Read Sex, Bombs and Burgers Online
Authors: Peter Nowak
Sex, Bombs and Burgers
SEX,
BOMBS
AND
BURGERS
SEX,
BOMBS
AND
BURGERS
How War, Porn
and Fast Food
Created Technology
As We Know It
VIKING CANADA
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First published 2010
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Copyright © Peter Nowak, 2010
Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists
94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6
Author’s Note: The author’s views and opinions are not necessarily shared by the interview subjects or their organizations and companies.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Nowak, Peter
Sex, bombs and burgers : how war, porn and fast food shaped technology as we know it / Peter Nowak.
ISBN 978-0-670-06966-8
1. Technological innovations—Social aspects. 2. Technology—
Social aspects. 3. Technology—History. I. Title.
T15.N69 2010 306.4’6 C2009-906563-0
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For Ian, Greg,
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CONTENTS
Introduction: A Shameful Trinity
2 Better Eating Through Chemistry
6 The Naked Eye Goes Electronic
7 The Internet: Military Made, Porn Perfected
Conclusion: The Benevolence of Vice
SEX,
BOMBS
AND
BURGERS
INTRODUCTION
A Shameful Trinity
We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early
successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become
apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the
means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.
1
—ALDOUS HUXLEY
The
inspiration for this book came from the unlikeliest of sources: Paris Hilton. I wish it was some deeper or more sophisticated source, like the many scientific journals I’ve read, a PBS documentary I’d seen or even
Wired
magazine, but nope. My muse, I’m ashamed to admit, was a hotel heiress with no discernible talents.
It was 2004, at the very beginning of the young blonde’s meteoric rise to celebrity. The internet was aflutter with a video of Hilton, then twenty-three, having sex with her boyfriend, fellow socialite Rick Salomon. There was, as is usually the case with celebrity sex tapes, a debate over whether the video had been purposely leaked to raise Hilton’s public profile. Regardless, it certainly succeeded in getting attention. The video intrigued me, not because of the sex or the celebrity-to-be, but because a good portion of it was green. The naked flesh on display was not a rosy pink, but rather monochromatic hues of emerald. This was, I realized, because the video had been shot in the dark using the camera’s night-vision mode. While most viewers marvelled at Paris’s, er, skills, I was interested in the technology being used behind the scenes. Welcome to the life of a nerd.
As a technology journalist, I’m used to wondering what’s under the hood, so to speak, and thinking about such cultural events in ways the non-technically minded, thankfully, never consider. When CNN trotted out the world’s first televised “holograms” during the 2008 American presidential election and compared them to R2-D2’s projection of Princess Leia in the first
Star Wars
movie, alarm bells rang and led me to discover that they were in fact “tomograms”—three-dimensional images beamed onto the viewer’s screen and not into the thin air of CNN’s studio. Similarly, most people enjoy Lego toys for their simplicity. Me? I couldn’t help but wonder how designers decided on the optimum number, shape and variety of pieces in each set. So I called them to find out. It turns out that there are a lucky group of Lego employees who test-build sets, using threedimensional modelling software to create new pieces as they are needed. The software also prices the sets based on the number of parts, so designers can add or subtract pieces to get the kit to their target cost.
Such are my nerdy preoccupations; these are the stories I write in my daily life as a journalist.
I knew I had seen Paris Hilton’s night-vision technology before. The notion nagged at me for days before it finally hit: the first Gulf War, also known as Operation Desert Storm. More than a decade earlier, a coalition of countries led by the United States had gone to war to liberate Kuwait from a brash takeover by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I was too young for the televised reports of the Vietnam War so Desert Storm was the first big military action I had seen, played out on CNN as it was. The images that defined the war for me were the nighttime bombing raids—the barrage of anti-aircraft fire arcing upward, followed by huge explosions
on the ground. Like the sex video, the most memorable images of Iraq’s defeat were, for me, bathed in green.
It got me wondering what other consumer technologies are derived from the military. The more I delved into it, the more I found that just about everything is. From plastic bags and hairspray to vitamins and Google Earth, military money has funded the development of most of the modern items we use today. I also found many other links between war and the technology used in pornography, which is basically what Paris’s video was. The porn industry has been quick to adopt every communications medium developed by the military, from smaller film cameras to magnetic recording (which led to VCRs) to lasers (which led to DVDs) to the internet. Porn companies jumped on these technologies well before other commercial industries, thereby providing the money needed to develop them further.
The technological savvy of these two industries should come as no surprise. Lust and the need to fight or compete are two of the most primitive and powerful human instincts. They are our basest needs, a duo of forces that drive many of our key actions. Despite centuries of trying to deny, avoid, cure or otherwise suppress these forces, we have so far failed to find any course of action other than satiating them. As a result, catering to these needs has become big business. And big business needs technology to stay current and competitive.
Of course, there is another powerful urge that drives us: the rumbling in our bellies. At about the same time as Paris was getting famous, I was just starting to read the labels on grocery store shelves. Like anyone entering that phase of life where the metabolism starts to slow down—the tardy thirties, as I like to think of them—I was actually starting to care about what
I ate and therefore becoming concerned about the amount of glucose, fructose, phosphoric acid, sodium hydrogen carbonate and other assorted chemicals I was putting into my body. If you’ve ever read those labels and come across ingredients you can’t pronounce, you’ve probably realized—as I did—just how much technology goes into our food.
As eye-opening as this was, though, it really shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Our need for food is the most elemental instinct of them all, trumping all others, because without food we simply can’t survive. It’s understandable then that throughout history, we’ve used every resource at our disposal to ensure we have enough food on hand. Food has always been linked to power, and thereby to conflict. Historically, he who has had the most food has typically had the most power. And the best way to create lots of food is through technology. Ultimately, the more technology you have, the more food you have and the more powerful you are. This doesn’t just apply at a macro level, either—in any society, a wealthy individual is a well-fed individual.
Our war-, sex- and food-related instincts go well beyond technology—they influenced human evolution itself. A recently unearthed hominid skeleton—4.4 million years old, the oldest discovered thus far—has presented evidence that war, sex and food were the three factors that led to humans getting up off all fours to become bipedal. Researchers at Kent State University in Ohio believe that early human males competed for female attentions by fighting it out. As with most apes, the ones who ended up with a mate were always the strongest and fiercest. Lesser males, however, also succeeded in getting female attention, but they used a different tactic—they brought them
gifts. At the dawn of humanity, there was of course only one gift that mattered: food. Researchers have postulated that these lesser males had to learn how to walk on two feet in order to free up their hands so that they could carry this food to the females.