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HAGAKURE

葉隠It is not good to settle into a set of opinions. It is a mistake to put forth effort and obtain some understanding and then stop at that.

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SYDE261 - W2011

The Luddites and the 20th Century

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Relevant Readings

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRluddites.htmThe Luddites

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-LuddismNeo Luddism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_in_the_World_Wars_and_Interwar_Years

20th Century Canada

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The Luddites

General Ned Ludd and the Army of Redressers- threatening letters sent to Nottingham employers- issues: reduced wages and use of unapprenticed workmen- began to break machines at night- 200 frames destroyed for making stockings in 3 weeks- Nottingham authorities protected buildings with special police

stockings

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The Luddites

- government made machine-breaking a capital offence- you can be killed for breaking a machine!- 12 000 troops were ordered into the area- as of Dec 29, 2010, Canada has 2913 active troops in Afghanistan

http://www.isaf.nato.int/en/troop-contributing-nations/index.php

THINK ABOUT THE SCALE OF THIS - 12000 TROOPSand

YOU CAN BE PUT TO DEATH

...these Luddites must have been a big problem...

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The Luddites

- by 1817 the Luddite movement was over

- in 1812 there were 23 men executed and thirteen sent to Australia prison colonies

- violence continued for years- Luddites kill mill and factory owners

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Neo Luddism ...it’s not really all that new...

Neo-luddism conjures pre-technological life as the best post-technological prospect

Why? What are the advantages of pre-technological life?

Take 5 minutes with a group of 5 or 6 and come up with an answer...

- reduced our impact on nature and the destruction of the planet- return to simpler values - family, spirituality, co-existence

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_Google_Making_Us_Stupid%3F

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

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Neo Luddism What are disadvantages of pre-technological life?

Take 5 minutes with a group of 5 or 6 and come up with an answer...

- medicine- limited dissemination of information- poor means of communication- ignorance leading to bad things (war, witch-hunts, etc.) - no MMORPG’s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMhU_4m-g

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Neo LuddismParis-Roubaix Bicycle Race

A Sunday in Hell - 23:10- 27:50

Le Parisien Libere Newpsaper- protesting layoffs of linotype operators due to automation

- protests and strikes are part of French culture- workers losing their jobs because of new technology

- interrupted by “neo-luddites”

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Neo LuddismTyler Durden - Fight Club

Ted Kaczynski - The Unabomber- hated industrial development and destruction of natural resources“He soon came to the conclusion that more violent methods would be the only solution to what he saw as the problem of industrial civilization. He says that he lost faith in the idea of reform, and saw violent collapse as the only way to bring down the techno-industrial system.”

"Project Mayhem," a cult-like organization that trains itself as an army to bring down modern civilization. This organization, like fight club, is controlled by a set of rules:1. You don't ask questions.2. You don't ask questions.3. No excuses.4. No lies.5. You have to trust Tyler.

– Fight Club, pages 119, 122, 125[15]

[Wikipedia]

[Wikipedia]

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Neo LuddismThe Luddites

THE IMPORTANT THINGS ARE:- social change entails social response- technology has the ability to create social change- social response is inevitable- doesn’t have to be violent or destructive...it could be constructive, or subtle, or unconscious

&

They are good things to know about, but...

- look for the response to technology when designing (or design with a response in mind)

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Neo LuddismThe Luddites &

How has society responded to Social Networking (Facebook)?

- spend more time indoors- new economic opportunities - farmville??- questions of privacy and personal rights raised

- What else?

- cyber bullying

http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2008/04/11/one-in-four-canadians-say-facebook-is-more-negative-than-positive/

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Neo LuddismWho reads books anymore?

http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/8774490.Brighton_teacher_launches_campaign_to__save__the_book/

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20th Century Canada

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20th Century Canada

Cars- revolutionized transportation- world expands - you can drive a lot farther than you can take a horse or walk- large scale production line manufacturing (FORD)

- affordable cars meant big changes for society- mass production means building for the mass market- fashion, culture, social values (safety, fuel economy) play major roles in car design

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20th Century Canada

- 620 000 Canadians served, 60 000 dead, 155 000 wounded

WWI - 1914-1918- Canada was a British colony - automatically a participant when Britain entered the war

- women employed during the war because men were serving overseas

- during the war Women’s Suffrage movement gained support- women got the vote 1916-1918 (SOCIAL CHANGE)- returning soldiers didn’t have jobs!

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20th Century Canada

Post War YearsThe move from a wartime to a peacetime economy, combined with the unwillingness of returned soldiers to accept pre-war working conditions, led to another crisis. In 1919, the One Big Union was formed by trade union syndicalists with the intent of improving conditions for all workers, not just in a single workplace, industry, or sector. The OBU had some influence on the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, which business and political leaders saw as an outbreak of Bolshevism, especially since the Soviet Union had recently been formed. The army was sent in to break the strike and the entire Winnipeg police force was fired and replaced with a much larger and better paid force of armed special constables. Although the Winnipeg strike is the best known, it was part of a larger strike wave that swept the country. Special constables, vigilante "citizens" organizations, and replacement workers were mobilized in strikebreaking throughout the country in this period.

Does this sound familiar? (Yes it does, the Luddites!)[Wikipedia]

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20th Century Canada

Great DepressionCanada suffered greatly when the Great Depression began in 1929. While the decline started in the United States, it quickly spread to Canada because of the gold standard and the close economic links between the two countries. The Canadian economy was the second-worst affected in the world by the Depression, after the United States. The first area affected was wheat, which saw a collapse in prices. This destroyed the economies of the Prairie provinces, but as wheat was then Canada's largest export it also hurt the rest of the country. This was soon followed by a deep recession in manufacturing, first caused by a drop-off in demand in the United States, and then by Canadians also not buying unneeded luxuries. Perhaps most harmful, however, was the subsequent reduction of investment: both large companies and individuals were unwilling and unable to invest in new ventures. Unemployment rose to 25 per cent.

- socialist movement developed as a response- tried implementing US-style policies to boost economy- these policies didn’t really work, but by 1936 the worst of the depression was over- the war was an economic boom for Canada

[Wikipedia]

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20th Century Canada

WWIIThe Canadian economy, like the economies of many other countries, improved in an unexpected way with the outbreak of the Second World War. When Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Mackenzie King was finally convinced that military action would be necessary, but advised George VI, King of Canada, to wait until September 10, after parliament had debated the matter, to declare war (unlike World War I, when Canada was automatically at war as soon as Britain was).[10] Ultimately, more than one million Canadians served in armed forces.

- advanced technology- improved manufacturing techniques- these changes led to post-war commercial innovation

[Wikipedia]

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20th Century Canada

WWII

- racism and prejudice were part of “Canada’s” culture (unfortunately).

With the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany and the growing trickle of refugees arriving in the country, Canada began to actively restrict Jewish immigration by 1938. Frederick Charles Blair, the countryʼs top immigration bureaucrat, raised the amount of money immigrants had to possess to come to Canada from $5,000 to $15,000. As well, immigrants had to prove they were farmers, which no Jew coming from central Europe was. Senator Cairine Wilson was one of the country's leading voices against fascism and one of the few non-Jews lobbying for the refugees but she was unable to get Mackenzie King to intervene. He himself shared the anti-Semitism of many Canadians; in his diary he wrote: "We must seek to keep this part of the continent free from unrest and from too great an intermixture of foreign strains of blood." [9] “Through government inaction and Blairʼs bureaucratic anti-Semitism, Canada emerged from the war with one of the worst records of Jewish refugee resettlement in the world. Between 1933 and 1939, Canada accepted only 4,000 of the 800,000 Jews who had escaped from Nazi-controlled Europe.” [9]

- Canada’s multicultural stance may be a response to out past decisions

- when talking about culture and social values make sure to understnad that you can’t paint everyone with the same brush, there were exceptions

[Wikipedia]

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20th Century Canada

WWIIWomenWomen began to play a more significant part in war efforts, joining the armed forces for the first time (aside from nursing) by means of the Canadian Women's Army Corps, the Royal Canadian Air Force Women's Division, and the Royal Canadian Naval Women's Service (Wrens).[11] Although women were still not allowed to enter combat, they performed a number of other roles in clerical, administrative, and communications divisions. A total of 45,423 women enlisted during the course of the war, and one in nine served overseas.[11][12]With over a million Canadians serving in the Armed Forces during the war, enormous new employment opportunities appeared for women in workplaces previously unknown to them. To encourage women to work in factories, machine shops, and other heavy industries, the Canadian government offered free child-care and tax breaks. Elsie MacGill, an aeronautical engineer who supervised the production of Hawker Hurricane aircraft for the Canada Car and Foundry Company became a celebrated war hero known as "Queen of the Hurricanes."[13]

- cultural change that sees a woman’s role in society having more value- engineers as WAR HEROS!- the work you do can have huge cultural impacts, maybe you can be the next “Queen of the Hurricanes”

[Wikipedia]

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20th Century Canada

WWIIJapanese internmentMain article: Japanese Canadian internment

When Canada declared war on Japan in December 1941, members of the non-Japanese population of British Columbia, including municipal government offices, local newspapers and businesses called for the internment of the Japanese. In British Columbia, some claimed that Japanese residents who worked in the fishing industry were charting the coastline for the Japanese navy, and many of their boats were confiscated. The pressure from the public was so great that early in 1942 the government gave in to the pressure and began the internment of both Japanese nationals and Japanese Canadian citizens. Most of the nearly 22,000 people of Japanese descent who lived in Canada, were naturalized or native-born citizens.[16] Those unwilling to live in internment camps faced the possibility of deportation to Japan.Unlike Japanese American internment, where families were generally kept together, Canada initially sent its male evacuees to road camps in the British Columbian interior, to sugar beet projects on the Prairies, or to internment in a POW camp in Ontario, while women and children were moved to six inland British Columbia towns. There, the living conditions were so poor that the citizens of wartime Japan even sent supplemental food shipments through the Red Cross.[17] During the period of detention, the Canadian government spent one-third the per capita amount expended by the U.S. on Japanese American evacuees.[17]

We’ll talk about George Nakashima who was interned in America.

[Wikipedia]

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WWIIThe BOMBEven before the first nuclear weapons had been developed, scientists involved with the Manhattan Project were divided over the use of the weapon. Some—notably a number at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, represented in part by Leo Szilard—lobbied early on that the atomic bomb should only be built as a deterrent against Nazi Germany getting a bomb, and should not be used against populated cities. The Franck Report argued in June 1945 that instead of being used against a city, the first atomic bomb should be "demonstrated" to the Japanese on an uninhabited area.[1] This recommendation was not agreed with by the military commanders, the Los Alamos Target Committee (made up of other scientists), or the politicians who had input into the use of the weapon. Because the Manhattan Project was considered to be "top secret", there was no public discussion of the use of nuclear arms, and even within the U.S. government, knowledge of the bomb was extremely limited.The Little Boy atomic bomb was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Exploding with a yield equivalent to 12,500 tonnes of TNT, the blast and thermal wave of the bomb destroyed nearly 50,000 buildings and killed approximately 75,000 people.[2] Detonation of the "Fat Man" atomic bomb over Nagasaki occurred on 9 August 1945. The role of the bombings in Japan's surrender and the U.S.'s ethical justification for them has been the subject of scholarly and popular debate for decades. J. Samuel Walker suggests that "the controversy over the use of the bomb seems certain to continue".[3]After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the worldʼs nuclear weapons stockpiles grew,[4] and nuclear weapons have been detonated on over two thousand occasions for testing and demonstration purposes. Countries known to have detonated nuclear weapons—and that acknowledge possessing such weapons—are (chronologically) the United States, the Soviet Union (succeeded as a nuclear power by Russia), the United Kingdom, France, the People's Republic of China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea.[5]

- issues of morality and ethics- how do you value human life- killing enemy civilians to protect your civilians- this is a debate based on social values and culture - engineers face these debates regularly in design scenarios

[Wikipedia]

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20th Century Canada

The ComputerAlan Turing is widely regarded to be the father of modern computer science. In 1936 Turing provided an influential formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, providing a blueprint for the electronic digital computer.[11] Of his role in the creation of the modern computer, Time magazine in naming Turing one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, states: "The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine".[11]

- Turing was gay during a period when this was unacceptable in society- was prosecuted and faced prison or chemical castration- chose chemical castration, but later committed suicide

- Turing was a war hero, helped crack the Enigma code, but still couldn’t be respected for who he was

The development of the computer has shaped our lives in innumerable ways!

[Wikipedia]

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20th Century Canada

The Internet

- free communication- collaboration- service industries (selling a service, not a physical object)- information industries (selling information)- multicultural domain of interaction

- a global network of interconnected that allows:

This new technology has entailed HUGE social change...more on that later!

[XKCD]

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20th Century Canada

The Internet

[XKCD]

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20th Century Canada

Brainstorm some answers to these questions...

How do you govern the internet? Who sets the rules?

What are Good Uses? (but who defines good?)

What are Bad Uses? (but who defines bad?)