Books

Inspiration, paranoia, nuts...and bolts

RADICAL TECH NOLOGY

edited by P. Harper, Godfrey Boyle and the editors of Undercurrents.

304 pages, £3.95, Wildwood House, London, and $5.95, Pantheon Books, New York, 1976.

Radical Technology is a do-it-yourself book. It is not about the innocuous furniture fixing or kit assembling so familiar in the suburbs, but about the efforts of groups critical of the majority way of life to pioneer new lifestyles with new technologies: small-scale, egalitarian, independent, self-sufficient, resource conserving, ecologically harmless ... None of this is news, of course. However, since the book addresses itself to its cause with a rare combination of critical zeal and nuts- and-bolts practicality, and since an important part of the book is devoted to communications, it deserves more than a passing glance from the 'mainstream' communications technologist, policy analyst or decision maker who might occasionally wonder what the 'freaks' are up to on the other side of the fence. In the phrase immortalised by the Michelin tour guides, it is 'worth the detgur' to find out.

At the risk of gross oversimplification, the editors' aim seems to have been to seek out ways of placing technological tools, of the kind they judge appropriate in ecological or socio-political terms, in the hands of small groups or communities so that they can assert their independence of Big Government and Big Corporations and their allegedly wasteful and inhuman ways. The reader can weigh these political judgments for himself. I would go about one third of the way with them. The point, however, is that Radical Technology and its contributors

pursue their aim in very effective style. Did you know, for example, that the 'underground' world of communes and suchlike confers weekly in North America on 14.253 MHz (SSB voice transmission) at 1900h GMT every Sunday, with guest speakers 'patched in' to the 'has' transmitters over the public telephone network? They have been doing it since September 1973. If that, and the similar 'alternative sources of energy net' does not impress you, you might be struck by the fact that they are introducing slow-scan television (presently 120 lines, 8 frames per second) as well, an activity that has been permitted in the USA by the Federal Communications Commission since 1968, and has just become legal in Britain. The 'people's' computer centres, typically a strikingly effective improvisation using obsolete and officially scrapped machines to provide 'alternative' enterprises with accounting and records services, statistical analysis for investigative reporting, and the like, are another remarkable phenomenon. Further and less surprising items deal with the practicalities and politics of using portable video systems in community activities, and how to get time on the existing mass media, including community-access cable television.

Lest all this should begin to sound reassuringly harmless, in fact hardly radical at all, let me add that you can also find out, using information in Radical Technology, how to set up an illegal 'pirate' broadcast radio transmitter, and how to evade detection when you've done so. If you prefer a private, switched medium of communication, you will learn how to obtain access to the astonishing private world of the 'phone phreaks,' with their 'black boxes' and 'blue boxes' for illegal signalling to the telephone system's automatic switching centres, and their

sometimes dazzling intellectual games to beat both the system (by discovering its codes and procedures) and its managers (who are, very properly, constantly seeking to frustrate the phreaks). The editors state very clearly, of course, that 'we are not suggesting that anyone break the law; we merely report how it is being broken and thereby discredited.'

Still, it is clear enough that objections to pirate broadcasting (on the grounds that chaos will ensue unless there is orderly allocation of frequencies) or to phone phreaking (on the grounds that it imposes heavy and unfair costs on the rest of the community) are not taken very seriously by the authors of these sections of the book. No doubt it is relatively easy to dismiss such arguments coming from official circles when one distrusts them as much as most of these authors evidently do.

At times, indeed, the distrust begins to verge on paranoia. According to one contributor, the Act of Parliament that set up Britain's present semi- independent Post Office Corporation in 1968, allegedly 'gave the State's Monopoly Corporation as much total i tar ian control over communications as it considers expedient.' According to the authors 'the importance of communcations in maintaining social control is immense, and the Post Office's network of radio stations is designed around the need of the military to maintain ultimate control' (the implication being that Britain's present form of government does not in fact have 'the consent of the governed' and would not persist without such technological means of control). The British Broadcasting Corporation, which many American thinkers regard as a successful 'socialist' experiment that might be emulated, gets gentler treatment, but nevertheless: ' . . . nor can a structure like the BBC, on a (loose and well concealed) state leash, do anything but ultimately hinder the development of community radio.'

As anyone in a telecommunications common-carrier organisation or regulatory agency who is concerned with network security or radio-spectrum management will testify, the views and activities reflected in these contributions cannot be dismissed as unimportant. Just as the creative and original aspects

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Books

of the 'alternative society' with its 'radical technology' command attention because of their growing claim on the loyalties and enthusiasm of young, critically minded people in the West, the attack, physical and ideological, on the existing communications institutions and networks deserves to be taken seriously. If you agree, you should read this book - and some of the primary sources cited in its extensive

Adaptive trends TELECOM 2000 An exploration of the long term development of telecommunications in Australia

by the National Telecommunications Planning team

166 pages, The Austral ian Government Print ing Unit, Melbourne, 1975.

In Telecom 2000 Tony Newstead and his planning team have taken on a formidable task, and pulled it off rather well. A comprehensive report is presented on the environment facing the telecommunications industry sector in Australia and on this basis many significant directions for progress are recommended.

The corporate planner will recognise many of the elements of a 'corporate plan' in Telecom 2000 (eg, the recommendation of strategy or directions, and the description of environments to support strategic choices). He will note the relative absence of statements of objectives (eg, where Australian telecommunications should be in the year 2000). Indeed, Telecom 2000, in its Introduction, refers to ' . . . a different kind of long range planning where the emphasis is on the exploration of alternatives rather than on targets . . . '

Instant WorM, a similar government report on telecommunications in Canada, published in 1971, made no recommendations, but instead was 'intended to focus attention on the main issues and problems, and present options for consideration rather than recommended courses of action'.

Industrial top executives exhibit a certain amount of impatience with these

bibliography, itself a remarkable piece of versatile craftsmanship by Peter Harper , a leading Alternat ive Technologist and former biochemist. Incidentally, if you have the time, you may find the sections on food, building, energy and so on quite thought- provoking as well.

Michael Tyler, Harvard University,

Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

bland approaches, preferring the strong taste of decisiveness. These inner directed men and their counterparts in government will take decisions based on what they know or believe at the time of decision. The quality of these decisions will spell success or failure. They deserve the best 'data base' possible, and Telecom 2000 provides this to a significant degree for the Australian scene.

Telecom 2000 recognises the impor tance of technology to telecommunications in specific technical chapters and in the ideas of other chapters. There is a further recognition that the evolution of technology is perhaps impossible to influence. The research and development 'leading edge' is scattered among so many good laboratories in the world that the most the telecommunications planner can do is detect the main advances and lay plans for his own particular situation within this knowledge. In this vein Telecom 2000 says Australia should 'reactivate and advance network planning studies of the applicability of integrated digital switching and transmission systems in the Australian telephone network ... ' .

To cite another example, 'In distribution media, presently available cable are not suitable for a high-demand wideband network. Optical fibres show great promise ... ' . The world is waiting and has had to wait for a new technology to provide universal broadband-switched service to homes and offices. There are various interim measures, such as coaxial cable, specially treated twisted pair cables, but they are only interim measures. The real solution may be optical fibre or another technology still to be perceived.

Man has not so far been able to forecast the indirect societal impacts of new technologies and has therefore applied them with mainly economic and military objectives in mind. Telecom 2000 recognises that it is impossible to influence the evolution of technology to any great extent, and searches for 'adaptive trends' to foster and 'maladaptive trends' to avoid. There is not much doubt that new telecommunications can pollute, not so much the physical environment, but rather the environment of the human spirit. The art of technology assessment is gaining pract i t ioners in the world and may yet be able to reveal the hidden effects of new departures in technology. The search for adaptive trends proposed by Telecom 2000 is a most interesting approach worthy of pursuit.

Of course, economic futures will have a lot of impact on telecommunications. It is interesting that the report makes no recommendations in the chapter on 'Economic futures' as it does in other chapters. The report merely notes that the telecommunications share of gross capital expenditures is more likely to maintain or exceed the present 4½% figure than to fall below it. Certainly technology has provided massive reduction in costs 'per circuit mile' and in so doing has fostered growth to match. The result has been a continuing high level of capital expenditure for telecommunications. Will this continue, or will technology provide some new magic answers? Some estimates of the information industry share in gross national product are as high as 50%. Will this rapid growth in the information industry force even higher levels of te lecommunica t ions expenditures?

Telecom 2000 is written for Australians from the viewpoint of state ownership ('it will be more than ever in the nat ional interest that te lecommunica t ions remains predominantly in the public sector'). Reader reaction will be polarised between that in North America, and that in most of the rest of the world. To quote R.C. Scrivener, Chairman of the Board of Northern Telecom, 'the report left me with a feeling that the proposed planning approach will prove to be too slow and cumbersome (bureaucratic)

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