Leaf blowers and ‘overtech’

When the Metro subway system opened in Washington DC in 1977, commuters like me were thrilled — until we actually started riding the thing.

During that first week, as the platforms filled to capacity at the height of rush hour, the trains simply would not go. They sat in the stations, doors opening and closing and making that damned “ding dong” sound, and then opening and closing again.

It was amazing. Ding dong. Ding dong. Then the train conductors would ask a few people to get off because the train was overloaded, but that didn’t make any sense. Of course the train was crowded. It was rush hour. “Please, please, will some of the people get off the train.”

I remember the operators pleading, the cops trying to shove people off the trains with their nightsticks. Isn’t it great to have lived in extraordinary times?

Anyway, it turned out that the doors were not closing because they used “fail safe” optical sensors that were not lining up when the car was overloaded. That was happening because the extra weight was causing the floors to sag. Had the floors been made of cold-rolled steel, instead of some high-tech titanium alloys, and had the doors not been built with over 2,000 moving parts, the trains would have kept running.

It was a great example of “overtech,” the tendency to overbuild systems that become prone to failure because they are overbuilt. We see the results all the time — space shuttles blowing up, nuclear power plants melting down, chemical factories oozing poison, and SUVs turned turtle on the roadside.

Overtech has long been with us a long time. Perhaps the classic example is from 1628. The Swedish ship Vasa sank in Stockholm harbor two hours after being launched. It was the most heavily armed and expensive warship that had ever been built up to that time. But apparently the royal engineers had insisted on adding extra gun decks against the wishes of the naval architects.

What compels us to “overtech” things?

Consider the Nestle infant formula scandal — a case of class and social blindness. In the 1970s, Nestle advertised its substitute for mothers breast milk as clean, scientific, modern, safe and healthy. There were doctors and nurses in white coats in newspaper and billboard and TV ads. And Nestle even gave away one months supply to all the new mothers. Many didn’t realize that by the time the free formula milk ran out, the mothers natural milk would have also dried up.

This was no big deal in the US and Europe, but the impact in developing nations was devastating. Since infant formula was priced at what was often 30 to 40 percent of a poor workers daily wage, and since drinking water supplies were often dirty, millions of babies died. The scientific, modern, safe, healthy way was an appeal to something that didn’t exist. It was a technological lie. Even worse, Nestle stonewalled for years, until the World Council of Churches called the pastor of the mother of the vice president for international marketing. That got their attention — for a while.

Maybe it’s something psychological. I once stopped to talk with a group of workers at my college in the Gothic American South. I asked why they used leaf blowers. What with all the noise and pollution, weren’t rakes better? No, leaf blowers are better, they said. Gets the job done quicker. Right. But if you still have to work eight or ten hours a day, and the wage is the same, what difference does it make? Maybe Dave Barry had it right:

“Leaf blowers are the ideal guy tool, because they have engines, they’re loud, and they enable you to blast debris, ray-gun-style, from one place to another without having to actually pick it up.” — Dave Barry, Miami Herald, Jan. 11, 2004

Yep, what I failed to realize was that these workers aren’t just raking leaves. As Marshall McLuhan once said, technologies are extensions of our personalities. If you use a rake, you are a groundskeeper. If you use a machine, you are an operator. Machinery has status, hand tools don’t. Nobody wants to be a ditch-digger, but most workers don’t mind operating a backhoe. Or, even better, blasting debris ray-gun style.

It’s kind of sad in America but its positively tragic in other parts of the world. A few years ago, at a newspaper publishers conference, a group of Central American news honchos were being sold on the benefits of automating their stuffing lines. The US cost of “stuffing” the sports and local news sections of a newspaper into the front page section is about the same if you use either automated machinery or large numbers of minimum-wage human beings. You would think that with all the people who needed work in Honduras and Guatemala, the most affordable choice, not to mention the most ethical one, would be to hire manual labor.

The publishers didn’t see that. Mechanical is better, they told me. Better how? There are already security guards at newspapers. Laying people off and installing automated systems would cause labor problems, not solve them. The cost is equal in the US, surely the labor costs in Honduras are cheaper. But no, the automated systems were shiny, modern and reliable. Humans are sweaty, difficult creatures at best. And it’s easy to love machines, especially if you have been disappointed in people. But what about those of us who are disappointed in machinery?

With all the amazing problems surrounding the voting debacles of recent years,  you would think that people would want to go back to simpler, more reliable methods. In Canada they still use paper ballots and pencils and the election results are known the next morning. And if there is a recount the ballots are there and can be checked. Yet in the US, the answer to problems is to increase the level of mechanization and complexity.

There is a tall tale going around to the effect that NASA spent $6 million on a ball point pen that would write in space while the Russians simply used pencils. As it turns out, it’s not true, but it’s one of those things that probably should be.

Astronauts, voters, publishers and groundskeepers enjoy technological vanity as much as nuclear engineers, Nestle executives or  Metro designers.

Ding dong.