IS THIS OUR SPUTNIK MOMENT?

IS THIS OUR SPUTNIK MOMENT?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 27, 2011

President Barak Obama gave an inspirational speech as his State of the Union Address rather than a laundry list of what we can or must do to sustain the future of the United States (Tuesday, January 25, 2011). 

It lacked the normal applause and the ceaseless standing ovations typical of this address.  This was never more so than when he claimed that this was “our sputnik moment.”  It would seem that most in the house, the 435 Congressmen and Congresswomen, the 100 US Senators, 9 Supreme Court Justices, along with staff members and distinguished guests missed the hysteria of 54 years ago when the USSR launched a satellite into space, changing the future of mankind forever.  I say this because you could hear a pin drop when he said it.

The president used this hook to show that at a time when there was no American Space Program, no supportive technology, and neither the engineering nor rocket technology to support such an effort the Russians had done it, they had beat us in space.  Yet, in a decade, the US had a man on the moon.

The idea the president was promoting was that when Americans make up their minds to do something they do it.  He mentioned the great American technological achievement of the transcontinental railroad.  He could have also mentioned the building of the Panama Canal. 

The railroad was built primarily with imported Chinese labor, while the Panama Canal was built primarily with men from the West Indies.  American labor in both instances was mainly missing as men of color did the hard labor, while whites, whatever their skill level, were more comfortably employed in other pursuits.

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Some sociological changes that occurred after Sputnik are interesting to report.  Science fiction was a big market for young people prior to 1957.  The science fiction magazines, books, television programs, and films treated outer space as if it belongs by natural rights to Americans.  In these dramas, explorers, settlers, daredevils, even comic book heroes were all Americans in storyline. 

And then out of nowhere, the first bona fide space vehicle Sputnik was Russian, not American! 

Hysteria was in the air.  The “new math” and “open classroom” were invented.  This was meant to create an organizational infrastructure to support a technology of layers upon layers of technical management with our neglected production workers, essentially unschooled, unskilled, and poorly trained left in the lurch.  America was on a mission and the ends justified any means no matter the sacrifice or displacement.

NASA was created with a whole new dynamic in our culture.  We now had astronauts.  We also learned a whole new vocabulary as Houston talked to these astronauts from central control as they spun around the globe.  It was like science fiction ouf of "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century," or was it?

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While NASA was gearing up, the nation’s mass culture was gearing down.  It turned away from science fiction movies and TV shows to westerns.  In the western, there was never any doubt who would win.  Scores of television dramas such as "Gunsmoke," "The Bounty Hunter," "Wagon Train, et al became the fodder of the popular culture, along with films of the same genre.

Another thing was going on about the same time as Sputnik.  It was called “automation.”  The president alluded to its impact in his State of the Union address when he mentioned a steel mill once employed 1,000 workers but now employed only 100. 

Automation was to take the place of unintelligent labor, or stated another way, replacing brawn with brains, electronic automated brains. 

It first replaced assembly line workers, the kind doing dull repetitive work.  It was thought this work was not conducive to thinking.  It was claimed to paralyze the human spirit, and to give rise to “the alienated worker, self-estranged from job and identity.” 

All that messy, boring work, experts insisted, would be taken over by machines.  It was “Deus ex machina,” a god from the machine.  The machines would solve our problems.

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An automated future was presented as a good thing.  This would cause productivity to explode, standards of living to rise, plus it would sustain economic growth. 

No one seemed concerned about all the people who worked for generation after generation doing mundane labor, who lacked the opportunity or inclination to learn new skills, and who were perfectly happy doing manual labor.  What was supposed to happen to them?  Did anyone consider them in this equation of automation?  Did anyone stop to think if automation took their jobs, what were they supposed to do to support themselves?

Most reading this are too young or have forgotten the hard effects on ordinary workers when automation arrived for real.  It was about the time of Sputnik. 

In the 1950s and 1960s tens of thousands of blue-collar workers were laid off because of automation.  Most of these workers belonged to unions, and unions had grown strong since the 1930s.  So, there were constant strikes in the automotive, steel, and the coal mining industries, among others. 

Workers retained benefits and compensation concessions because companies could afford it, leastwise in the short term, when business was booming.  No one seems to have worried about unintended consequences such as worker morale when they were paid more and more to do less and less, or what would happen to the viability of these industries when the bubble burst.  Workers were asleep, but so was management.  

Gradually, automation became accepted, adjustments were made, and there was some easing of the pain.  We can say today that most of that pain has been absorbed. 

Now, workers are hit constantly with another reality: plant closings and plant relocations to other countries, mergers, redundancy exercises, restructuring and reengineering.  A whole new vocabulary of interventions has followed in this wake.  This, too, has eased over the years as the "child of automation" has found ways to upgrade its skills and rise a little higher on the food chain.

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The child of automation is now the computer and the Internet.  The child of automation reduced the blue-collar workforce by two-thirds to three-quarters, and is still counting.  That workforce will never come back. 

Now, the "child of the computer and the Internet" is replacing the white-collar workforce: the manager, the supervisor, the staff engineer, and the secretary.  This is happening as surely as the assembly line robot took the place of the lunch-bucket brigade. 

The ranks of middle management are disappearing at an alarming rate.  It is conceivable that this disappearance will parallel the blue-collar workforce's disappearance by 2025.  Add to this the fact that for all intent and purposes there is no viable union movement today.

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Before World War Two, there were three to four levels of management, the man in charge, the manager of operations, the supervisor and the administrator.  This grew to as many levels as twelve layers of management after World War Two, with the most noticeable swelling of what became known as “middle management.” 

In the computer and Internet age, you find in any large company bosses and executives as representatives of the stockholders at the top.  They count the numbers and issue the orders and make the decisions.  At the bottom are the workers on the line, expendable and interchangeable, who make whatever is being made.  Between the top and the bottom, until now, has been middle management.

It was the job of middle management to interpret the bosses for the workers, and the workers for the bosses.  It was a hierarchical structure, a pyramid in which it was the job of the middle managers to pass information (orders, specifications, requirements) down to the workers, and to pass up to the bosses the record of accomplishments of what actually had been done. 

Middle management has had the responsibility to pass to suppliers the information regarding the raw materials needed, and to distributors the information regarding what finished products were available.  It seems absurd now but middle management once considered itself as the essential conduit and primary component in the process of information exchange from the top to the bottom. 

Alas, once the computer and Internet were brought into the equation, and made viable as they have been progressively so in the last ten to fifteen years, there is little need for middle management.  There is no need for the hundreds of thousand, indeed, millions of middle managers in the equation. 

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Middle managers reading this might say, "Bullocks!  Of course, middle management is necessary."  Then as I have heard before, "Aren’t you that angry guy that wrote WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS a score of years ago, and book after book since with that same message?”  I would have to answer in the affirmative.  I would also have to confess that the process I envisioned has accelerated.

In the face of this, I’m not advocating a stand, I’m simply recording a trend.  Middle management might take comfort in the fact that there are more than 10,000 colleges, community colleges and universities that still give MBA graduate degrees to hundreds of thousands of middle managers. 

I won't dispute this fact.  Nor will I argue that more and more college graduates, an army of which many have MBA degrees, are competing harder and harder for less and less jobs, until the day in the not too distant future arrives when there are none.  They will have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in a management class that is anachronistic and a once valued position that is atavistic.  

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The irony here is that few seemed concerned when tens of millions of blue-collar workers were put on bread lines, dependent on social services, had to take jobs a fraction of their former pay, were made homeless, or driven to alcoholism, drug abuse, divorce, or yes, even crime.  They were always considered expendable. 

Corpocracy does not take too kindly to observers such as this writer who report what has been so clearly on the wall.  As the imminence of this trend was becoming increasingly undeniable, universities did not change their curriculums to make them user-friendlier to a computer and Internet connected society, nor did employers, nor did the government. 

Institutional society milks ideas long after the cartoon is empty.  This is because they have a vested interest in the status quo, in perpetuating things as they are.  They are locked into myopia, into infallible authority, and no matter what the calamity are driven to do business as usual.  Our president thinks this is our "Sputnik moment."  Do you?  Do they?

We are in the midst of a flood of changes brought on by the computer and the Internet, and it will not end with these new technologies.  If anything, it will only accelerate.

In the face of this, President Barak Obama reminded Americans in his State of the Union speech that we are ninth in college graduates of advanced technology nations.  Half of our black youth do not finish high school, more than a third of Hispanics fail to do so, and a quarter of whites fail to finish this minimum education benchmark.  Is this our Sputnik moment?  If it is, it hasn’t trickled down to too many.

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Finally, every era has it own content of character, its morality and code of ethics.  This is all dependent on how people think and what they think important. 

The president mentioned Facebook in his eulogy to technology, what I see as an empty moment of disconnection with and through electronic social connection.  Two police officers here in Tampa gave their lives when they attempted to arrest a felon.  They had a passion to serve and protect.  It was reported that half the people at the funeral were texting or tweeting while the minister was giving his sermon of their ultimate sacrifice.

There have been times in human history when duty and honor were considered the most sacred qualities.  This is not such a time with the possible exception of the military and law enforcement.  There has been too much corruption in the Church and incompetence in education and enterprise to extend the honor to these professions.

In the early days of the American Republic, the work ethic was our greatest expression of morality.  This gave way to acquiring property and fulfilling the American dream. 

“Having” became valued above everything else.  A person’s worth was measured by what he had.  This has progressed to what we have today the ends justify the means.  If you take a short cut and get away with it, fine.  Avoid the hard work, the preparation, the diligence and frustration, the necessity for failure on the way to success, and gamble on the future by taking unconscionable risks, or walking over other people who are not as swift.  You think I exaggerate?

Government leaders defend their actions on the basis of their goals.  It led to the economic meltdown of 2008 and the debt crisis of 2011.  CEOs made sweeping business changes that permanently disrupted lives, such as downsizing, plant closings and relocations on the rationale that means justify ends.  Many corporations, banks and Wall Street firms went belly up in 2008 taking risks with reckless abandon.  They were considered too big to fail practicing the morality that ends justify the means. 

Nothing has changed.  These operations are all back to practicing the morality of ends justify the means with the same insourciance.

These words will not change anything.  I know that.  I’ve been writing them for years and get no satisfaction in writing them now.  My innings are growing shorter, and I will have to say with all the wonderful societal and technological improvements, having been born during the Great Depression, it would seem people counted for far more when they had far less, knew less, and were far less comfortable than they do now.

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