors.

So how do we know that Sauron really did have red glowing eyes?

Isn’t some of that over-the-top description just the sort of thing that royal families used to promote, casting exaggerated aspersions on their vanquished foes and despoiling their monuments, reinforcing their own divine right to rule?

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Yes, I’m having fun with words like “really” — relating to a made-up story. But come along with me for a minute: Next time you reread LOTR, count the number of powerful beings who are vastly uglier than anybody with that kind of power would allow themselves to be. Why? How does being grotesquely ugly help you govern an empire?

Then unleash your imagination a bit further.

Ask yourself: “How would Sauron have described the situation?”

And then: “What might ‘really’ have happened?”

Now ponder something that comes through even the party-line demonization of a crushed enemy — this clear-cut and undeniable fact: Sauron’s army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colors of humanity, and all the lower classes.

Hmm. Did they all leave their homes and march to war thinking, “Oh, goody, let’s go serve an evil Dark Lord”?

Or might they instead have thought they were the “good guys,” with a justifiable grievance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy topped by invader-alien elfs and their Numenorean-colonialist human lackeys?

Picture, for a moment, Sauron the Eternal Rebel, relentlessly maligned by the victors of the War of the Ring — the royalists who control the bards and scribes (and moviemakers). Sauron, champion of the common Middle Earthling! Vanquished but still revered by the innumerable poor and oppressed who sit in their squalid huts, wary of the royal secret police with their magical spy-eyes, yet continuing to whisper stories, secretly dreaming and hoping that someday he will return … bringing more rings.

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If that’s going too far, here’s a milder version. Those orcs and low elves and dwarves and dark-skinned or proletarian men who fought for the Ringlord were fooled by Sauron’s propaganda.

Fair enough. Even that slight variation adds flavor to an already-great tale, making you pity Sauron’s dupes a little, even though you still cheer as they’re slaughtered down to the last private and orcoral.

Come on, folks, a little empathy!

Instead of railing against “evil,” try to understand it. That’s always been the best way to defeat it.

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Am I pulling your leg? You bet! I don’t take speculations about fictional villains quite that seriously.

My real point is more general.

Don’t just receive your adventures. Toy with them. Re-mold them in your mind. Keep asking “What if …?”

It’s how you get practice not just being a passive consumer, or critic, but a creative storyteller in your own right.

And remember this too: Enlightenment, science, democracy and equal opportunity are still the true rebels, reigning for just a few generations (and still imperfectly) in one or two corners of the Earth, after elite chiefs, romantic bards and magicians dominated our ancestors for maybe half a million years.

Don’t you think a little pride in that rebellion — a radical revolution-in-progress, still fresh and incomplete — might be called for?

A rebellion that, among many other things, taught serfs like you to read so you can enjoy epic books and picture things differently than they are.

One that makes vivid movies that cater to your taste for adventure.

One that, for all its imperfections, gave you a better chance than in some peasant village of old.

One that has a long way to go, but has at least turned our eyes around to face the future.

Self-critical almost to a fault, this culture may not be as romantic as those old kingdoms. But isn’t it better?

You are heirs of the world’s first true civilization, arising out of the first true revolution. Take some pride in it.

Let’s keep enjoying kings and wizards. But also remember to keep them where they belong.

Where they can do little harm.

Where they entertain us.

In fantasies.

This trend isn’t limited to hate crimes. In the chilling story of Cary Stayner — the Yosemite killer — we saw how one man’s penchant for brutality can be sharpened by an appetite for publicity. Soon after he confessed to murdering four women in Yosemite National Park, Stayner told San Jose reporter Ted Rowlands, “I want a movie of the week.” Though he admitted having murderous fantasies since childhood, Stayner may also have been propelled by a jealous wish for notoriety equal to his brother Steven, whose escape from a pedophile in the late ’70s was indeed dramatized for TV.

It’s an all-too-familiar pattern. The Oklahoma City terrorists, Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, cyber-vandal Kevin Mitnick and killer Mark David Chapman all showed a yearning for attention, both in the headline-grabbing nature of their crimes and in their polemics after capture. Whatever their diverse rationalizations for wreaking harm, it also surely had a lot to do with getting noticed in an era that reveres fame.

Society appears to be trapped, obliged to pay madmen the attention they crave, in direct proportion to the hurt they do.

This is not a new problem. Two millennia ago, in the Hellenistic era, a young man torched one of the seven wonders of the ancient world — the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. When caught and asked why, he replied first with grievances against individuals and his city state, then admitted that he really wanted to make a mark, to be remembered. Since he wasn’t a great warrior, or creative person, his best chance was to gain infamy by destroying something.

Conditions are ripe for more of this. Not only has fame itself been made sacred, but countless films and novels feed a culture of resentment by extolling the image of romantic loners, battling vile institutions. On the plus side, this all-pervading mythos fosters a mild but truly healthy suspicion of authority. But when exaggerated, it becomes one of the most tedious and toxic of all modern clichis — preaching contempt for all institutions, along with disdain for the very same tolerance and cooperative effort that sustain civilization. Now add another ingredient — the progressive diffusion of destructive technologies into private hands — and you get a recipe for profound unpleasantness in the years ahead.

We just don’t need this trend further reinforced by the seductive lure of renown.

Are there solutions?

One answer is suggested by that fellow who burned the temple at Ephesus. He is often called Erastratos. But in fact, many scholars think that is a made-up name, used to replace his true identity, which was expunged. To punish his selfish act and deter others, the city banned speaking of him. Two millennia later, no one knows for sure who he really was.

Were the ancients on to something? If a sociopath’s attraction to villainy is partly engendered by hope for celebrity, might an “Erastratos law” take away some of the allure, by ensuring the opposite?

Of course things work differently today. Coerced forgetfulness is out of the question in a free society. Newspapers and journalists would have to participate voluntarily. Instead of suppressing actual facts, which are needed for accountability, good results might be achieved simply by making adjustments in style and presentation. After all, reporters assented, en masse, when Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh asked to be called “Tim” and the Unabomber said “call me Ted” instead of Theodore. If journalists accommodate murderers in this small way — as a reflex of professional courtesy — why can’t they lean a bit the other direction, after someone is convicted of gross felonies in a court of law?

Courts already do have some authority to order name-changes. Suppose that power were widened — any criminal sentenced for a truly heinous crime could be renamed as part of his punishment, with a moniker that invites disdain. New history books might state: “Robert F. Kennedy was slain in 1968 by Doofus 25 *.” The asterisk is there to let anyone find the assassin’s former name in a footnote, if they are truly interested, so no one is actually suppressing knowledge. Nevertheless, the emphasis on a new moniker will take hold.

Who would choose the new names? Judges could get creative, or the public might be invited to suggest appropriate derogations.

However it’s done, won’t it make sense for ridicule to replace some of the grotesque fashionableness that’s now attached to terror? It would reflect society’s determination to allocate fame properly, to those who earn it. We would be saying — “You can’t win celebrity this way. By harming innocents, you’re only destroying your own name.”

The idea may seem odd, at first. Maybe even needlessly vindictive. But I promise it will grow more appealing each time the cycle is repeated by some murderous loony who demands our attention with both violence and contempt. Pragmatically speaking, it could contribute to breaking today’s vicious feedback loop by denying sociopaths the attention they crave, perhaps even tempting them to seek help. (Help we all-too-often fail to provide. But that’s another, much harder subject.)

Moreover, this approach to deterrence may give us — civilization’s rambunctious, argumentative, yet cooperative citizens — the last laugh. We can catch, punish and outlast them, of course. But above all we’ll deny villains any chance to win through violence a bigger place in history than the hard-working, creative people they hurt and despise.

Who knows? Some of those angry ones out there, who are teetering in indecision with each desperate day, may even decide that it’s better to help lay a few bricks, alongside the rest of us, than to claw after infamy by tearing the walls down.

If they do — if they choose to join us — we should try to welcome them. And learn their names.