In Search of Certainty

Chapter 6. Keeping It Together by Pulling It Apart: How weak coupling strengthened human infrastructure

“The most powerful dehumanizing machine is not technology but the social machine, i.e. The formation of command structures to make humans emulate technology in order to build pyramids and skyscrapers...”

Lewis Mumford (1967)

The story of certainty in technology isn’t the story of brilliant engineers who brought skill and wisdom to bear in building their systems. It is a story of how society experiences systems from the hard edge of everyday life. To discuss what certainty means for information technology, we need to place ourselves at the heart of the changes that took place.

In the autumn of 2002, I was asked to hold the keynote at the NordU computer infrastructure conference, which was to be held in Västerås, Sweden, in February of the following year. The early 2000s were a time during which the whole world of information technology seemed to be raging: mobile computing, online commerce, and the World Wide Web were maturing into something mainstream, and it was the wake of the ‘dot com’ boom, where many expectations had been inflated and popped. As I planned the talk, I recall being haunted by an image from an episode I had experienced a few years earlier.

I’d been walking through a part of downtown Oslo called Grensen (literally “The Edge”) with a visiting colleague, fleeing snow pellets that were blustering through the streets. In those days, Grensen was the hangout for a tribe ...