I'm Tyler Walters and the Dean of University Libraries and
thank you for attending our first spring semester Visible Scholarship
initiatives, we very much appreciate it. We're here,
we're going to hear from Matthew Wisnioski on his
book Engineers and Change. I've been reading a little
bit about it, I haven't read it yet,
but I'm looking forward to reading it soon. Very,
very interesting stories for the learning more about that.
So again, thank you for coming in and
turn it over to Tom Ewing, Associate Dean in CLAHS
to talk a little bit more about the program and
some of the scholarship that we we feature here and
then we'll hear from Matthew. I'm treading lightly over here because
there's two cables that have Matt's presentation on them.
I would really hate to break. Um as usual,
I want to thank Lesley Moyo, who I
guess is not here, who was really the coordinator
and organizer of this um always appreciate her involvement.
We have a new student who's working on this semester,
but she's also not here, she's in class,
which is a good place for her to be
Taylor Moran. Um and I also wanna thank Chris
Barb who is the one who post managers materials.
Um it was actually a conversation with him, which
we had again just a few minutes ago. Um
it made me think more about the question of visibility
because when he was talking about pulling out these books,
he said they're all from like 40 or 50
years ago, which of course makes sense because Matt
is writing about engineers in the 1950s and 1960s and
these books they wrote and they were reading and without
really thinking, I immediately responded lots of brown and
black books, right? And he said, yeah,
it was really a dull color and so what
I did was, you know, what you can
see here, which is to go pull off some
actual picture or colored covers from amazon and other places
and print those up and add a little variety to
the blue, brown, blue, black, brown, gray books.
Um but it did make me think about kind of,
I think our kind of notions of what scholarship
should look like. I think it changed. I
mean it's kind of the theme of this, of
this series in terms of visible scholarship and what scholarship
means once it comes out into public view. Um
you know, I think for a lot of us
in graduate school, you know, black and brown
books with what we did when we read lots and
lots of books and accumulated that knowledge, I happen to be.
spending a lot of time recently looking at newspapers,
The 20th century, it's hard to imagine anything that's
more monochromatic than black print on white paper. Um and
I think more than our expectations have changed. I
mean I was actually relieved when I walked in here
just a few minutes ago to see a student reading
a book or at least holding a book open in
front of him because everyone else you see is looking
at a screen, you know, and I think
one of the, one of the challenges for those
of us who write books and and and read books
as part of our scholarship is to compete with a
very different expectation of what not what it should look
like when it, when it is delivered. Um,
and I think it's not that we want,
you know, to write books that are, that
are boring and dull in color and certainly if you
look at the cover of mask book, meaning it's
very engaging. Um, but I think it is
a shift and it is a challenge and something that
we're talking about thinking about in this series. Alright,
We have um three more scholars coming up this
spring, we take a break in February for Virginia Tech's
Authors Day um, and library recognition of all of
the authors across the university and every day come in
February, November 21st. Okay. Um, and then
put more officers coming up in the spring. Um,
Jeff Mann from the Department of English, Elizabeth
Mussolini also in from the Department of English and Corinne Noirot from
of foreign language featured in this series to take us through
the rest of the semester. So I'll turn it
over to Matt, let him talk about his book.
Great, well, thank you Tom and I,
before I get started, I want to list
a number of people to thank because I've had the
opportunity to present this work while it was happening in
five different countries, in many, many institutions in
the United States and I have to say that this
is one of the surreal experiences of my life to
be sitting here in a space where actually did much
of this research next to this kind of display and
this collaboration between the University Libraries and the College of
Liberal Arts and Human Sciences is really tremendous and I
hope that you all keep it up. Um thanks
especially to Tom for introduction and for a lot of
work behind the scenes and for Leslie and to Sue.
Um this book was also fueled by coffee and
I wanted to thank Ivy at Next Door Bakeshop who
was a great advertiser of the event and I think
might pop in herself and also to Russell at the
at the defunct Easy Cair, which is is long
missed of course all of my colleagues who have come
and friends thank you and to Cindy who's been helping
me get my work done long before this project ever
existed. But most of all I want to thank
my colleagues and students in the Department of Science and
Technology and Society. Without their moral financial and intellectual
support, this book might not have existed. It
certainly wouldn't have been as good and Skip Fuhrman in
our department head deserves special thanks in this capacity,
but no one more than Gary Downey whose name also
appears if you take a look at the book as
the series editor um deserves thanks. He's been uh
an incredibly generous sounding board and friends throughout the process
. The visible scholarship initiative I think offers in and
of itself a showcase of what we do in STS
. I'm frequently run into confusion with friends, family
members um and even many new students who enter into
my class about what it is that we are doing
. Um and who it is that we are.
This includes, I once gave a talk for Cindy's
4th grade class on the history of astronomy and they
were disappointed that I had not been in space and
was not an astronaut. So so what is science
and technology and society? And it's hard STS is
an interdisciplinary project to make things visible. We live
in highly technological and scientifically mediated environments in which technical
and social dimensions are inextricably connected, but few of
us know how to study and really even know what
that means. So I hope that through this presentation
today I can shed some light on what STS is
this afternoon and why if there are any students who
are out there in the back, they should take
our classes. So to that end, I want
to do three things first, I'll give two explanations
of the origins of my research. Then I'll walk
you through the argument of the book and hopefully show
you some nice images that will entice you to either
check it out of the library or to go onto
amazon and purchase it. Uh you can get the
e book if if you're not happy with the gray
binding that it's in via M. I. T
. Press directly. It's also quite a bit cheaper
that way. Um but so after doing that I'll
finally I'll offer what I think the take home message
of this work is. So in 2002 I was
working in the in the basement computer lab at Princeton
University where I was a graduate student and I was
studying history. I was interested in work at the
intersection of the history of science and technology, something
that I had some experience with as an undergraduate And
at the Cultural Intellectual History of the United States.
I was especially interested in the Cultural Intellectual History of
the 1960s. So most of the people around here
probably have an inkling of what cultural intellectual history is
. But if not it's all about how we make
meaning in a particular time and a particular place and
especially how that meaning changes. So I wanted to
know about the evolution of the concepts of technology and
engineering and I was in this basement creating Excel charts
of word frequency in newspapers using historical databases. Um
now I could go onto Google N. Gram and
produce this chart in less than 10 seconds. Uh
huh. As I was putting in these numbers,
this graph began to take shape and I had this
feeling that I had was touching something incredibly profound that
I had really stumbled into something here. A few
people know, I mean we take this word technology
for granted is something that has always existed and has
always been around. But in fact People didn't use
technology in the way in which we understand it until
the 1920s and the 1930s. And it's really as
you can see in the chart after the Second World
War, where our current fascination with this term as
a means of explaining society at large arose at the
same time In the early part of the 20th century
to be an engineer, was to have a high
uh sense of professional status that engineers were the servants
and creators and makers of machines. Um and as
you can see here sometime in the 1960s, these
two uh terms converged. What happened in the semantic
reversal, what were the causes of it and what
were the consequences of it? So these are the
big questions that appeared to me. So that that's
data.1 for explaining where this project comes from um
data point to before I dig into it. I
think you can gather from the message on my trash
can there. So I am I was an undergraduate
student of material science and engineering and I solved many
a problem like this one which says starting with the
following form of the gibbs do em equation for constant
T. P. For a binary solid solution,
derived the result that if a obeys rules law over
a composition range near X Equal one, then be
obeys Henry's law over the same composition range show all
work. Um I found myself over and over asking
a question that's at the heart of the enterprise that
Gary has pioneered with the notion of engineering studies.
What is engineering for? What am I doing here
? It wasn't that I was a bad engineering student
, it wasn't that I couldn't do these problems though
. People have probably had the experience of of reaching
a level of mathematics where you've done it, but
you have no idea what just happened. In fact
I was um I managed to to to do some
research at the Army research lab and win a prize
at a national engineering meeting for this kind of work
. But I was really interested in what was I
doing there, Why why didn't we talk about uh
these things and how might we begin to? Okay
, so I have these two motivations, the one
intellectual the other one sort of um personal trying to
figure out about myself and what I found behind these
things was a remarkable upheaval of technological advances, political
radicalism, scientific discoveries, um cultural experimentation, intellectual
innovation that were entangled in ways that historians were just
beginning to think about and just beginning to grapple with
. So my book has been an effort to interpret
and make sense of these things if I start out
by trying to trace the evolution of the american engineering
profession in both structural and cultural dimensions. So what
, how did it come to be that in the
19 thirties, engineers considered themselves to be great cosmopolitans
, whose ambition was to serve all too a position
where they were seen as organization robots. This picture
comes from an advertisement for the old inc saying we
we didn't want such robots, We wanted real humans
, the best that they could get. So what's
happened here? Now, one part of the story
is a traditional one in the history of technology.
In the history of science, there's explosive growth in
the number of engineers in the United States From the
1940s to the 1960s. So in World War II
, there about a quarter of a million engineers in
the United States. By 1960, there are over
a million entire new industries emerged from the ground up
, including the aerospace industry in particular, which prior
to the Second World War was a craft industry employing
a couple of tens of thousands to a 2,000,002 million
person endeavor Engineers were increasingly working in very large companies
, 75% of engineers worked in 1% of all companies
in the United States, they were increasingly working on
defense research problems. Um, some studies show as
much as 70% of all engineering and scientific work In
the 1950s and the 1960s was in some way connected
to the federal government. Uh and engineers were increasingly
challenged by the rise of scientists as the leading um
uh occupation for people with, with skills and math
and other sort of analytical abilities. Engineers were also
increasingly going to graduate school. It used to be
that you would go to an engineering school and then
you would go work in an industry. Now there
was this longer cycle of specialization of knowledge. So
at the same time, leaders in the engineering profession
became worried about a whole range of other activities.
We associate the 1960s with the civil rights movement,
with the environmental movement, with the quagmire of Vietnam
, with the rise of the counterculture and all of
these movements. One thing they had in common was
a growing interest in the way in which technology is
some kind of abstract force in society was responsible for
all of these problems. So, after sort of
laying out why the engineering profession seemed to be in
crisis, I asked what, what was it like
? And this is a question that comes directly from
a book of the time called the existential pleasures of
engineering. Um, what was it like to be
an engineer at the moment when the profession has achieved
unprecedented successes and simultaneously is accused of bringing society to
the brink of ruin. Um, one of the
underlying elements of this newfound attention to technology and society
as a whole new genre of thinking and writing that
has an academic group, but that also had broad
popular appeal. You were talking about students on computers
back in the day, the paperback press was exploding
in the amount of books that were being produced and
the number of titles and almost every publisher had some
kind of book on technology and society. Some of
the most important critical intellectuals of the era did their
major work in this area. So people like Lewis
Mumford and his myth of the machine series and Jacques
Alu and his famous technological society. Now these images
portrayed these books portrayed an image of technology as out
of control and it's something that had its own logic
. So one question I had is well, how
do engineers respond to all of this intellectual stuff?
And in the main engineering is a relatively conservative profession
. If you read through engineering journals, you get
lots of lamenting about the new intellectual luddites who were
bringing society to the brink like Lavoisier to the guillotine
, that there was a huge pushback against all of
these social changes that were happening in society and particularly
on those intellectuals who they saw as responsible for making
engineering seem like a less than desirable vocation. But
two sets of people were very interested in these readings
and wanted to learn from them. Um the first
were disaffected radicals, many of whom had worked in
the defense industry and we're starting to feel the pinch
of its economic down turn. Many of them were
academics who had had some kind of socialist upbringing,
many of them had religious motivations for their work,
but they began to question, they began to ask
what is engineering for and they adopted these critical technology
literature and tried to make it their own. Um
you can see up here a picture of spark magazine
from the committee of Social responsibility and engineering with the
uh ubiquitous protest fist with a lightning bolt into a
transistor to make a peace sign. And it talks
about revolutionary engineering and doing it at the workplace.
But there was another group that kept coming up that
kept coming reading this literature, interpreting this literature and
then going out and finding their own intellectuals and their
own theorist and these people are university presidents, corporate
executives, um government policy makers. And they made
the argument that work, technology is out of control
. It's not inherently progressive, but this doesn't tell
us something inherent about the nature of our society and
the values of our society. It tells us about
the nature of technology itself. And they took a
relatively old idea from the 1930s and scaled it up
to what I think has become our dominant way of
thinking about technology and society, which is basically to
say technology and society operate at different speeds. Technology
is rapidly accelerating faster than we can handle and it's
producing unintended and under wanted effects. So what we
need is new kinds of experts who can manage this
balance between technology and society. One of the most
prominent advocates of this position was a guy named Simon
Ramo, who was the head of the american I
C. B. M. Program, among other
things. But the books in in this literature,
I mean, their titles give away their argument the
century of mismatch. How logical man can control his
illogical society. Okay, so the rest of the
book ways out In 11 case studies, this contest
station between these two groups for dominance over what technology
is going to mean for engineers and how engineers are
going to understand what it is that they do.
I travel through um professional societies, through university education
through some pretty amazing collaborations between avant garde artists and
engineers um and through these radical journals, um well
, I look at the research of people who converted
from defense problems to environmental problems. And always my
interest is on how does this affect the way we
live now. What is the outcome of all of
this work? And I think that it's pretty clear
that this ideology of technological change. This idea that
we need to somehow keep up with technology and adjust
our social institutions to its effect rather than to see
these things in conversation always all the time as is
everywhere. So this is a quote from one of
the most important recent policy documents of the engineering profession
put out by the National Academy of Engineering, I
mean, this vision sort of solved the problem of
engineering and crisis, but bound engineers to working with
this, this kind of rhetoric, you must ask
if it serves the nation well to permit the engineering
profession and engineering education to lag technology and society.
Now we have to keep up with this thing that
we thought we were going to be the people,
uh, we were going to be the ones who
are controlling it. So that's in the realm of
engineers. But I think that the impact for this
are quite a bit larger. Um, many of
you have probably read or at least are aware of
thomas Friedman's world is flat. Um, Friedman's interpretation
of globalization and the very rhetoric of globalization is,
Is quite closely linked to this activity of the 1960s
and the 70s, Um, so there's no sugar
coating this in a flat world. Everybody's going to
have to run a little faster. And I can
see many people checking their various devices to unwary to
uh, run next. So what's the take home
point? Uh huh. Hopefully after reading this book
again, either from the library or from outlets such
as amazon dot com. Um, I want to
leave you with the impression that these words are not
just words behind these words are a whole range of
associations and a whole range of beliefs and some and
ideologies now it may be the case that when we
look at these words, this is what comes into
mind. But hopefully after spending some time examining the
history of how this vision came to be instead,
I hope that you can visualize the multiple or contested
multiplicity of contested fights locally, nationally and internationally That
infused these words with the meaning that they now carry
. Indeed, these words are no more inherently static
now than they were 40 years ago. They can
be changed. Thank you. So now I answer
questions some of the other variety or eat cookies.
Mm hmm. What's in the last two days?
This one in the previous one. Were you conveying
then technology engine? Oh, oh know that on
the background, right, technology and the and the
engineer. So this is an image that comes out
of a originally comes out of a corporate magazine internal
to Kaiser aluminum, which tried to sort of take
on countercultural aesthetics to make sense for its employees about
what was happening around the world. And they hired
some really interesting characters and some really talented artists to
put together uh, this, this kind of a
cultural production. This image then got picked up by
a number of engineering textbooks and um, and so
I I wound up sort of finding it over and
over and over. But that's what I'm trying to
convey there. And of course here I'm really trying
to convey. And all of this stuff is there
to this is a nice clean way of thinking about
the past and about what these concepts mean? But
this is um more close to reality, stunned silence
. Sure. Okay you piqued my interest. But
who do you think your audience is? Thank you
. Person in the end field and maybe history and
so on Or is it the person really technocrat or
someone doesn't see where those. Sure. Well I
think all authors aspire to write for for everyone.
But I would say the first audience are people in
this field who are trying to interpret what's going on
at this period. But in terms of a broad
engineering audience which I hope that there is um engineering
students are one Generally interested readers or another. I
got picked up by civil engineering for example which has
I think 100 and 40 um 1000 readers. And
there was just here's an interesting story about your past
kind of thing. But I think for the policy
makers within engineering and the kind of technocratic thinkers it's
very important because they know that they're engaging with these
questions. They're quite astute intellectual thinkers and I think
for them to engage with ideas that are gonna push
them a little. I think it's a good it's
a good thing this curious that you put up Ramos
who was behind the I. C. B.
M. S. The intercontinental ballistic missiles reflexively how
did engineers deal with the fact that on the one
hand technologies out of the out of control, but
they're the ones creating the out of control mess in
the first place, right? It's engineers who keep
keeping one technology on top of another. And in
fact then the populist has to respond to it in
a variety of ways. So how did engineers deal
with what seems to me to be an obvious contradiction
? Well, I think that complaining about it and
I think that contradiction was at the heart of this
point of intersection and it was experienced differently. I
mean that contradiction was felt immediately by them because you
go to school for four years, then you go
to graduate school for another two years maybe to study
a very particular kind of subsystem of a broader system
that you that you kind you understand generally, but
you're not involved in and then the projects done and
national priorities change. And they say, well yeah
, you know, we could try to convert you
to work on these other problems, but you've been
made for this. Um, so there's that element
of the sort of being in the rank and file
. Um there's the other element there where you could
say this isn't our fault, we didn't know these
problems existed. This is new knowledge, this is
the cutting edge of social science, this is the
cutting edge of the interaction between science and technology and
society. And so now that we recognize these problems
were the people who are best positioned to resolve them
? Um so that's why we need these new training
programs for socio technologists. That's why we need these
these other kinds of people for the people who are
most embittered. They read some of this critical stuff
. And you can find these engineering journals that will
say things like um you're just a coin that gets
put into the slot of the machine and then once
you do that, the technology takes over on its
own. So, I think what's fascinating about this
moment is the is the just the vast range of
ways of reconciling with that. What what am I
here for? So, yeah, is this a
peculiarly american discourse or is there an international dimension,
at least in the rich Western? No, I
mean, for sure it's an it's an international discourse
. I mean, louis french. Um many of
the other writers in this technology in society literature,
german or their emigration, some other kind of way
. Um you can find similar discussion among british engineers
. You can find even some really fascinating english language
, um communist writings about technology and society who look
at these neo marxists and they want to shut them
down. So this is like state or state funded
soviet stuff who don't want to give up their similar
conception that technology is at the core of their project
. Um so it's I've focused principally on the United
States, because that's what I know it's containable,
but those that circulation does happen for sure. How
is this affecting like the younger generation when you come
to school? Do you want to be an engineer
or do you just want to be Bill Gates and
just go into technology without having the engineering degrees?
And is it so problems? Yeah. So,
so one group that I didn't think I forgot to
thank in the beginning, where all of the students
in engineering cultures, of course that I've taught,
I'm teaching for the fifth time now, which attempts
to get many of these issues um by looking broadly
at the evolution of engineering in different times and places
. Um you have to wait your turn for questioning
, sir. Um but I think what's really interesting
is how to ask to ask students and and to
get from students at Virginia Tech, what they think
engineering is because it's the diversity is substantial. The
majority position is still quite similar to this notion that
an engineer is somebody who has great technical skill,
who works on a very big project in very large
institutions that the kind of culture of entrepreneurship of,
of, of the innovator um is less present.
Now, if if you were to go to stanford
for example, um you might find a very different
conception of who students want to be as they come
in and also what faculty think the role of um
their job in making these students and I mean when
I came through and I think this is still a
very prominent way of thinking with those problems that are
sort of divorced of all contacts. It was very
much the notion that engineering was a branch of the
sciences and that you didn't think about finding a job
, you thought about which PhD program you were going
to go to and that this was about fundamental foundational
mathematical um um problem solving that you could then later
find an outlet for. So for me, that's
a really interesting question about how and if that's changing
, especially with the ways in which we think about
social media and other kinds of technologies that are inherently
engaging sustainability, things like that, that are inherently
engaging with these technical social technical problems. Skip.
Sure. I'm wondering about the question asked earlier about
the cultural air sense, was there something in american
culture that made the notion of technology out of control
? Uh, peculiarly american in the sense that if
it was a new technology, we ought to adopt
it both economically And socially and morally. And I'll
give you a concrete example when I was here in
the early 80's when they dumped personal computers on us
. There were some training for staff and secretaries,
but not much. And you had to adapt at
the same in the same year, I was in
Finland on a full ride for a full year.
And there was public debate about this issue how they
were going to be introduced how the staff was gonna
get retrained for this and so on. That is
they seem much more deliberative, much more meditative and
much slower in the introduction of these new technologies.
I certainly don't remember that happening here. Yeah,
I mean, I don't know enough about this sort
of Scandinavian approach to technology, about which there's quite
a lot of literature there sts is is very popular
in um in nordic countries. Um But what I
would say to that is certainly people have written about
in Germany for example, after the Second World War
, where there was a major backlash against um the
notion of a technological state and the notion of a
technological order coming out of the rise of nazism and
its and its demise. I don't think it's a
surprise that the United States became the center for all
of this because the post war era is really the
era in which the United States um exerts global supremacy
in a way that it hadn't quite before where all
of this important technological innovation was taking place. Um
The soviet Union, it would be another place,
but the kind of cultural dynamics of being able to
do any of that sort of um introspective, reflective
kind of thought was quite quite different. But there
is a really fascinating literature of cybernetics in the soviet
union that talks about some of these same issues go
ahead, I guess. That's good the kind of
notion of englebart and augmentation instead of automation. It
seems like there's a lot of ways with technology and
yet other cultural shifts to generalize about the US historically
that we often go to fast and efficient rather than
quality. And a lot of things including beyond technology
including technology. So I'm just running back to the
comment about education and engineers and R. C.
O. E. Or anywhere. What kind of
general disruption? Both curricular pedagogic lee kind of large
questions that we have all engineers to meet that isn't
at the N. A. Is talking about the
category five storm. Sure. Yeah. Well so
a long answer to that is that um taking gardeners
um faculty seminar sort of changed my view a little
bit about how to interpret people like Engelbart and others
where so I'm starting on the next big project that
looks at the notion of the innovator and the rise
of innovation as a framework that is associated with technology
, but it has a whole range of different connotations
and meanings very much along the lines of what you're
describing that that this should be about figuring out how
to augment us to make us better. Now,
I don't think this is radically distinct from what I'm
talking about. There's a book one of the books
up here by fred turner at stanford called from counterculture
to cyberculture. And he traces out how Countercultural embraces
of technology in the 1960s and also countercultural infiltrations into
places like the Stanford Research Center had a major role
in shaping digital media. And if you look at
Wired magazine, you can draw a line directly back
to what these guys are doing and they have their
own kind of political agendas and all the rest.
But they see themselves as sort of operating outside of
or or parallel to this apparatus that they see as
stale and regimented and organizationally problematic. Um you know
, if you talk to go to any executive meeting
at a university, they're having these kind of conversations
. Um so how do you do it? I
mean, I I think that there are a lot
of ways. If you're small, you can do
a lot of things. Um, if you're big
, you can create centers and and bring people into
them and and and change small groups of people.
But on the, on the big level, I
think, you know, there's an entire Department of
Engineering Education Research that it might take up that problem
as a as a significant one. Um, so
, I don't have any answers, but I see
the problem. Oh, go ahead, Choose your
cover photo. So, great question. Um,
so this is a picture and I wish I had
a slide of it. This is a the picture
in the background comes from an advertisement for Hamilton's standard
, major aerospace manufacturer of the 1960s. And you
have this this Um anonymous torso of an engineer setting
fire to his blueprints. So there's this element of
radicalism hinting at what's going on this from 1967,
hinting at what's going on around it at the same
time, he's lighting his own plans on fire so
he's gonna have to start again. So this is
kind of cycle. And the headline of it was
wanted an engineer who can handle change. Um and
the message in the text was that the engineers social
responsibility was to change of technology itself, not to
this broader sense of social change but to technological change
. One of the quotes and is something inside him
says you must keep up. Um so so it
really is a kind of embodiment of all of these
tensions that are taking place at the at the same
time we crossed the threshold of where we spend more
time trying to keep up than we do trying to
learn and develop. You know, every time you
turn around you're installing software updates. Software updates has
changed where the menus, where the stuff I mean
stuff I used to be able to do when I
first learned how to do Excel or whatever else you
can find in the stupid. And it's really it's
like when you go to the grocery store they rearranged
. It's just man and as technology is changing so
rapidly are we spending more time. You know,
I got this, I got this new thing,
I got this new thing. It's supposed to help
everything be better, but I don't have time to
figure it all out. So, I mean,
just I would say really quickly. I mean,
the framing of the question itself just shows how ingrained
this language and interpretive frame is. But I think
that the real point of one of the big shift
seems to be an awareness and growth of the complexity
of these systems and the fact that they are,
they do change quite rapidly. And there was this
sense of at one point that, um, you
know, a state properly organized with the right kind
of federal agencies like the National Science Foundation could keep
a handle on all of this. And so there's
a lot of work on, um, dealing with
massive complexity. And I don't know that there's no
answer to that question. It's more of about different
strategies for reinterpreting what the problems are. Okay,
married to an engineer of brotherhood. Yeah. And
I keep thinking economy. Economy because I watched what
happened in my family, my immediate favorite and my
extended family and so much happened in that he has
more with corporations with investment money. And it trickles
down to the engineer who maybe has the right idea
, but he has to work over here no produce
more basically. And to keep it running. And
we know what happened eventually. A lot of engineers
were affected by the economy and things moving out of
this country, other countries and you haven't addressed that
and I understand why, but I do think it
influenced this history. Yeah, Well, and I
think sure, well, and just on that,
I would say that the sort of technocratic leaders Start
to recognize and talk in those terms in the early
1970s, um, a little bit earlier than we
think that they started to talk about them. Um
, so the kind of bottoming out of the defense
industry in the aerospace industry in 1969, um a
lot of people start talking about what we need to
take this workforce and put them to work solving nationals
, domestic problems, environmental problems, urban development.
But many of these guys start saying, look at
Japan, they're they're microelectronic industry is taking off so
it's there. But I think it's, you know
, it's something that I'm interested in studying but I
don't know enough about and it is something that I
think really rises to the surface of awareness immediately after
what's going on here. Good, thank you.