p33 Peace Rooms

From War Rooms to Peace Rooms

By John Taylor; 2007 Dec 03, 2007, 11 Qawl, 164 BE

Town planning pioneer Patrick Geddes (also a personal friend of Abdu'l-Baha) believed that you should immerse yourself in the problems of a place before beginning to plan; his motto was, "survey before plan." That is what I want to talk about today, surveying before planning, looking before leaping; thinking and consulting before acting.

In a keynote talk for Hamilton's recent Day of the Covenant celebration our speaker recited the following fell words of Baha'u'llah,

"The All-Knowing Physician hath His finger on the pulse of mankind. He perceiveth the disease, and prescribeth, in His unerring wisdom, the remedy. Every age hath its own problem, and every soul its particular aspiration. The remedy the world needeth in its present-day afflictions can never be the same as that which a subsequent age may require. Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in, and center your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements." (Gleanings, 212)

This is a mission statement if ever I saw one. I sets up for us dual responsibilities, first on a personal level to latch on to the remedy prescribed by the divine physician by reading, praying and advancing our career "aspirations;" the second duty is in groups to express "anxious" social concern by "deliberating" on plans addressing the pressing needs and conditions of the day. Certainly in this broader sense this Badi' blog never sways from the covenant, for every day I try to shuffle off life's chaff and center on ways to better our planet. This is my way of "centering my deliberations," even though I work isolated here in my room.

Lately we discussed a new generation of programmable globes that map data directly onto a spherical model of the surface of the earth. Teachers use them to involve the next generation in thinking about the entire earth, not its subsidiary parts, divisions and borders. Yesterday we talked about a simple gadget called the Ambient Orb that acts as a programmable alert. When otherwise invisible data feeds reach critical levels it changes color, calling for human attention when it is most needed. This orb has been used to monitor stock portfolios and alert electricity users when consumption patterns are expensive or wasteful. A few years ago we talked here about other innovations slowly coming over the horizon, such as computer-aided consultation (a technology being pioneered in our local Mohawk College) and the new interactive remote controls, clickers placed in the hands of viewers that allow immediate feedback between teachers and students, speakers and audiences.

All these are baby steps in the right direction.

But the fact remains that the computer revolution has on the whole worsened our Western bias towards individualism. The personal computer pretty much forces workers to sit alone before a screen rather than interact dynamically with others in a group. "Divide and conquer" is the oldest tool of the plotter, the tyrant and the terrorist, and the more isolated we are the weaker we become. Technology does not change that, indeed, as I say, it is making it worse.

In spite of the bright spots, and by that I mean the programmable three-dimensional, non-screen I/O devices just mentioned, I see very little "anxious concern" about the divisive effect of technology, much less "centered deliberations" trying to correct the imbalance. On the whole, world policy makers are not even talking about taking the decisive actions that global warming, nuclear proliferation and a thousand other crying "exigencies" are calling for.

The fact that progress in computers and the Internet happened so fast has deluded us into thinking that we do not need to change the things that make a difference in collective decision making.

If you doubt, just go into any office and look around. It doesn't matter if it is the highest CEO, or if it is in the most high tech office in the world, you see the same thing, a desk and a monitor. Do you see any of the 3d, interactive devices mentioned before? Are meeting rooms wired? Is there a shared, communal space where anybody can look over an array of ambient orbs, clickers and interactive globes? Not a chance. That would allow just anybody to come in and see at a glance how the company is doing. Besides it would risk violating any number of trade secrets and, let us face it, bumbling on the part of higher management.

Okay, that excludes the offices of workers in high technology leaders like Microsoft, Apple and Google, but what about government? Surely in, say, city hall there is no need to keep one's data cards held close to the chest? As far as I know, 3d displays are not available there, or anywhere. The only war room that I know of was set up for staff generals and admirals during the Second World War, and then of course only a few, select personnel were allowed near the three dimensional models of ships, planes and armies. After the war these planning rooms, if they even exist, went under the radar. Decades of cold war instilled habits of secrecy so ingrained that even now that computers and the internet have been around for at least two decades, the idea of a "war room" interactive display is still being considered nowhere.

Of course the public I/O data center that I am talking about should not be called a war room, since it is habits of war that have precluded their construction in the first place. They should rather be called "peace rooms." Until we exclude all the habits and attitudes of war, spying and secrecy completely, these planning places are not going to happen. But I contend that they can and must, if we are to have a hope of responding to global warming and the thousand emergencies that rising sea levels around the world are going to provoke.

I imagine a tour of a peace room on the neighborhood level maybe happening like this. A guide takes our group into a large circular room, perhaps under a dome. In the center is a huge three-dimensional model of the locality; it is surrounded by ambient orbs, supplemented by input devices. As the tour guide walks our group through, an RFID device in her uniform or remote control activates our security level wherever we go and determines the level of detail we see on the displays. As we pass, say, the orb connected to the power consumption data feed, she can touch it and the whole model will be lit up, showing how much power each house is using.