"As we may think" by Vannevar Bush

I thought it was astounding how the mimex was pretty accurate as a projection of how people would want to use technology in the future. Considering that this piece was created in the last throes of WWII, it’s astonishing that Vannevar Bush had time to think about peacetime technology. But then, he perhaps needed a way to validate technology in the minds of most Americans and in the minds of those who award government and private contracts. I kept on thinking, of course after WWII someone would insist that technology could have an application in the daily lives of people in peacetime. To say otherwise would admit that the technology workforce is now useless! But it was also really quite optimistic of Bush to believe that peacetime was here to stay-at least long enough for warfare to not be the main occupation of engineers in America. How wrong he was. On some level, I think he expected the technology boom of the 1990s a few decades before its time because he couldn’t have really known how quickly the Cold War would take over American mentality and the economy.

Another thing worth mentioning is that even though this is an article for the post-war era, he seems to still believe naively that a memex would not be used against citizens as proof for the government of some thought crime or treason. If the memex is supposed to house all the connections and information that a person would normally keep in one’s head, what kind of government did he think existed that would be able to resist that temptation at using personal technology against its enemies? He had, after all, lived through a time when a Nazi government had used anything, even race, to execute and annihilate an enemy from within. Really, what is more personal than a thought crime but the crime of being who you are ethnically? It really strikes me as strangely out of touch with the realities that Bush would see all the good that technology would be used for but not the evil that could come of it even in wartime. If I were him, I would silence those fears and hope for the best, I guess. He probably never dreamed that the victorious American government could turn out just like the fascists as far as personal intrusion.

This whole discussion about technology in the post-war era still has very pertinent questions for Americans today. The children of the memex dream, the personal computer and the internet, are used by our government to illegally spy on its citizens, and if the public knows about that level of intrusion I am willing to gamble there are a lot more serious intrusions of privacy going on that we will never know about. How should we deal with that kind of benefit and cost to technology? The time is far gone when we could have rejected the internet and the computer, but what can we do as future librarians to combat the issue of surveillance? Can we destroy the records of who has looked at what in the library? Or simply not keep those kinds of records? As a government agency, must we cooperate with other government agencies who demand information about patrons? These are things the ALA needs to publicly address and resolve as immediately as possible.