Back to the Future Is your favourite technology actually pathological?
Like the Zeppelins of old, many of today’s technologies fit a ‘pathological’ profile, argues Malcolm White, and more of us need to take control of the way we use our tech, instead of being used by it.
Here in London, there is a commemorative plaque, which reads: ‘These premises were totally destroyed by a Zeppelin raid during the World War on September 8th 1915. Rebuilt 1917.’
It seems that it wasn’t only during the Second World War that Britain was attacked from the air, in what became known as ‘The Blitz’. In fact, between 1915 and 1918, Britain was bombed from the air on 103 separate dates – a surprising total that has prompted historians to call these early air raids the ‘First Blitz’. Many of these attacks were carried out by the Zeppelin airships of the German Luftwaffe.
To this day, the Zeppelin continues to fascinate many people. Although I’d heard about airship disasters, including the Hindenburg in 1937, what I hadn’t realised was just how bad their safety record was. In the 40 years prior to the Hindenburg disaster, a total of 26 hydrogen-filled airships had been destroyed by fire due to accidental causes, sometimes killing everyone on board.
Yet, despite an airship disaster occurring almost every 18 months, Zeppelins and their like continued to exert a spellbinding power over nations, industrialists and inventors – such as the eponymous Count Zeppelin himself – and on those passengers who were prepared to pay a premium to be transported in an immense vessel filled with more than seven million cubic feet of explosive hydrogen gas.
In his book, Monsters: The Hindenburg Disaster and the Birth of Pathological Technology, Ed Regis dissects this unhealthy fascination and concludes, “never has a technology been so soundly, thoroughly, and utterly discredited as the hydrogen airship. The craft was a complete and final dead end.”
But what caught my eye in Regis’ book was his description of the Zeppelin as an example of a ‘pathological technology’, and his definition of that suggestive phrase. For Regis, there are four things that make a technology ‘pathological’. First, they are oversized in terms of their absolute size or effects. Second, ‘pathological technologies’ cast such a powerful spell on people that all rational evidence against them or to their contrary is rendered null and void.
Third, their risks and even their blatantly dangerous downsides are systematically minimised and underplayed. And fourth, a technology should be considered pathological when there is an extreme mismatch between benefits and costs.
