Moloch or Aquarius

1973

So there's Mark Zuckerberg on TV being grilled by politicians about Facebook, his planet bending  innovation.

What came to mind while watching were thoughts about one of the wise people in my life.  

In May 1973 I started working at Bell Northern Research in Ottawa, my first job after MBA school. I had been hired as a Member of the Scientific Staff. Part of a team studying the office of the future. To look at how telecommunications might evolve at work. My project was fax machines. The technology had been used for generations at newspapers to transmit pictures. In 1973 they were still new in offices for document transmission, newly enhanced by the miracle of xerography. The average machine cost $11,000 then. Thanks to my work and the mystery of capitalism you can now get them as one of four functions in a $50 printer.

It was an anomaly that I had a scientist job. The only science course I took in university was 1st year biology. Before that a whiff of grade 11 chemistry. It's not that I was unqualified. It's just that Member of Scientific Staff was the entry level title at BNR.

At the time BNR was a hotbed of discovery and innovation. We were marinating at the leading edge of the tech evolution. Moore’s law which predicted a doubling of computing power every 24 months because of advancing chip technology was a decade old. And during the six months I was at BNR early versions of the personal computer saw the first light of day. I recall when one of my colleagues wowed us with a feature article in Popular Science. My memory is that it featured a personal machine built by the Steve’s; Job and Wozniak.  

A number of people who worked in the building when I did went on to be be tech billionaires. Jozef Straus who started JDS Uniphase was one. And Don Tapscott who became a highly regarded expert in the next decades was also there. I think they were more genuinely scientific than me. They were working on creation. I was in analysis.

Gordon Thompson’s space was near my cubicle.  He was a thought leader in residence.

Gordon was like you might imagine Clark Kent to be in his mid 50s. With the presence of a confident professor he had a tall posture that made him stand out in the hallway huddles that were popular in our culture.

Gordon didn't have a regular office. He had a large room. It was partially submerged. You had to walk down 4 steps to get to the floor while the ceilings were at least 20 feet high. And the footprint was all of 30 x 30 so it was a pretty big space. There were no windows. Maybe it had originally been built as a lab or a boiler room.

And it was full of things. He had a desk off in one corner which was piled high and wide with books and folders. There were globes and other things hanging from the ceiling giving the feeling of a big space under a jungle canopy. There were couches and chairs around the perimeter in case an audience had to be seated for a lecture or seminar. There was a display table off to one side and a boardroom table off to the other side.  The room was like an overflowing brain with stimulating diversions in every corner.

An essay titled Moloch or Aquarius was Gordon’s claim to fame. Moloch was originally a name of a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice. More recently in Paradise Lost John Milton associated it with the idea of a costly sacrifice and that’s how Gordon’s essay considered it. Aquarius referenced the line from Hair about the ‘dawning of the Age of Aquarius’ an age of love, light, and humanity.

So Gordon in Moloch or Aquarius asked the question ‘With all this revolutionary new technology will the future be the equivalent of a costly sacrifice or an age of love, light and humanity? And my conversations with Gordon addressed that. We spoke about all the pros and cons of the advent of new technology. And whether the future would better or worse.

You can put that against the backdrop a bunch of Molochian predictions current at the time. They got lots of publicity. The media prefer bad news. You know ‘if it bleeds, it leads’. In 1973 there were beliefs that the world was headed rapidly into the next ice age. It wasn’t until the 80s that the revisionist notion of global warming boiled up. And there were prophecies that starvation would grow as a problem. People believed that as the population exploded the food supply would be exhausted. One last misfire. People were saying that the earth was about to run out of oil such that by the 80s you wouldn’t go into a gas station and say ‘fill ‘er up’. Well that proved true. Now we pump it ourselves. But it’s still gas, mostly.

Aquarian predictions of the future I think had more to do with images we had of the future from Star Trek and The Jetsons. The most visual was the phasers Captain Kirk and Spock carried. I’m not sure they were even as functional as my Samsung smartphone. Many aquarians were saying ‘don't worry be happy, technology will save us’ but not making the right predictions. Still no flying cars in 2018!

I came away from all these discussions with an Aquarian outlook. When you take the long view there’s a steady drumbeat of innovation and things always turn out better. While there have been some pretty awful times in the past millennium people universally go to sleep warmer and better fed than their ancestors thanks to tech innovation.

So when I see an innovator like Zuckerberg being roasted by a squad of senators I’m not worried. Facebook may not be perfect today but it or its derivatives will make for a better world.

And why was Gordon a hero for me. Well he opened my eyes. Ever since that time I’ve been able to look at the future, day by day or decade by decade, with the expectation that because ‘tomorrow is another day’ there’s a chance that some toddler growing up on a farm in Alberta will  find what we’re looking for.