The Day People-Centered Technology Died
When Governor George Deukmejian killed California’s Office of Appropriate Technology in 1983 it marked the end of government efforts to make sure new technologies improve our lives. It’s been all about the Benjamins ever since.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about former California Governor Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown, Jr.’s Office of Appropriate Technology (OAT) and what might have been. Brown created the OAT, which was mothballed by his GOP successor, during his first term as California’s governor in the mid 1970's. It was the dawn of the digital age. Al and Heidi Toffler had just published Future Shock, their runaway bestseller that explained how microprocessors and digital technologies were accelerating the pace of change, including in ways that might not always be welcome. Big tech-induced changes were looming.
Another popular book of that era, Small is Beautiful, a collection of essays by the German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher published in 1973, had caught the young governor’s attention (Brown was just 37 years old). Schumacher’s book, subtitled “A Study of Economics as if People Mattered,” broke new ground. It popularized several ideas that are now commonly accepted, including that pollution is both a profit-center for business and an external cost passed on to the rest of us.
As the title of Schumacher’s book implied his central proposition was that bigger is not always better. When it comes to protecting the quality of our lived experience as human beings smaller is often, Schumacher showed, preferable. Massification, he explained, usually serves the interests of those seeking to command and control others and/or to build large fortunes. A less impersonal, more humane and localized scale of activity, divorced from the needs and desires of big profit-making enterprises is, by contrast, according to Schumacher, often a much better way to serve the interests of those pining for the simple pleasures, the routines that make life worthwhile or at least bearable, such as leisure time, or the ability to produce goods and services with local market value, and to retain the fruits of one’s labors. Schumacher called the more socially and individually economically advantageous uses of new tools and methods “intermediate” technologies which he deemed to be “appropriate” for their time and place. In this construction, the development and use of “appropriate” technologies came to be seen as the best way to advance the public good. Basic to all this was the understanding that new technologies would not steer themselves to their most socially beneficial uses and that, instead, government had a role to play in setting the course toward the most “appropriate” uses, which might not always be profit-generating. In short order, a global movement supporting “appropriate” uses of technology emerged.
California Governor Jerry Brown’s state Office of Appropriate Technologies (OAT) was easily the most attention-getting governmental flower of this grassroots uprising. It was the first full-fledged attempt to use the power of state government to influence the path of technology toward more socially-constructive outcomes. How could government use new technologies to improve the delivery of public services, such as health care, transportation, education, communications, and promote economic development that led to prosperity that was more widely shared? How could our government control new technologies to make sure privacy rights were respected? How could the government use new digital technologies to reduce the cost of providing the basic municipal services every community must pay for, such as traffic control, parking, monitoring and reducing pollution, reducing crime, poverty, and hunger? Some other very big questions were also put on the table regarding the state’s potential role in industries that had become oligopolies, including banking, insurance, and energy.
As you might imagine, these conversations caused a considerable degree of consternation among the entrenched special interests whose income streams depended on the engineered shortages and inefficiencies built into those same public service delivery systems. Mostly, it all boiled down to a simple question: should our state government change what it does to better meet the needs of Californians because new technologies were changing what was possible?
I was in high school at the time. I remember attending a few OAT-organized workshops and brain-storming sessions. It was thrilling to see senior state leaders starting to collaborate with others in blueprinting ways the most powerful technologies yet developed could be harnessed to take on the most stubborn public problems. It was a time of big dreams.
To put this in context, it helps to remember the flavor of that era. It was just after the rebellious 1960’s counterculture movement. At the time, many people were alternately euphoric about what digital technologies could contribute to humanity and at the same time absolutely petrified, with good reason it turns out, about the potentially adverse impact computers, digital technologies, and the globalization of markets they enabled might have on jobs and livelihoods.
California’s OAT was a central battleground for the clash of these two competing prospects. For the most part, the GOP stalwarts who objected to OAT saw it as thinly-veiled socialism. They maintained that California’s state government had no place “meddling in the market” for new technologies and should instead butt out and simply consume whatever tech products private firms produced, just like any other customer. Meanwhile, Democrats in the California legislature were typically disorganized and disunited, with some bravely backing Brown’s leadership on OAT and others equally happy to accept campaign contributions from those hoping to undermine and defund the new office, or at least look the other way while it was disparaged and hobbled.
It was in this controversial “appropriate technology” milieu that Governor Brown made an entirely sensible suggestion, that California should consider launching its own satellite to better monitor pollution, wildfires, and potentially, to reduce state telecommunications costs, among other anticipated benefits. A satellite as a public utility. Imagine that. And now imagine the idea used against Governor Brown. Because that’s exactly what happened. In spades.
Brown’s satellite proposal, or rather how that idea was portrayed, was successfully weaponized against him. The credit, if you can call it that, for getting the name-calling, pile-on rolling goes to the late Chicago Tribune Columnist Mike Royko who, in response to the satellite proposal, had famously dubbed Brown “Governor Moonbeam.” (Royko later apologized).
Unfortunately, Royko’s “Moonbeam” label stuck because of endless repetition by Brown’s foes, and also because it came on top of some of the youthful governor’s other less common traits and practices such as refusing to live in the governor’s mansion, dating a rock star, and driving around in a beat-up old car. For months, Brown was mocked relentlessly as “moonbeam” in the corporate news media and on popular T.V. network entertainment programs, including by Johnny Carson, the well-liked host of The Tonight Show on NBC, which had more than 10 million nightly viewers. Brown’s OAT was portrayed as just another example of his nuttiness. In turn, every idea OAT proposed after Brown’s celestial moniker gained currency was reflexively derided as just more zany moonbeam stuff, not to be taken seriously.
Most observers agree the moonbeam label greatly damaged Brown’s reputation and set back his prospects in his subsequent unsuccessful campaigns for the presidency and the U.S. senate. (Remarkably, Brown finally redeemed his electoral legacy in 2011 when the youngest governor in California history became its oldest governor ever). In the end, the sliming Brown endured over his OAT-influenced satellite proposal very nearly destroyed his political career. It also inflicted what turned out to be mortal collateral wounds on California’s Office of Appropriate Technologies.
The End of the Road for California’s OAT
January 3, 1983, marked the beginning of the end of Brown’s brilliantly envisioned OAT. On that day, the colorful, visionary young governor, who had tried so hard to influence the course of technological change toward a more humane and environmentally sustainable direction, was succeeded in office by his direct opposite, a colorless, myopic, taciturn GOP state legislator, George Deukmejian, who was closely aligned with the state’s most powerful business interests. One of Deukmejian first official acts in office was shutting down California’s OAT. All that remains today are some of its old publications. In its place, we now have the milquetoast California state Department of Technology, whose main role is to help tech firms do whatever they want, the public interest be dammed.
The whole thing is a sad and painful echo of the discredited 1950’s notion that “whatever is good for General Motors is good for America.” Post-Governor Jerry Brown’s 1970’s administration, California’s official tech policy morphed into a similarly nonsensical capitulation: that “whatever is good for tech firms is good for California.” The results generated by the application of this misplaced priority over decades contributes to problems that now threaten to overwhelm us. They include massive income inequality, the wildly uneven distribution of power in our society, government operational costs that are far too high for the value delivered, the near complete disenfranchisement of working people, the sidelining of people of color, rampant misogyny in tech firms, the continuing decimation of a viable, independent fact-based news media, and the weakening of our democracy itself. California’s OAT, had it survived, would have pushed us in a different direction.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this mostly forgotten OAT saga because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic is throwing almost everything up for grabs again and perhaps, just perhaps, the present chaos may allow us to revisit the question Governor Jerry Brown’s OAT raised nearly 40 years ago: what is the most constructive role public technology policies can play in bringing us to a destination where, as E.F. Schumacher put it, “people matter.”
We could, for example, establish a national OAT, or at least revive state versions, to champion and support socially constructive applications of technology, including open source, that would allow us to build and continuously improve a repository of publicly-owned applications and source code that government agencies at all levels can freely use to improve the delivery of vital public services at lower costs in place of the big software firms that presently, and often corruptly, control those markets. We could begin to more meaningfully support the development and continuous improvement of Open Educational Resources that provide free access to learning materials in place of the antiquated school textbooks we spend billions of public dollars on each year. We could begin to organize public schools as participants in shared science experiments run by teachers and students that build rather than purchase knowledge. Who knows, we might even decide to launch some satellites we all own and can use. At a minimum, we can reassert the idea that when it comes to the deployment of new technologies our government has a responsibility to all of us, not just those who run our most successful tech firms. It’s not too late to change direction and reconsider the ways public policies can return us to a path that leads to more appropriate uses of technology. It’s never too late.
As another big thinker who first became well-known in the 1970’s, Gil Scott Heron, wrote: “No matter how far you’ve gone, you can always turn around.”
