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Conversations on Technology, Literacy and Culture Robbie Davis-Floyd Medical Anthropologist; teaches for UT-Extension August 16, 2000 Michael: Can we start a little bit with your background in anthropology, and your research interests? Robbie: Sure. I became an anthropologist because my parents were racist. If you really want background, I'll quickly tell you that! My parents are white southerners; I was raised in an upper-middle class family in San Antonio. And we had a black maid who cooked all the meals, bought all the food, but couldn't sit down at the table and eat it with us. And when I was 15, this started to really bother me. I don't know why it bothered me, it just bothered me; you know, I mean, I grew up with it all my life, but suddenly it was bothering me. And I just couldn't figure it out; it didn't make any sense, you know, and I started having these talks with my parents about it, that devolved into screaming arguments, with me yelling at them that they were racist, and awful, and how could they treat other people this way, and - you know, and it wasn't just the black maid, it was the Mexican waiters in the restaurants; they'd be rude to the Mexican waiters, and polite to the white waiters, and, if we pulled up to a stoplight, and there was a car full of Mexicans next to us, with 8 kids in the back, and two adults driving, you know, my mother would say, "Oh, those people, they just breed like rabbits!" You know, and just nasty stuff! And it just started to bother me, and bother me, and bother me, until finally, it came to a head in this huge fight that we had, and I ran into my room sobbing, and I slammed the door, and I thought, "You know, I'm just gonna have to leave home - I just can't live like this!" And then I thought, "Well, alright, you know - " And I had this sudden - it just suddenly occured to me that my parents did not have a choice about what they thought, or believed. It was like there was no reasoning with them - it wasn't logical; their position was illogical, and held no water in terms of philosophical arguments; they had no ground to stand on. And I knew them to be sweet, loving, compassionate, kind, quote-unquote "Christian" people. And so, I finally understood that they - that this was the way that they had grown up, and that they were trapped inside some kind of system of thought, that didn't make any sense, but nevertheless was how they understood the world, and did not allow them to change their opinions. It was like their minds had kind of - they kind of concretized inside this way of thinking, and they couldn't get out of the box they were in. And so - but I realized that I wasn't trapped inside that system of thought, and that I did have choices, and that one of my choices could include accepting my parents' limitations, and loving them as they were, or I could be in the same kind of little box, yelling and screaming at them all the time - you know, I just - And there was this moment where I just kind of transcended, and I got broader in my thinking, and I decided to love and encompass them as they were, and accept them with their limitations, but not to choose those limitations for myself. And that, for me, that was kind of the moment that I became an anthropologist, although I'd never heard of anthropology, at that point. And then I went on to college, to Welesley (sp), in the East, and I took anthropology there, and I had a profound epiphanic experience taking that introductory anthropology course, because my central organizing question has always been, "why?" You know, about human behavior - "why?" Why do people do what they do, believe what they believe, think the way they think, create what they create - why? And anthopology's the best discipline for answering that question of why. So, I got into anthropology in college, and then I went on and got a Masters and a Ph.D in it. And during my Masters days, I was into shamanism, and - shamanism in general - but in Mexico, specifically, I worked with a couple of shamans down there; one traditional one, and one post-modern one. And I was going to write a dissertation on shamanism, but then I had a baby, and that was a very interesting cultural experience! I got intrigued, and I started asking other women about their childbirth experiences, and I ended up going to lunch with my dissertation advisor, and saying, "Okay, should I do shamanism or should I do birth, for my dissertation topic?" And she said, (gesturing away) "Shamanism, shamanism, shamanism - everybody and their dog is doing shamanism!" She said, "You do women's things; you do birth." And so I got to be at the kind of forefront of the development of women's studies in anthropology, and I got to be one of the early people writing about childbirth from a feminist point of view. And it just kind of evolved from there! Michael: How did the birth experience lead you to investigating hospital births? You did that for about five years, right? Robbie: Yes. Well, my birth experience was in the hospital, and I was personally very confused by it, because a friend of mine went into labor at almost the exact same time that I did; she came to visit me in the hospital when I was in early labor, and then immediately went into labor herself. I went on to have a cesaerean 26 hours later, and 36 hours later, she had a perfectly wonderful vaginal birth, with this other obstetrician in a different hospital. In talking to her, I couldn't make it make sense - why - you know, step by step, our experiences paralleled, up to a certain point, and it was at that point when the hospital started telling me that I was "still only 4 centimeters dilated," that I hadn't "progressed" fast enough, that I needed to be on pitocin to progress faster, that I wasn't doing it right - my uterus wasn't working, and, you know - and then all the drugs and interventions started to come in. Whereas, nobody said that to Pam; she got encouraged; she was with a more holistic obstetrician. She got to eat and drink, and walk around as much as she wanted, and ten hours later, she gave birth naturally. So, the discrepancy in those two experiences - I puzzled and puzzled and puzzled over it, and then I started talking to other people. So, my early work was all on hospital birth, because I was interested in what it is that hospitals do to the birth process that makes it so standardized - why do most women giving birth in most hospitals have the same kinds of experience - all the same interventions, the same fetal monitoring, the same drug process, the same pain relievers - why is such a unique, and individual process as labor and birth treated in such standardized ways? Michael: What did you find? I mean, in general - Robbie: That childbirth is a microcosm of American culture - of what I call the "technocracy," and the technocracy is a society organized around an ideology of technological progress. We tend to believe in the technocracy; that we make things better, that we make natural processes better, when we alter them with technology. It's what I call the "one, two punch," of the technocracy. (makes punching gesture with both hands) So, "punch one," is that you take a natural process, and you technologize it - like, you dam a river. So, the salmon are swimming upstream, everything is super; we're flowing along downstream, the salmon come upstream to spawn, but you dam the river, because you want energy; you want a hydroelectric plant. And then the water can't flow on its own anymore, and the dam's happening, and you're generating energy, that's great - but the salmon can't get upstream to spawn, so they all start dying. So then, that's "punch one" if you mess up a natural process with technology. Well, then, what are you gonna do about it? Here are the poor salmon, and the salmon fishermen are yelling and screaming, so - your option is to tear down the dam - and in some places in the U.S., dams are being torn down. But, the general thrust of technological development is upward. You go - you escalate up the technogical scale, rather than down it. So, instead of tearing down the dam, you try to building "salmon ladders," that kind of lift the salmon up and over the dam, which usually kind of mangle and mutilate them. So, in California, they actually built a salmon-spawning plant, where they scoop salmon up out of the water, spawn them in trays, feed them artificially, and then take them back to the river and dump them in. It's like - "punch one," mess up a natural process with technology; "punch two," fix it with more technology. There's an anthropologist named Peter Reynolds whose brilliant insight was that "punch two" always looks like an accidental byproduct of "punch one" - "Oh gosh, gee, we've got to save the salmon." But, in the technocracy, for most people, "punch two" is kind of the point. We think we've made natural processes better, when we alter them with technology. Like - we dammed the Everglades; there was flooding in the fifties, and the Army Corps of Engineers went in and paved all the channels in the Everglades, put in floodgates to control the flooding - fine, so the flooding stopped. Well, the problem is that the dirt is going out - we're losing a third - we've lost a third of the Everglades to soil erosion, as satellite photos show, because of the dirt sliding out over the concrete channels. It doesn't stay in the riverbanks anymore. Every time you mess with a natural process, there is a price to pay, and hospital birth is just one more little microcosm of that. In childbirth, society's core values are always kind of sharpened, and focused, and heightened, because it's all about birth and death, and life, and the perpetuation of a culture. So, you can see the culture in microcosm most sharply and clearly in childbirth. So, and so - childbirth is a danger - it's what we think of as a dangerous natural process, that is made safer and better when we alter it with technology. And we dissect it into components, and alter each one of those, and channel it through technology - we feel like we have taken this dangerous natural process and made it safe. That is, actually, not the fact - it's not the case - what we've done, most of the time, with technological interventions, we mess up what would have worked fine, had it been left alone and nurtured. But, we don't tell ourselves that story - we tell ourselves the story about "all those pioneer women who died in childbirth, and look at all the women we're saving," because we're expressing our massive cultural belief in the promise of technology through technologizing birth. Michael: You edited a book called _Cyborg Babies_, and you definied "cyborg" in several different ways. I thought it would be helpful if you describe it in the context of birth, because "cyborg" is popularly thought of something that's, you know, literally somebody that has implements, or prostheses, grafted into their bodies; but you think about it kind of metaphorically, or symbolically. Robbie: Well, the way we definie "cyborg" in _Cyborg Babies_ is as a symbiotic fusion of human and machine. It can be a permanent fusion, as when you implant prostheses into a body, or it can be a temporary fusion, as when you hook a woman up to a fetal monitor, for example. So, that's routine and standard in most hospitals; most women get hooked up to fetal monitors for half-hour initial strips, and maybe for the entire labor, depending on hospital policy, and the way their labor's progressing. One woman I interviewed said, "As soon as I got hooked up to the monitor, nobody even looked at me anymore; everybody just looked at _it_; pretty soon, I started staring at it, and then I got the feeling that _it_ was having the baby, and not me!" That - she's conceptually been rendered cyborg, by her - she's attached to the machine by this belt around her waist, and - and she's staring at the machine, and everybody else is staring at the machine, and it becomes the dominant interpreter of her experience, right. People are looking at the machine, and saying, "Oh, the contraction's over," and she's going, "No, I'm still feeling it," and they're like, "Oh, no, the machine says it's over!" You know, this becomes the source of authoritative knowledge. It becomes dominant, and definative, in her birth experience. What the machine says will dictate how her birth goes, and whether or not she's allowed to birth vaginally, and whether or not she goes to have a cesaerean, et cetera. So, that's a particular - later, she can be unhooked from the machine - it's not that she's permanently rendered cyborg, but it's useful to analyze her as a cyborg in that context, because the useful thing about Donna Haraway's formulation of the concept of cyborg, is that it is inherently ambiguous. It is not necessarily positive or necessarily negative. And she said, it's the promise and danger - how'd she put it? - the promise of monsters, but also the promise of wonderful things. Miracles and monsters, you know. So, for - so that's - "cyborg" is a nice way of conceptualizing what happens to laboring women in birth, because for some women, to be hooked up to those monitors, it's a devastating experience, because their - their experience gets lost in the technology. But, many women find it empowering, because they like the information that comes through the monitor; it gives them a sense of safety, and it's what I call the "technogical kiss"; it's like when you - you know, when the King says, "I hereby dub thee knight," and then he kisses the knight on both cheeks - it's like the society bestows upon you its greatest gifts and blessings. And, for many laboring women in childbirth, to be hooked up to the monitor - it's a symbol of the best that our culture has to offer. So, there, they feel like their experience is valued, they're important, the information obtained about them is the right kind of information; in other words, they're in, already - in the technocratic mentality that says that technology is good, technological progress is good. And so, in order to be blessed, or to give them that technological kiss, they need to have all the technology that the hospital has, thrown at their birth experience - it makes them feel safe, blessed, cared for, respected. So, the cyborg can encompass both of those realities - the woman who feels victimized and ripped off by being hooked up to the monitor, and the woman who feels empowered. And the whole range in between. Michael: How do the technocratic values in the hospital effect the way that they use technology - is it just something that's basically - more is better, more technology is better, or - Robbie: Pretty much; if the uses of technology in the hospital were not driven by technocratic values, it would be applied judiciously, in 10 to 15 percent of childbirth - of birth. Because statistical realities are that 10 to 15 percent of labors benefit from some kind of technological assistance. Well, the other 85 percent do really great, left alone - do better alone. So, if technology were to reflect scientific fact - biological fact - it would be reserved for those 10 percent of cases - that's where it's really needed. The fact that it's applied universally and routinely to almost every birth is a massive reflection of technocratic values. (paused tape for interruption) Michael: You had made the point that the culture in the hospital encourages the use of technologies when they're not biologically or clinically necessary. (Robbie: Right. Or valuable.) And you see that as microcosm of what's happening in the surrounding culture? Robbie: Right. It's a reflection of larger technocratic ideology, that technology is an unadulterated good, that it's always better to do some - it's like the maxim, "If you can do it, you must do it." You know, it's what I call the technocratic imperative. If you can do it with technology, you should do it with technology! (laugh) Whether or not it's a good thing, you know. We've done massive environmental alterations with technology, and now we're gonna have to deal with global warming as a result. That's a "macro" scale, but you see, that same process of individual decisions that lead - that look reasonable at the time, but are based on values - on supervaluing technological progress and development - that lead, for individual women, to often highly interventive, highly expensive, and highly damaging outcomes to their labors, that wouldn't have happened if you didn't have this value system that says, "Technologize, technologize, technologize." Michael: Can you describe other traditional and alternative birthing cultures, that are outside of that box? Robbie: Sure - most traditional systems, and, in the U.S., homebirth midwives, apply - well, that's two different things that we're talking about. Traditional systems are minimally - Technologies permeate all human societies. It's just that in the West - we use the concept of "cyborg" to get at the overwhelming technological permeation of every aspect of life. Technology penetrates us at all spheres, here. But, and now - of course, that's spread all over the world, so it gets increasingly difficult to talk about "low-tech," or "primitive," or small-scale societies, because everybody's technologized at this point. But, anyway - using traditional words - in traditional cultures, or what used to be called "primitive" cultures, the approach to birth was physiological. People watched what worked, and fostered that. So, they noticed that upright positions were physiologically efficacious. And it turns out, when you do scientific medical studies, when women are upright during birth, they can use their muscles to push more effectively, their pelvic bones open much wider, the babies' rotation and descent are easier, because you're working with gravity, and birth in general works out better - it's easier, safer, healthier to give birth. You have fewer tears, always, if you give birth in an upright position. But in the West, what do we do? We put women flat on their back, with their feet up on stirrups. And why is that? It's because it's more convenient for the attendants, who can get in there with the forceps and with the technologies, and maneuver, and do stuff better. It's a much clearer, easier, field for him access, when the woman's flat on her back. So, you ignore physiology, in favor of technological intervention. And the fact that you're ingoring physiology necessitates technological intervention. When women are flat on their backs, as contractions start coming, they can't push well; they're more likely to tear, the baby's less likely to rotate and descend properly. It's less likely to crown in a way that works, you know - they get the baby without damaging the baby. So, given that you've screwed up the birth process by putting women flat on their backs, now you get to cut a big episiotomy, and haul the baby out with forceps or use a vacuum extractor, and you can say that your technologies are life-saving, because this baby might have been damaged otherwise. When in fact, if you have looked at what other cultures have learned about childbirth, and let the woman move about freely, eat and drink as much as she wants during labor, to keep up her strength, and give birth in upright, sitting, or squatting, or hands-and-knees kinds of positions, you would find that birth would not require all that kind of stuff that you're throwing at it. So, that's - the "low-tech" societies - their approach to birth - almost universally - I mean, it's like, every culture intervenes in birth to a certain degree, every culture has customs around childbirth; like, some cultures, you can't breastfeed right after birth, and so all that good colostrum that has all the immunities in it - a lot of cultures say it's bad, and it's because it's "yellow milk," and it's not the right stuff, so you shouldn't start breastfeeding until your white milk comes in three days later. The babies often get sick from being fed water or solid foods that they shouldn't be eating when they should be eating the colostrum, you know, in a biological sense. So, it's not like we're the only culture that intervenes in birth, as many cultures intervene in birth in funny ways. In culturally idiosyncratic ways. But, we have taken those interventions to a far greater level than anybody had ever thought before; the technologies didn't exist for that before. And in general, because other cultures - well, if you want birth to work, you've just got to look at works - midwives in most cultures are pretty good at helping babies get out. If the head gets stuck, or the shoulders get stuck, on the way down, they're good at changing the mother's position; or, doing maneuvers - version - turning the baby in utero, to help the birth. You know, they've developed a lot of techniques that work with the natural process, instead of against it, to help babies get born. So, that's - there are many different knowledge systems about childbirth in "low-tech" societies out there, but in the technocracy, we have a number of competing knowledge systems about birth, one of which is the holistic, out-of-hospital midwifery knowledge system. And, that system is also highly technologized, but the technologies are much less obtrusive, and are designed to support and enhance the natural process of birth, rather than to interfere with it. So, oxygen - midwives carry oxygen to home birth; they have home birth kits, with all kinds of fancy, sophisticated tools and technologies for listening to fetal heartbeats, and handling emergencies, and dealing with hemmorages, and all that kind of stuff. But they only apply them when they're really needed, and they confine their interventions to those 10 or 15 percent of the time when they're really necessary. The rest of the time, they're loving the mothers, supporting her, rubbing her back, feeding her, helping her walk around, dance, laugh, cry, sing; you know, working with the natural process, rather than imposing technology on it. Michael: And the technology comes in - I don't know if you can generalize, actually; but the technology comes in in those situations that would be called "high-risk" or - Robbie: Well, most homebirth midwives don't attend women who are high-risk. They - If you know the woman is high-risk in advance, you put her in the hospital, where the cesaerean can be performed, if necessary. But, there are always cases - homebirth midwives have about 92 percent success rates in their practices. In other words, 92 percent of the women who start out to give birth in a given homebirth practice will give birth at home, and 8 percent will end up being transferred to the hospital. And of those 8 percent, only a few will be true emergencies. But, then, sometimes, emergencies will happen suddenly at home, and there's no time for transport. Like, maybe - the birth is perfect and gorgeous, and then suddenly, the woman has a massive hemmorage. Well, you better know how to handle that - you better have the technologies to handle that. That's - in cultures where those technologies were not available, women often died. Now, women in these cultures, like the traditional midwives that I'm working with in Mexico, for example - they have a lot of herbal remedies for hemmorage. And - but you have to boil the herbs, you know - if you don't have it ready, then it's a problem, because it takes a while to boil it, and let it steep, and - then you have them drink liters and liters of it. So, you know - so the rates of maternal mortality are higher in "low-tech" societies. But again, homebirth midwives use - they have a lot of high-tech stuff, that's lightweight, that can be carried around. Like if a woman hemmorages massively, they have a series of interventions that they perform. The first one is magical speech - "Stop bleeding, now!" Sometimes it works, just to yell at the - grab the woman, look at her in the eye, and just say, "Stop bleeding!" And sometimes she'll just kind of snap out of it, you know. And then you go to the herb Shepherd's Purse, which is a really strong herb that will help the uterus clamp down, and keep the blood from flowing. And if that doesn't work, you can go to pitocin injections; you can give a woman a pitocin shot, or under the tongue; the fastest is the shot of pitocin, or you can hook her up to an IV, to replace the fluids, and give her pitocin through the IV, to help her uterus clamp down. And all of those technologies are available to homebirth midwives, and most homebirth midwives carry those technologies with them; so that if they're confronted with a sudden emergency, they can handle almost anything that comes up at home. Now, out of every thousand babies, one or two are going to die, no matter where you are, no matter what you do. The statistical reality is that out of every thousand births, one or two babies die, even in the best of circumstances. But, homebirth midwives have as good as, or better, infant - perinatal mortality rates, as doctors attending low-risk women. So, doctors attending low-risk women in hospitals - their perinatal mortality rates are usually two to four per thousand. Homebirth midwives attending low-risk women at home - which is the proper comparison group - their perinatal mortality rates are usually one to two per thousand. So, they do a little better than doctors attending low-risk women in most hospitals. So, it's not like there's - there's no increased risk in home birth, in other words. Which is really hard for people in the technocracy to understand, because we think safety is where the technology lives. Michael: So, you can look at them as two very different cultural systems that have very similar results, I guess? If you look at it quantitatively? (Robbie: You mean, traditional midwifery and holistic midwifery?) Holistic, and - Robbie: In other words, I'm trying to make a distinction between midwifery in traditional cultures, and American professional homebirth midwifery, which is a (Michael: yes.) very, very sophisticated knowledge system which draws on Western obstetrical science, looks at all the technologies that Western obstetrical science has invented, rejects many of them, and accepts some of them in an appropriate way - using them for the 10 to 15 percent of births that need them. Michael: Okay. What I was trying to get across was this. What comes into play in rejecting and accepting; what makes something appropriate in American holistic midwifery, homebirth midwifery, and not in a hospital birth. What's the distinction? Robbie: Well, that's very interesting, and very individual, and we'd need a lot more fieldwork to really answer that question. (Michael: Okay.) For example, there - see that wooden thing? (points to bookshelf) Right on the shelf. (M gets wooden "goblet" shaped object) Can you grab it? That's a pinard horn, okay. It's a very simple technology that you find in many low-tech cultures, for listening to fetal heartbeat. (Michael: Oh, cool!) It was invented in France, centuries ago, and you just put it on the mother's tummy - and you put your - you know, her tummy's here, and you put your ear to it (pointing to each end) and it amplifies the heartbeat - the fetal heartbeat - so you can tell if the baby's still alive, and if the heart is still beating at the rate that it should be beating, which is 120 to 160 beats per minute. So, this is the lowest end of the technological scale for - besides putting your ear to the mother's tummy, this is it - in terms of technology, this is the low end. The next step up from this, is what's called a fetascope, which is like a stethascope, (sp) that, you know, the doctors put in their ears and listen to your heart, only designed for fetal heartbeat, so it looks a little bit different than a stethascope. You put it in your ears, you put it on the mother's tummy, and you listen. Okay. And you could put it on the mother's ears, and she can also hear. Okay. Then, but when you're using the fetascope, or the pinard, you're close to the woman, (gestures with ears close to her hand) you know - you're down in her space. And midwives talk about how these technologies allow you to hear the fetal heartbeat, but you have to concentrate; you have to be present, and you're breathing the mother's energy. You're kind of in her energy field, and so, you get more information than just the heart tones, because you can sense what's going on with the woman. Especially if you're using a pinard, which can put you down pretty close to the mother's tummy. But also with the fetascope - you've got more information, on more levels, and intuition is more easily activated. Okay. The next step up, in terms of fetal heartbeat information, from the fetascope, is the doppler. The doppler is like an electronic microphone. You put it on the mother's tummy, and it amplifies the fetal heartbeat, so that everybody in the room can hear it. But what you're hearing is not the fetal heartbeat; you're hearing an electronic amplification of - an electronic interpretation of the fetal heartbeat. Okay. So, it's information, but sensorily, tactilely, and intuitively, it's two steps removed, you know. Because now, it's interpreted through a machine, and, you're not physically close to the woman. You can be sitting here with the doppler here, (gesturing two places) and you're not - your body isn't leaning over her. (Michael: There's a lot more mediation.) Right. There's a distance - a distancing. It's like this in terms of distance, and - so, you may - the information is the same as you get from the fetascope, but this time, everybody can hear it. So, it's nice in that it involves the family in the experience, but, it's two steps removed, you know - in terms of intuition, and sensing, and being tactile with the woman, and the engagement of mother and midwife, or mother and physician, you're more removed. And then, the next step from the doppler is the electronic fetal monitor, which is this big machine that fits in the corner, with these cords that come out, and a big belt that wraps around the belly to record the strength of her contractions, and another one that wraps around lower, to record the strength of the baby's heartbeat, and it gives you a continuous electronic tracing on the screen. It's like a green tracing on a black screen, or - depending on the color of the computer - blue lines on a white screen, or whatever. And, so, you're seeing - you can visually see the heartbeat, and it amplifies it electronically, so you can hear it; it sounds like galloping horses. You know. But it's completely removed from the mother; the machine is over there, and the mother's over here, (gesturing two places) and everybody's focused on the machine over there. So, there's this escalation in terms of technology, from less information to more information, because the fetal monitor gives you continuous information about the heartbeat, but it also gives you less information about the mother. You know, because with the pinard, with fetascope, and even the doppler, you're at least in some kind of tactile contact with the mother; some kind of sensory engagement with her. Whereas with the fetal monitor, you're not. You don't have to touch her, you don't have to be anywhere near her. You can be in the nurses' station down the hall reading the fetal monitor. You don't even have to be in the room with the mother, you know. So, midwives who do homebirths made decisions about this range of technologies. Nobody uses an electronic fetal monitor at a home birth, that I've ever heard of. They're very expensive and hard to lug around; but it's not that; if midwives wanted them, they would buy them, and use them in their birth centers. It's a philosophical statement when you reject the fetal monitor. If you go to birth centers in hospitals that are run by nurse-midwives, often the fetal monitors are in the closet, you know, with their purses on top of them! (laugh) Because, if you reject the fetal monitor, what you're rejecting is that technological distancing of the woman from her experience, and you're saying - and you're looking at the evidence, the scientific evidence, that says, "I can get the information that I obtain from listening to the heartbeat with a fetascope or a doppler - it's just as good scientifically as what comes from the monitor, and doesn't lead to unnecessary cesaerean sections the way the monitor does." You look at the randomized control trials which show that nurses and doctors and midwives monitoring with their hands have better outcomes than the machine produces, and you say, "I'm not buying into this value system that says that this big, fancy machine is better, because it has more bells and whistles." You reject that. You know. But when you're a midwife doing homebirth, and you're not in the hospital, then you look at the pinard, and the fetascope, and the doppler, and you ask yourself, "which of these am I going to use?" And there's a whole big philosophical discussion that goes on among homebirth midwives, over the fetascope versus the doppler. The fetascope takes more attention - it takes more of your - you have to pay attention when you're using a fetascope, and you can get distracted by outside noises. Whereas the doppler's easier. But there is a sort of intuitive thing that gets lost when you graduate to the doppler. (Michael: Right, yeah.) But, most homebirth midwives carry both, and if there's some compelling reason to use the doppler, they'll use it; most of the time, most of them prefer fetascopes. So, like that. And you could do that little analysis I did - the four steps - the pinard, to the fetascope, to the doppler, to the electronic fetal monitor - there are many technologies that apply at homebirths, that you could put on the same scale. Like, how do you handle postpartum hemmorage? Magical speech, Shepherd's Purse, pitocin injection, and then, an IV, you know. So, there's all these graduations of technology. And a great Ph.D dissertation for somebody would be to look at homebirth midwives in relation to hospital midwives and obstetricians, in terms of technologies used. And examine these individual graduations of technology, and look at where homebirth midwives draw lines, and what kinds of choices they make around which technologies to apply, or to use at home. Michael: Right. You said, when you were talking about the pinard, that the - I was starting to imagine that spectrum, because you said that the fetal monitor offers more and more "information," but this pinard gets the person into - the mother and the midwife into closer contact. And you mentioned authoritative knowledge, and intuition. Robbie: But it's not - the EFM offers more and more of a certain kind of information. It offers more and more hard, cold, factual information. "This _is_ the fetal heartrate." And less and less tactile, and sensory, and intuitive information. Michael: That's what I kind of wanted to get clear. That, I'd think, is significant - Robbie: And that's one of the things that happens in the technocracy. Authoritative knowledge begins to seem to the culture to reside in the technology. The fetal monitor is authoritative because it is a machine, and it must know better. So, the kinds of knowledge that can only reside in humans, like tactile, sensory, and intuitive knowledge, become increasingly culturally devalued. At least in terms of dominant, or hegemonic systems, like Western medicine. Because there are all these counter-cultural revivals, you know. There's a whole national thing about intution; there are national conferences on creativity and intuition, and - you know, when the technocracy tries to take away too much of the human equation, counter-cultural groups come - evolve, or rise up, to try to reclaim, or to try to stike a balance, and to reclaim those parts of the equation that are being lost. That's the great thing about the technocracy, or the cyborg society - that when something like homebirth, or intution, is in danger of being lost in a dominant cultural sense, subcultural, counter-cultural groups will spring up and reclaim it, and yell and scream about it. You know. We don't go quietly into the good-night; we fight to retain the humanity that we have, and to balance it with the technology that we're developing. And that's what I love about this society. It's that, that battle is ongoing. You know, Greenpeace is out there yelling and screaming, and the Sierra Club's out there yelling and screaming, and - you know, people don't just give up. I mean, many people do give up, and buy in to the dominant system, but see, this is a big world, and the technocracy is a very big society, and it is also a democratic society. So it encompasses within it the possibility for counter- cultural groups to challenge dominant hegemony, and that's what makes the society strong. Michael: (garbled) ...the values become more clarified, I guess? (Robbie: Because they're challenged, you mean? (interruption) I'm sorry, ask me that again, I got distracted.) Oh, I was thinking out loud. When those values are challenged in the technocracy, then groups form to clarify them, make them more conscious? Robbie: Yeah, or to challenge them. And in the challenge - if nobody - the thing about hegemonies, which are really important in the technocracy, you know; we have these hegemonic ideologies that drive and dominate and influence the actions of most people. Capitalism is the hegemonic economic ideology; Christianity is the hegemonic religion, even though it's got many, many different sects and sub-sects, it's still hegemonic, in terms of - there are more - Christians have more political power, you know; Christian belief permeates the culture more than those of any other religion. And medicine, in the realm of health care - technocratic medicine, or what I call "technomedicine" is the hegemonic ideology and practice. And - Michael: By that, you mean, it's a practice that's "the one true" way to do it, or - Robbie: Well, regarded by its true believers, it's the one, true way to do it, but, supported by the culture, as the authoritative way. Even if it's wrong. Even if it's wrong. The thing about hegemony is, even if they are not rational, or even if they're counterproductive, sometimes, or many times, they dominate and infuence peoples' actions, in very, very powerful ways. But, they can be changed and modified over time by challenging them. Think about capitalism as the hegemonic ideology. Think about capitalism in the 1800s, or the early 1900s in the U.S. - what did it look like? We had robber barons pillaging and, you know, the workers had absolutely no rights - people were dying in the coal mines, and dying the factories, and there were no health benefits, and there was no workers' compensation, and there was no accident protection, and the wages were terrible, and, you know, robber barons were getting rich off of the sweat of the poor. Well, what happened? Labor unions - it's a democracy, right? Labor unions organized; they had huge, huge battles between labor unions - massive strikes, and all that. And it ended up modifying the capitalist system to make it more enlightened - to make it more responsive to workers, right. And then we had the consumer revolution, which made it more responsive to consumers. So, now there's this understanding in capitalism that you have got to be flexible, and you've got to include your workers, and you've got to share stock options, and you've got to, you know, let the workers own the company, and, you know - or, they'll strike, and you'll be in trouble. So, it's that give and take between the hegemonic force and the counter-force that makes the hegemonic system expand, soften, widen, broaden, deepen, so that it becomes more responsive to reality, and it becomes better as a result. Otherwise, hegemonies that don't respond to change, and to challenges from the outside, well, they just crack and crumble, and eventually are overthrown. Communism didn't do so well as a hegemony. It was hegemonic, it had a chance to dominate in a totalitarian kind of way, but it was too totalitarian, and no responsive enough to the need for change, and so it got overthrown over time. You can look at that throughout history; you have hegemonies that are challenged by heresies, and when the hegemonies respond by opening themselves up and incorporating many of the aspects that they're being challenged about, then the hegemony gets revitalized, and can continue transformed - in a new way. But if it doesn't respond, then it will be overthrown. (pause) Or not - I mean, some hegemonies go on for centuries, you know. (laugh) Without being overthrown, but - the more ossified and rigid a hegemony is, the less likely it is to continue on into the future. So, one of the great strengths of the technocracy is that it's a very fluid and responsive kind of hegemony. Modern medicine, for example, is hegemonic. Technomedicine is hegemonic in the health care realm. Well, it's been massively challenged, from within technomedicine, it's challenged by the humanistic reform effort, and from outside of technomedicine, it's challenged by the holistic health care revolution - all those weird modalities from all those different countries - acupuncture and chiropractic, and homeopathy, and all that stuff, are heretical challenges to the health care hegemony of technomedicine. So, what's happening? Technomedicine is trying to defend its - first, it tried to stop the challenge, by saying the FDA can't have information about nutritional supplements, vitamins have to regulated like drugs, you know - those were all efforts to stop what turned out to be an unstoppable force, and they failed, because we live in a democracy, and when those kinds of things got - when the hegemony of technomedicine tried to freeze the challenge from the outside, the thousands and millions of FAXes to the White House, and phone calls, and you know - the countercultural holistic people besieged the government, and wouldn't allow themselves to be co-opted in that way, or themselves to be stopped in that way. So, technomedicine gave up trying to stop the holistic health care revolution, and is now actively engaged in trying to co-opt it, by acting holistic. You know, there's all these practices where the doctor's will go, "Holistic Medical Group," (gestures a sign/billboard) and there's nothing holistic about them! Or, inventing nutriceuticals (sp), where you combine pharmaceutical drugs with herbs. So, in a way, it's a co-option, but in another way, it's an expansion of the hegemonic system - it's opening up to include the countercultural challenge, which will make it stronger and better in the end, because many doctors are learning about herbs, and discovering that, guess what, there's some efficacy there. And a lot of American consumers are getting much more educated about health care as a result of the clash between these different healing systems. Again, that's one of the vital strengths of the technocracy - is that all these different knowledge systems clash, compete, argue, discuss, fight over laws, you know - and that keeps it strong, it keeps it vital, it keeps it open, it keeps it more of an open system. The open systems are ones that respond to input from the outside environment, and grow and change as the environment changes. Closed systems are ones that try to keep their little reality model against all comers, and against all odds, and end up cracking and crumbling as a result. So, the technocracy, at the moment, is still an open system - you know, screaming and yelling about it, but nevertheless, responding to change. And it's able to change, because of its response to countercultural challenges. Michael: So, you think that fluidity has a lot to do with that it's, for the most part, taking place within a democracy? Robbie: Oh yeah, absolutely. Imagine the technocracy in a totalitarian society. The free press is immediately shut down - well you know, China's a nice example. China's becoming a democracy, but it's still a communist society, controlled by totalitarian government. Only the government's flipping out, because they can't control the Internet (laugh) and they can't control the flow of information any more. It's antithetical to the information revolution to have a totalitarian government trying to control it. Nevertheless, you have still less freedom in China, because there's a system in flux - the old way is trying to hold on and preserve itself, and it faces these massive new challenges to the closed flow of information. So there you can see - ten years ago, what happened? We had Tiannenmen (sp) Square, because China was refusing to open up to democracy and new ideas, and human freedoms, and so people got massacred, when they shouldn't have. And, so that was a sign of a rigid system failing to respond appropriately to pressure. It could have just softened and expanded, which it's now doing. (tape stopped for interruption) Robbie: You were asking me, if somebody were to take a class on the technocracy, what kind of concepts would they come away with. I think think it would be fascinating to design a whole course on "The Technocracy." Because, first of all, we've been talking about it in a kind of univariate way, but - we talk about "The Technocracy in the U.S." or you can talk about the technocratic nations of Europe, which are also technocracies, but each with a distinctive cultural flavor and emphasis. So there's - the American technocracy is kind of what we think of as "The Technocracy," but there are other technocracies out there. And, we can talk about the Western technocracy; well, what is that? And, I don't know that anybody has really made a thoughtful study of the characteristics of technocratic culture. I use the word "technocracy" to mean a society that's organized around an ideology of technological progress. And that is - that retains elements of an industrial past. See, for me, technocracy is the latest evolutionary stage in human development. We started out as hunter-gatherers; there have been, basically, five - there are five stages that most anthropologists talk about. And they're also subsistence strategies; five subsistence strategies. Not stages. So, hunting/gathering, horticulture, pastoralism, agriculture, industrialism, and then I add a sixth one - "the technocracy," which I see as qualitatively different than industrial society, because industrial societies are organized around the production of goods, and the distribution of goods. And they tended to be extremely hierarchical, extremely bureaucratic, often totalitarian; whereas technocracies, or the technocracy - are organized around the flow of information, more than the flow of products. Products are a part of it, but information becomes the primary characteristic of what's flowing around out there. They're much more open, they're - they are still autocratic, bureaucratic, and hierarchical, but not as much so as industrial societies; so, for me, the technocracy is a kind of evolutionary phase, it's a - we're moving away from industrialism, and towards something else, some new form of - you know, we might end up calling it "technoculture," or something, instead of technocracy, because for me - the word "technocracy" encompasses the heirarchical, autocratic, and bureaucratic aspects of industrial society that we still struggle with. The gender discrimination, the racial and ethnic discrimination, the rich versus the poor - all of those are hangovers from the industrial era that we still have to deal with in the technocracy, but we are trying to create more egalitarian ways of living and being - less racist, more accepting of diversity; more enlightened - more encompassing of more people - the discrepency between the wealth the U.S. holds and the rest of the world is becoming increasingly untenable; everybody's becoming increasingly worried that it's not okay for one country to hold - what is it - what have we got, 20 percent of the world's wealth, just here in one country? There are all these fascinating alternative forms - like, microeconomics - you know, the notion that you can lend a woman in India 20 dollars, just so she can buy the raw materials for her chair business, and that will make her economically independent. Those kinds of philosophies didn't use to exist, and now they're everywhere. And they're becoming - they're becoming - I just see more - I may be idealistic, but I just see more and more enlightenment out there in the world, and more and more concern for individuals, and human rights, and less and less totalitarianism, and more and more democracy, as we move into the 21st century. And a lot of that has to do with this primary characteristic of the technocracy; two primary characteristics, which are - one - an emphasis on technological progress, which has given us the computer revolution, but - two - an emphasis on the free flow of information, which is facilitated by the computers that the technocracy has developed. So, what nobody really expected was that once computers were pervasive, information would be available to everybody, anywhere in the world. Which is a massive equalizing factor. And helps - you know, right now the major dis-equalizer is access to technology; but if you have access, then you have access to that information. To any information. Anybody, anywhere. So, there's this possibility for this entirely new technoculture, or whatever we might want to call it, that is less - that is not bound by the rigid classist, racist, sexist, and bureaucratic hierarchies of the industrial era, but that is much more egalitarian, open, free-flowing - with lots of possibilities for individual development, and growth. That's the upside, you know, of the cyborg society, or the - and the downside, of course, is the massive environmental pollution, and overtaxing and depletion of natural resources. And the huge question is, will we be able to keep our environment sustainable for long enough to reach this more enlightened way of living that I can see signs of everywhere? It's just a question of, are we going to screw up the environment too much, and then it'll be too late? (side ends) Robbie: ...and connection and community. Evolutionarily, I see that in the technocracy, there are these parallels with hunting/gathering life. Where, in hunting/gathering life, people travelled in bands of 25 or 30, and kinship and community were primary. In the industrial era, we kind of got away from community, and people lived in isolated high-rises in big cities, and lost community when they moved in from the small towns; but in the technocracy, people are recreating community everywhere. In urban enviroments, people try to recreate community in many different ways. But, one way is the notion of the "urban village," where you have people of all different socioeconomic levels centered around a kind of village green, and there's the traditional soda shop, and the barber shop, and the - you know, people interact in a community sense. I mean, there's this basic human need for community that we lost in the overly bureaucratic, industrial cog-in-the-machine kind of era. That got lost in some places, in some places, in some countries, in some cities. But, there is, everywhere, this effort to reclaim or recapture them, and to design models of community living that are more viable, and more focused. So, churches, you know, are still out there being major community centers, and even reclaiming that role in a big way; people want community. And so, there are - charismatic religions characterized hunting/gathering societies - people could go into trance on their own, do drugs, do dances, and access the supernatural directly. And, in the technocracy, we have all kinds of charismatic religions undergoing major revivals. And the body piercing and tattooing that went on - that goes on in many societies, as an expression of - usually it's an expression of the society's relationship to the cosmos; you tattoo your body with the primary decorations, motifs, cosmological beliefs of your culture. So, you express your cultural identification, and your place in the cosmology through your tattoos. Well, in the technocracy, there's all this tattooing, and it's not so much - there's no one cohesive cultural world view. So, it's more of an individual expression. But it's a body modification in accordance with individual values and beliefs. It's - I don't want to make too much of the parallel between hunting/gathering times and the technocracy, because the differences are far greater than the similarities. But there just is this thing that's happening - this humanizing factor. The human - it's like it's about - much of the technocracy is about humanization. Bureaucratic processes that used to dehumanizing get softened, warmed up; people get more responsive on the phone, people are nicer to each other; you know, a lot of the - In medicine, a lot of the dehumanizing that happened when technomedicine became hegemonic, and doctors got so distanced and impersonal, there's this huge humanistic reform effort, within that - to bring back relationship between patient and practitioner as a central element of care. It's like, everywhere you look, humanism becomes what's important to people. In global relationships, the primary value is on humanism. It is not okay to torture prisoners, it is not okay to abuse women and children. Why? Because humanistic values say that everybody has equal rights, and that those who are weaker or younger, and less capable of defending themselves, should be defended by those who are stronger. That's humanism, that's, you know, a kind of global humanism, it's becoming a set of - a kind of value system that more and more people can agree on, and are aspiring to. And when humanistic values drive national policies, and drive corporate policies, you get a kinder, gentler world. And I'm not naive about it; we have a hell of a long way to go, there are a lot of companies out there whose CEOs and whose boards of directors, while they are profit-driven as ever, take humanism into that equation, because they understand that profits will be better if humanism is encompassed the way the company does business. With others, and with its own employees. It's like there's this understanding. And then, a lot of companies - global corporations, multinational corporations - increasingly understand that their continued success and profit margins have everything to do with the health of the environment. And that, you know, they will cease to exist if the environment becomes too messed up. So, it's not - so there's this move - global scenario writing has become a big international trend. And when people do international scenarios, there are always scenarios that predict environmental doom and destruction, because that is a huge, looming possibility. And when companies really look at those scenarios, in terms of their own bottom line, they're like, "Shit, we better get our act together, and think at a higher level, here!" (laugh) Michael: I actually read something on your website about scenario writing; you interviewed somebody, who - Robbie: Betty Sue, yeah, I did an interview about her use of scenarios. She wrote the scenarios for Shell International. But then later, after she did three sets of scenarios for Shell, she was hired by something called the "Global Business Network," or the "Global Council of Businesses," or some name like that, in Europe - it's of 50 multinationals, in Europe. And the hired - they wanted to scenarios for the world, because these are multinational companies, who - and the world matters to them, because they're located everywhere. And so, they hired Betty Sue to write global scenarios. And, in some of those scenarios - she ended up writing three or four - and in some of them, you can - if you look at present trends, you can see that a possibility in the future is these massive conflicts between environmentalists and corporate-types. So, one of her scenarios; I think she called it "Frog," I can't remember the name, exactly, but - in one of her scenarios, the environmentalists and the corporate-types in Europe have some major standoff, or face-off, and there ends up being - a lot of people die in massive demonstrations, because the corporate types refuse to get environmentally responsive, and so that gives the activists more and more force, and more and more adherence. And so, in that scenario, there's this kind of conflagration in Europe, around environmental issues. And, that's a very, very real possibility, because if the corporate-types don't get more environmentally conscious, the environmentalists will continue to do their thing, only more and more and more so. And so, the corporations looked at that scenario, for example, and they didn't like it! They didn't want to go there! And so, the other scenario she wrote - she wrote three or four, but one of them was called, "Jazz." And in "Jazz," everybody kind of dances together. And the corporate-types figure out that if they work with the environmentalists, and make modifications, and even hire environmentalists on their staff, that then their companies can become more responsive and - in a fuller, more adaptive way, so that they're not cutting in to their bottom lines too much, but they're making changes over time; that they can kind of dance together, and move forward. And so, what these scenarios became about is like - "Okay, here are four possible futures - no which one do you want to live in?" You know? Because the corporations - those multinationals realize that their policies can literally create Future A, Future B, Future C, or Future D. And they better - if they want to live in Future B, which is Jazz, then there are certain steps they need to take now to get there. And that's one of those little signs of enlightenment that I see out there. The people are - it's a scenario, the process of building scenarios. A shift - in the 80s, it was purely about - each company that did scenario planning wanting to maximize its own profits, at the expense of everybody else. But now, scenario planning has become about - "Let's look at the possible futures out there, and then we better pick the one we want to live in, and actively try to make it happen that way." Because the alternative is really, really, really bad! (laugh) Global warming, chaos, glaciers melting, the oceans rising, whole islands sinking under the water, massive tidal waves, holes in the ozone (laugh), you know - pollution out the wazoo, the end of the rainforests and the oxygen depletion of the atmosphere, and on and on, and the end of life as we know it, in a hundred years. You know, that's really, really, bad! (laugh) Nobody wants to live in that world! And all this information that we're collecting from all these computers that have been invented by technocrats, is what enables us to look at those futures, and go, "Oh shit!" (laugh) I mean, it's the Landsat satellites that you can look at the - the global satellites pictures that are taken by the Landsat satellites (sp) - they can do down to a meter of resolution, now, from outer space. And so, you can look at the border between two countries and you can see that the border is this straight line - and why is it a straight line? Not because there's a fence there - but one country has a policy of reforestation, and the other country doesn't! And so, the reforestation country is all green, and along the border, where the other country doesn't, it's desertified - it's completely - instead of reforesting, they let the soil get depleted and eroded, so it's like this brown wasteland. You can see that from Landsat pictures - you can see the difference between policies that are future-thinking and futuristic, and humanistic, and environmentally conscious, and policies that aren't. It's obvious - you can't - the information is there, and the choices - the information is in front of us, and the consequences of the choices we make are now clear, in ways that they haven't been before. Because of the technocracy, you know! (laugh) So, we create our problems, but we also give ourselves the machanisms for being more conscious of the problems we've created. And these countercultural groups help us find ways - help technocrats find ways to solve the problems that they've created. Often, with more technology, but sometimes, with less. Like there is this movement out there to tear down the dams that I mentioned. I've been seeing more and more newspaper articles about people tearing down dams, because there comes a point where you're not getting enough energy from the hydroelectric plant to justify the pollution of the river, the erosion of the soil, the death of the fish, the damage to the native peoples who live there, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, sometimes dams are actually going down. Because we have information about the consequences. Michael: Yeah, I've thought about - well, you wrote something that actually was pretty interesting - it compared - it made connections between tecnocratic birth and the number of satellites around the earth - (laugh) I'm not sure if that's accurate, what it was about, but - kind of the - instead of going out to explore space, it's more like - turned back onto itself - the Earth looking back at itself. That's definitely an aspect of it. Robbie: It's been one of the great benefits of NASA, of the space program. That the technologies that were developed to get humans out into space, and to peer out into space, and to travel to the moon, have had a massive impact on life on Earth. Many of the technologies - like Velcro, for example, was invented for the astronauts! (laugh) And now, it's everywhere. That's just kind of a dumb example, but there are many technologies that are life-enhancing that came out of the space program. And it - there has been this interesting kind of feedback loop, of - for me, I just talk about "inner space" and "outer space," you know. Cultural core values are just as manifest in the building of a spaceship, as in the treatment of a pregnant woman, or - you could say that the other way - Cultural core values are just as manifest in the management of a birth, as they are in the building of a spaceship. Both of them are all about - "get up off the planet, transcend the boundaries of natural limitations, don't let nature stop you - we can go beyond." You know, in the technocracy, all that "going beyond." Biotech, genetically engineered food, all that kind of - "don't let the limitations of the evolutionary, natural process stop you - we can now create our own evolutionary processes through chemical and biological engineering." And now, we have nanotechnology, which doesn't exist on a large scale yet, but, I interviewed the guy at Rice who invented nanotechnology, in that he discovered Buckytubes. He discovered Carbon-60; the Carbon-60, when it's heated and vaporized in a certain way, will form these perfect little geodesic domes at the atomic level, that he called "Buckyballs," for Buckminster Fuller. They're - "Fullerenes" is the larger class of molecules, but the little geodesic domes are "Buckyballs," and they, under certain conditions, will form into Fullerenes, or "nanotubes." And, the nanotubes will align with eachother, if you put them under a magnet - we're talking atomic level - but you can make them infinitely long - they're ten times stronger than steel, and they're superconductive, so - at the atomic level, you can now -- They're like Chinese finger puzzles, you know - open at both ends, and they look kind of like Chinese finger puzzles - but they're atomic scale, nano-scale; a nanometer is a billionth of a meter! So, right now, those nanotubes cost ten times more than platinum to produce, because nobody's figured out how to produce them cheaply at a large scale. But, that's a race around the world in nanotechnology - is how to produce nanotubes cheaply, at a massive level. And if that can be achieved, then, you can build buildings that will withstand any earthquake; you can build airplanes that might not fall apart on impact, if they crash - cars that might not fall apart if they're -- And you can take human DNA, and wrap a nanotube around it, and genetically engineer humans and animals at the atomic level. (laugh) You know. So, if you want to think about what cyborgs could be, that is like the ultimate fusion of humans with their technology. And those technologies have enormous promise for transforming life as we know it, in either - in all ways. Some of which will be fabulous, and some of which could be really, really horrible. And, Rick Smalley (sp), the guy who discovered Fullerenes, says, "God, I just hope there's some bioethicist out there paying attention!" (laugh) he said, because, once we can produce this stuff on a mass scale, it literally will, once again, transform life as we know it. And nothing will be the same. Nothing will be the same. Michael: Do you see those things being developed without - well, do you see - within that community - I know you - you did more than interviews; didn't you kind of hang out with the nanatech people (laugh) for a while? Robbie: I went to one of their conferences in Houston, and I'll go - I'm going to speak at another one (laugh) in - I think it's in January, or something; I'll be speaking at a nanotech conference, and I'll talk about all this stuff. I'll ask them to - I will invite them to look at the implications for - Michael: Yeah, well, I wondered, within that community, whether that was a part of their work, or, if it's focused on the technical aspect of just being able to do it. Robbie: Oh, that's all they care about - that's all they think about. (Michael: They want to be able to do it?) Just, "let's look at the microlevel; how the hell do we produce this stuff?" You know. "Let's run this experiment, and that experiment - " It's like - its - the technocratic drives them, just like it drives everybody else, or most people in this culture. "If we can do it with technology, we must do it with technology." So here's this fabulous technology that can transform life as we know it - well, don't stop to ask yourself if you want to transform life as we know it (laugh), let's just go for it, man! (laugh) But, Smalley thinks about it; he's - he won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of Fullerenes in 1996. And he thinks a lot about the possibilities that this technology has, and for him, they're mostly positive. You know, he thinks - he talks, for example, about wrapping nanotubes around brain cells, you know - or, putting nanotubes inside of brain cells. You could, theoretically - and he believes that it will be possible - you could - you know that movie - not "Matrix," but, the one before it, where the guy was in Japan, and they stuck a - it's a futuristic society where you can plug people's brains into, and download computer information into - (Michael: Oh, Johnny Mneumonic.) Yeah. Well, he sees that as a real physiological possibility, because, through nanotechnology, you could amplify memory capacity in the brain, to the gigabyte level; and so, we could actually download information from computers, and store it in our brains. Which would create a very different kind of human being. (laugh) Michael: Well, you know - for that, to do that, he had to exchange all the corporate information for his childhood memory. Robbie: His life, his memories. Right, but with Rick's technology, he wouldn't have to make those kinds of choices, you see. Because nanotubes - because they're so tiny, and they can conduct, and carry so much information, you probably would be able to do both - retain your normal memories, and add this other stuff. At least, theoretically - that's what he's theorizing. But he doesn't know! And some day, somebody will experiment with that; some day, somebody's brain will be altered to find out, you know. And we don't have any ethical guidelines for any of that - that's why ethics - bioethics is one of the fastest growing fields in the social sciences, because nobody can keep pace with this shit! The biotech people did not expect, when they grew genetically engineered food in the U.S., that it would be massively rejected in Europe - that the Europeans would refuse to allow the import - nor did they expect that there would then be a counter, you know, a complementary outcry in the U.S. against - because they perceive it as an unadulterated good! "Look, we made a corn that's resistant to insect F - isn't that better than spraying it with pesticide?" Well, do you know what the effect of eating that corn, on a human being, over 20 years is? "Well, of course not! Nobody's eaten it for 20 years! But, it exists, therefore we should grow it!" (laugh) Those conversations are what need to happen. And they - the biotech people and the scientists, they just - "Let's go for it. Let's create it; it's bound to be better, because - " There's just this idea, that it's going to be better - this is the technocratic imperative, or the "one-two punch." "It's got to be better if we alter it with technology." And sometimes it is a lot better, and sometimes, it dreadful. We really don't know where this stuff is going to wash out. And that's why everybody has to be in the game - the bioethicists are needed. And the public discussion is needed, and the flow of information is needed. It's not - there is no possibility to stop any of this. I mean, let's - don't have - nobody should have any illusions, in the technocracy, that there is any way to stop technological progress. It is the dominant, driving ethos of this culture. Of Western culture, in general. And is becoming the domininant, driving ethos of all cultures on the planet - not all cultures, but all nations, all nation-states on the planet. And what we have accomplished with technology, and what we can accomplish with technology, are stunning that nobody wants to - I mean, a lot of people want to stop, but we're not going to. The people that want to continue vastly outnumber the people that would like to stop. So, there is just no hope of stopping any of it. So, the only question is, how do we go forward? Under what guidelines do we develop these new technologies? What are the rules for applying and using them? Who will have access to them, and who will not? We can only ask, and work with those kinds of questions, but stopping technological progrss is not an option. It's - technology's pervasive; permanently pervasive, unless we destroy this culture, and it ceases to exist in any recognizable form, there is not stopping technological innovation and development, because it has become core and central to our cultural identity - cultural, social, and evolutionary identity. Michael: It's something that, if you question that, you're just kind of questioning the identity. "Who are we, if you take that away? What are we doing here?" So, I can see - Robbie: I listen to guys on the plane all the time - I travel so much, and I'm with all these - see these - mostly the people on the airplanes with the laptops, you know; they work for Intel or Dell, or, you know - they're computer-types, and they're travelling around, doing sales or development, or technological seminars, or whatever they're doing, they're doing stuff. And many of them are executive-platinum frequent flyers; they're on planes all the time, you know. And I talk to them about their values - I don't say, "what are your values?" but, I listen for the values. And they're all so proud - number one, they're having a great time - fun is like a primary value. And this stuff is fun - it is really fun to be on the cutting edge of technological development - they like it out there; it's like being on the frontier, you know? And two, it's success - it's success defined in material terms. They are all so proud that their wives are home taking care of the kids, they don't have to work, the kids have the finest of everything; the best shoes, the best toys, the best cars, the best houses, it's all the best! And they think that is just really great, because it makes their kids happy to have the best. And their wives are happy, cos they have the best - the country club membership, the jet that takes them off to wherever - they have these great lives. And that's good. I mean, that's good, that's what they think of as good. And they hardly ever consider anything beyond that. But they're happy - they are happy. They're living the good life - because they're having fun - their work fulfills them, they enjoy it, and it makes them feel powerful and good, and they're providing extremely well for their families, and all their relatives, and sisters and brothers, and aunts and uncles, and all the rest of it. And they're out there creating the future, in terms that they see as unadulteratedly good. It's really interesting. Michael: These are Dellionaire kind of people, or - ? Robbie: No, these are just guys on the plane! The guys with the laptops on the airplane. You talk to them about who they are, and what they do, and they're always kind of mid-level executives working for various computer companies, software companies, and they're out there developing software, or disseminating information about the software they developed, or doing sales, or doing product development, or liasoning between this city and that city and that city and that city, in terms of research and development for certain products, or - whatever they're doing, but they're - almost always cutting edge, front-line, "let's develop this product, let's develop that product, let's push the boundaries of where the technology can take us." And what I ask them, and I've also been over to lots of labs - you know, Motorola, Draper, Boeing, those kinds of places. And you go to those kinds of places, and you ask people, "what are the limits to the technologies you're developing?" and they will look you in the eye, and they will say, "There are no limits." (laugh) "There are no limits!" (Michael: It's an infinite universe.) And they don't stop to think, "Well, maybe a limit is the natural resources on the Earth. Is that a limit?" You know, it's like - "No." For them, it's just unlimited. And, Hal Puthoff, here in Austin - he's a scientist, a physicist, here in Austin - he's a physicist who's working on extracting energy from the vacuum; from the zero-point vacuum. (laugh) In outer space, it's a vacuum, right? And everybody thought, for a really, really long time, that there was no energy in outer space; its just emptiness - there's nothing there. But, the truth is, apparently, according to the latest physical findings, that there is tons of energy in outer space. And it's what they call "zero-point energy," because it exists in the vacuum. And it's very difficult to extract it, but it is there. There is enough energy in the vacuum of outer space immediately surrounding the planet to run everything on the planet for billions of years, if we knew how to tap that energy source. So, all of Hal's work - he runs experiments almost daily trying to figure out how to extract energy from the vacuum. And he has managed to extract a certain amount of energy from the vacuum - I think it's up to 25 percent - but everybody agrees that you have to get up to 60 or 70 percent before it becomes economically feasable to do it at a large scale. It becomes worth it. And then, if he can succees in that - it's just like nanotechnology could revolutionize everything we know on the atomic level, and then the only problem becomes the energy to build the stuff - the energy to produce it, where do you get it, right? Well, if Hal's research were to be successful, we would have absolutely unlimited energy. No worries about the lack of oil under the Earth; no worries about whether we can get solar energy; no worries about depleting the resources of the planet - outer space is nothing but energy. So, given that, then, there are no limits! You can - You want to build massively sophisticated an expensive weapons? No problem. You want to point Star Wars technologies at every country and every city on Earth from outer space? No problem. There's enough energy out there, and it's cheap. Extracting energy from the vacuum - the idea is, that it would be cheap - if you got it to this certain level, it would be affordable. Michael: Do you think that that's kind a drive in a lot of ways? Not just progress; making technological progress, but what could be driving that could be something like - eliminating limits. Robbie: Yeah. If you can do it, you must do it. When have we ever - you know, the Himalayas are there, therefore, you have to climb them. That's part of the human condition, and has been - it's been part of what's driven us, and part of what makes us great, as a species, is that we are always driven to overcome our limitations. But now, we've developed technologies that overcome natural limitations - why do people break sports records constantly? It's not that the body is so much better, although in some ways, the body may be better - there's steroids, and all that - but it's the shoes that eneable you to jump higher; the mats that give you that extra sproing, the vaulting poles that take you a foot higher than anybody else ever went. Everywhere, it's about technological progress - everywhere. Everywhere, everywhere. (laugh) (Michael: That's one of my favorite things about the Olympics - The swimsuit that makes you go faster - ) Yeah, the diving board that lets you go higher, so you can do more flips. Right, all of that. (Michael: It's like that for every single sport.) And the advantage is down to microseconds, right? And yet, you win an event by microseconds. (laugh) Oh god! Michael: If you need to get to work, I think we can probably stop. (Robbie: I think I probably do, yeah.) That's an excellent - it's pretty complete, I think. (tape stopped, then we continued briefly:) Robbie: Hal talked about - I haven't seen him for a couple of years, but he talked about - if you have this unlimited, free energy source, then - or very cheap - suppose you were some kid with a bulldozer; you could dig up a whole island just because you felt like it. It's like - as long as their energy is limited - you run out of gas, right - then you have to have money to buy more gas, right. And, eventually, we may run out of gas, so there are - we put conceptual limitations on how much fuel we may use, and we try to - we keep speed limits lower, we try to burn less, we try to turn out all the lights, because electricity costs more. Or costs too much. So, there are these - even though we still use energy at an unbelievable rate, there are conceptual limitations on our use of energy - we're always turning off lights, trying to minimize, trying not to use much oil, trying not to heat our - insulate your house so you don't let the heat go out it, because it costs money to buy the heating oil. But, were there to be an almost free, and indestructible, and infinite energy source, why bother? Why bother to try to constrain your use of energy? And then, what are the environmental consequences of that? If you can do anything you want, any time, anywhere, who puts on the breaks? And what happens to the planet as a result? Hal worries about that all the time (laugh)! Does it stop him from wanting to go out and develop the technology - certainly not! If it can be done, it must be done! He's been all around - he's been to all the major oil companies, because there have been these urban legends circulating for years, that if somebody were to develop a free and cheap source of energy, that it would put all the oil companies out of business. So, there've been all these legends about how they squash innovation, and they murder people secretly to keep them from developing - you know. So Hal just went to the headquarters of every single major corporation, and said, "Here I am - are you going to kill me? I'm trying to develop - " And they're all like, "Oh, thank God, we hope you succeed - here, have some money! Because, we're gonna run out of oil in 25 or 30 years, and then what the hell are we gonna do?" (Michael: We've got to do something else!) Right. Michael: In this book that I just finished reading, and it's come up in another interview, it had to do with community kind of concentrates around limited resources - like, say, the village well, before there was plumbing - that was where people met. Or, before computers were so cheap, people would actually socially around the labs. Where people get onto the train - in very large cities - the train stations end up being social gathering points. And I wonder about that, effect on having - or, the drive to have limitless resources would have on communities, because the - and I don't know - Robbie: Well, nobody knows what, do we? We have no idea what effect that would have. It would be something that'd be really interesting to think about. Like, if you were to teach, or take a course on the technocracy, for example - one of the - you could do a great class on looking at nanotech, and extracting energy from the vacuum, and that kind of stuff - and ask the students, discuss it, lay it out, even have Hal come and guest lecture or something. Or Rick Smalley from Houston; and then ask the students to write papers about - "What would happen if?" What would the world look like if we had - if Puthoff suceeds, and we have this free, unlimited source of energy? What will the world look like if Rick Smalley suceeds, and we have nanotubes out the wazoo, that you can rebuild anything - including yourself - from within. What will happen? What's that about? That would be a hell of a way - because we have got to become futurists, in that, because the future is so, so close, and so right there, and everything we do today helps create what the world is like tomorrow - we've got to get more and more conscious about what kind of future we choose to create. It really is not - we just can't stumble along blindly anymore. There's a - in fact, in Clear Lake - this might interest you - in Clear Lake, in Houston, at the University of Houston there's a program; you can get a Master's Degree in Future Studies. I think it's the only one in the country. Oliver Markwell, I think, is the professor there, and they just put on a World Future Society conference in Houston that was huge, and they had 600 people attending, and - the Clear Lake program is an interesting program; they do a lot of really interesting stuff, a lot of interesting courses. (Michael: Oh, I'm glad you told me about that.) Yeah. Michael: It's been really helpful to see what other schools have done. There will always be a different focus at each of them, but - and UT will probably have its own personality, but - Robbie: If you really get into this, you ought to go down and look at the Clear Lake program, or somebody from UT might; because what you're doing with Technology, Literacy, and Culture is not unlike what they're going to do in the Future Studies program. Or what they are doing. There's a lot of overlap. And then, I guess you know all these books - (shows some books on bookshelf) One of the things I'm gonna do in the cyborg course, is I'm going to use Jerry Mander's _In the Absence of the Sacred_; he's a Sierra Club guy - he's kind of ranting and raving against overtechnologizing life. (garbled) But it'll be fun to have them read Jerry Mander, and then read Donna Haraway, and let's have a dialogue between the two. (Michael: yeah, yeah.) I think it'll be good. (garbled) Michael: Thanks for having me up here! Robbie: You're welcome! (tape stopped)

"That childbirth is a microcosm of American culture - of what I call the "technocracy," and the technocracy is a society organized around an ideology of technological progress. We tend to believe in the technocracy; that we make things better, that we make natural processes better, when we alter them with technology. It's what I call the "one, two punch," of the technocracy. (makes punching gesture with both hands) So, "punch one," is that you take a natural process, and you technologize it - like, you dam a river. So, the salmon are swimming upstream, everything is super; we're flowing along downstream, the salmon come upstream to spawn, but you dam the river, because you want energy; you want a hydroelectric plant. And then the water can't flow on its own anymore, and the dam's happening, and you're generating energy, that's great - but the salmon can't get upstream to spawn, so they all start dying. So then, that's "punch one" if you mess up a natural process with technology. Well, then, what are you gonna do about it? Here are the poor salmon, and the salmon fishermen are yelling and screaming, so - your option is to tear down the dam - and in some places in the U.S., dams are being torn down. But, the general thrust of technological development is upward. You go - you escalate up the technogical scale, rather than down it. So, instead of tearing down the dam, you try to building "salmon ladders," that kind of lift the salmon up and over the dam, which usually kind of mangle and mutilate them. So, in California, they actually built a salmon-spawning plant, where they scoop salmon up out of the water, spawn them in trays, feed them artificially, and then take them back to the river and dump them in. It's like - "punch one," mess up a natural process with technology; "punch two," fix it with more technology. "   " So, the kinds of knowledge that can only reside in humans, like tactile, sensory, and intuitive knowledge, become increasingly culturally devalued. At least in terms of dominant, or hegemonic systems, like Western medicine. Because there are all these counter-cultural revivals, you know. There's a whole national thing about intution; there are national conferences on creativity and intuition, and - you know, when the technocracy tries to take away too much of the human equation, counter-cultural groups come - evolve, or rise up, to try to reclaim, or to try to stike a balance, and to reclaim those parts of the equation that are being lost. That's the great thing about the technocracy, or the cyborg society - that when something like homebirth, or intution, is in danger of being lost in a dominant cultural sense, subcultural, counter-cultural groups will spring up and reclaim it, and yell and scream about it. You know. We don't go quietly into the good-night; we fight to retain the humanity that we have, and to balance it with the technology that we're developing. And that's what I love about this society. It's that, that battle is ongoing. You know, Greenpeace is out there yelling and screaming, and the Sierra Club's out there yelling and screaming, and - you know, people don't just give up. I mean, many people do give up, and buy in to the dominant system, but see, this is a big world, and the technocracy is a very big society, and it is also a democratic society. So it encompasses within it the possibility for counter- cultural groups to challenge dominant hegemony, and that's what makes the society strong."