What do missiles and music have in common in America? It is something very remarkable, something that is at the root of much of the enormous waste and folly that is rapidly robbing America of its greatness. The failure of Star Wars missile defense and digital music copy protection technologies are examples of an entrenched and highly profitable culture of whoring in the high-technology sector of American capitalism.
What is a whore? A whore is someone who takes the act of love that is fundamental to human happiness and perverts it into a cash transaction devoid of any meaning other than a predatory exchange. Whores are generally despised because they destroy the bond of trust that is at the core of a healthy human community and replace it with the commerce of mutual exploitation. What is a technology whore? A technology whore takes the Promethean fire of the most advanced tools of our civilization and uses them to make fraudulent goods and services. The technology whore typically receives money and the customer receives "satisfaction." Let's consider what happens when technology whores work on missiles and music.
Two technology myths and the whores who sell them
It is widely understood by knowledgeable and impartial observers that defense against ballistic missile attack is an intractable problem within the limits of current technology. There are two main difficulties: target discrimination and defense saturation. Nobody has figured out how to identify an incoming warhead among a cloud of cheap decoys that look exactly the same to the interceptor's guidance sensors. Nobody has figured out how to make an affordable missile defense that can't be overcome by a large quantity of incoming missiles. It takes about three hours of Google research for the average college graduate to reach this conclusion. Nonetheless, technology whores have been paid vast sums to design and deploy a non-functioning missile defense system in America.
It is widely understood by knowledgeable and impartial observers that the copy protection of digital music is an intractable problem within the limits of current technology. The difficulties include: inability to change compromised protective schemes and the inability to prevent copying after an analog conversion. Nobody has figured out how to retroactively update the copy protection scheme of millions of items that have already been sold and delivered once such a scheme has been broken. Nobody has figured out how to prevent the copying of digital media once they are captured in the analog signal stream flowing to output devices. It takes about three hours of Google research for the average college graduate to reach this conclusion. Nonetheless, technology whores have been paid substantial sums to design and deploy music copy protection schemes for some of the largest American companies, including Microsoft and Apple.
Whores know what they are selling. The technology whores know that satisfying their customer's "needs" is not producing something workable or technologically sound. They have simply decided that their personal enrichment is more important than any other consideration. And unlike whores in the sex trade, technology whores are protected by the complex and esoteric nature of their services. Most citizens lack the understanding and motivation to see technology whoring for what it is. It's a good life in the technology whorehouse, because it pays well and looks respectable to most people on the outside. The names of the technology whorehouses are proudly listed in the Fortune 500.
Novices, whoremasters, and whores
It is not easy to take an intelligent university graduate trained to high standards of integrity and turn him or her into a technology whore. The process requires several stages. Novices joining a technology whorehouse are shielded from the whoring work during their initial time in the business. They are put under the supervision of a whoremaster who gradually teaches them that high salaries and attractive benefits flow to those who learn to be "flexible" in adapting their work to client "needs." Because the process proceeds by small increments, the novice is seldom fully aware of the transformation. The novice may hear of misdeeds or dubious projects in other parts of the whorehouse, but everything is OK in his or her own little world - until the test of "leadership potential" arrives. The novice is offered a managerial role, a significant promotion conditioned on demonstrating the ability to handle a difficult assignment. The difficulty of the assignment, unfortunately, is delivering to the customer something that is not technically sound, such as an analysis of missile targeting data that confirms the ability of a seeker to identify a missile warhead among a cloud of decoys, when statistical analysis of the data does not support such a conclusion. If the novice "fails" this test of leadership, by refusing the assignment or producing an "inadequate" product, the opportunity will be offered to another promising novice. There is always a supply of well-prepared novices who are willing take on the "challenge" and become full-fledged technology whores. Those who fail the test are urged to leave the whorehouse to make room for new novices, and they usually turn to less remunerative vocations.
What is technology whoring doing to America?
The steady expansion of technology whoring during the Bush administration has led to skyrocketing expenditures on junk. The US defense budget is now loaded with weapons programs that are poorly conceived and dishonestly managed. Star Wars stands at the pinnacle of this tower of bad faith because even its supporters acknowledge that the deployed system does not work. This open acknowledgement of technology whoring as a new normality (deploying an untested weapons system while it is still under "development") has disturbing implications for the future of the US military.
In the civilian sector, the delusional pursuit of copy protection threatens to cripple consumer use of basic computing tools, as Microsoft's Vista operating system is designed to conduct a tug-of-war with the "licenser" of the program as to what and how music and video playback occurs on a computer. Vista will degrade or inhibit operation of the computer if it detects that the user is attempting to bypass copy protection.
But the technology whores, fresh from turning their profitable tricks, are searching for new opportunities. Missiles and music are just two examples, chosen for juxtaposition, from a list of hundreds of whorish technology scams. Defenses against terrorism, plagues, and global warming are sure to be promised by the polished and proficient liars who lead the great technology whorehouses. As long as the demand for quick "satisfaction" remains strong among feckless political and business leaders, the whores will prosper, and we will all suffer for it.