PROFESSOR: What struck me immediately on September 11th
was the fact that--
at least as far as we know, there
were no bombs involved in these attacks,
and the energy that caused all this destruction was
the energy, as John pointed out that's concentrated and held
in the very systems that we rely on.
And the terrorists did an unfortunately successful job
of turning those systems in on themselves-- turning
our systems in on themselves.
And that's a striking fact in that
it points to the sense, which has always
been the case, that our own technologies are
both potential saviors and potential tombs
and potential weapons.
It's also quite striking the degree of engineering talent
that went into this attack.
At least several of the attackers
themselves were engineers.
I was struck to learn that Bin Laden himself was trained
as a civil engineer and that his family comes out
of the construction business.
So it's natural, in a sense, that he thinks about buildings
when he would think about attacks,
and that's been proven in the embassy attacks in Africa
as well.
I think that's an important fact for people at MIT
to contemplate.
In no way indicts the entire engineering profession, but one
of the reasons this attack is so disturbing
is that we at a place like MIT are not
comfortable with the idea of cool calculation being turned
toward these murderous ends.
It's a similar issue that was raised during the Holocaust,
it's a similar issue that was raised during the Vietnam War
with the overuse of systems analysis in that context.
That very fact, in a sense, puts a paradox into the way
that we think about technology.
MIT, by its own definition in a way,
is a place that seeks to improve science and technology
for the betterment of humankind.
In general, disasters like this blow a hole
in our technological world.
In this case, literally.
The systems that we rely on every day,
not just airliners and buildings,
are revealed in ways that we don't see them ordinarily.
And I can think of many of them, I'll
list a few here, that are ordinarily just
under our public radar screen.
Of course, there are people on campus
who think about these systems all the time.
So as we mentioned, air traffic, aircraft themselves,
the air traffic control system, communication systems,
cryptography.
The security systems around the airport.
General information, systems use of the internet,
world wide web for planning.
The emergency response system in New York City and in Washington
in response to the Pentagon attack.
Of course, cell phones.
Remarkable closing of the loop on the cell phones
aboard one of the airliners, and there's a distinct possibility
that the presence of either cell phones or seat back phones
actually thwarted that effort.
And strikingly, the language that's
used on virtually all sides of the current discourse
has to do with systems and networks.
I would remind you that the very language that people
use to talk about the terrorists and Al Qaeda organizations
is as networks with cells, connections, nodes,
investigation systems, law enforcement systems,
again, using the various information and other types
of systems.
Security systems to track the hijackers.
Some of these things we praise, obviously.
Others of them are not as comforting for us,
but truly, the way that this event opens up
what Manuel Castells' called "The network society" is very
revealing, and one of the unpleasant facts about it
is that we are so dependent on these technological systems,
and yet, by their very nature, they're flexible and open.
This is one of the reasons they're so successful.
You can hop on an aircraft with an hour's worth of time
and be across the coast.
Ditto for other types of systems,
and yet, their very flexibility and openness
is partly what makes them vulnerable.
And in some sense, one of the prices
we will always live with for our flexible, open,
large-scale systems, which we use
every day is the fact that these shadow or parasite systems,
terrorist systems, drug dealing systems
other types of nefarious systems will live on their underbelly,
and in some way, we have to come to terms with that.
Of course, the flexibility in this case
was a great advantage.
I think the flexibility of the systems--
the urban system in New York City-- is truly astonishing.
Financial networks, electric power networks.
One day, I would love to do just a study of the way they rewired
the entire Southern Manhattan electric grid in order to get
the stock market up to speed.
But these are the same kinds of concerns that make the Al Qaeda
network difficult to target and difficult to remove,
although there are some interesting ideas in the press
being thrown around about how you deal
with those kinds of networks.
One more idea to close with is also the issue
of symbolism in this story.
What's striking about-- as someone who thinks about
symbolic technologies and the symbolic power of technology is
the way that these two technologies at least,
if not others, that we think of as symbolic of American
or general technological life that would be the aircraft,
which is--
for Americans, has often been a symbol of freedom,
a symbol of speed, a symbol of release from worldly concerns
was, again, turned in on itself.
Also, aircraft being one of America's most proud
industrial products, Boeing aircraft.
And ditto the World Trade Centers, of course,
standing for capitalism, American capitalism,
even global financial networks, and part of the reason
that these attacks are so devastating
to the American culture is because
of that symbolic dimension.
And yet, at the same time, there is no sense
that this is a purely symbolic attack.
These were very real technologies, real machines,
real people died.
Real families lost family members,
and it points to the fact that what we consider symbolic
and what we consider technological are increasingly
difficult to disentangle, and that there always
is a material element to what we choose to present as symbolic
of our culture and that material element has two sides to it.