Sex, Bombs and Burgers (39 page)

Porn is also becoming today’s rebellion of choice. While a few decades ago a teenager might have bought a leather jacket or smoked cigarettes to rebel against her parents, today she just might make her very own green-tinged sex video and post it online. You never know—tomorrow’s president may not be asked whether he inhaled marijuana, but whether he wore a condom.

Are these positive developments? Some would argue that the sexualization of culture is a sure sign of decadence and decline. I’m of the belief that sexual liberation and acceptance of different lifestyles are positive steps forward in our evolution.

A Paradox of Plenty
⁷

Of our shameful trinity of desires, technology has produced the most dramatic transformation of opinion in the domain of food.
In the fifties, food was much scarcer than it is today and wasn’t available year-round. As a result, meat sat frozen in the freezer for months while vegetables and other preserves waited on the shelf in jars and cans. People would typically eat just about anything they could get their hands on.

Half a century later, abundance has turned us into a very selective society. Some consider us complainers. While people in starving countries will do just about anything for a steak or a pork chop, many in the West are turning to vegetarianism and veganism. As comedian Chris Rock so bluntly joked, “We got so much food in America we’re allergic to food. Allergic to food! Hungry people ain’t allergic to shit. You think anyone in Rwanda’s got a fucking lactose intolerance?”
⁸
We’re even choosier about what we eat than who we have sex with. As one sociologist puts it, “To compare junk food to junk sex is to realize that they have become virtually interchangeable vices— even if many people who do not put ‘sex’ in the category of vice will readily do so with food.”
⁹

What is often overlooked is that technology provides us with plentiful food that is inexpensive, available year-round, easy to store and fast to prepare and throw away if we don’t want it or use it in time. This has formed the backbone of all the other freedoms we enjoy. The success of the McDonald’s restaurant in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district is proof—at lunchtime, it’s packed with the high-powered financiers and stock brokers who keep the wheels of the global economy spinning (although not so well, of late). Big Macs and Quarter Pounders provide them with the quick calories they need to get on with their busy day. Ironically, food technology has created a luxury of riches that gives us the
choice
of being vegetarians and vegans.

Despite the issue of obesity and the related health problems it can bring on, abundant food, along with improved medicine, has also significantly increased how long we can expect to live. In 2009 the average lifespan of Americans, Canadians, Brits and Australians, the people who eat the most processed foods, was between seventy-eight and eighty-one. That represents an increase of about ten years from the fifties, when mass processing really kicked in. Perhaps all those Big Macs and Twinkies haven’t been so bad for us after all.

We want our food to be healthier, with fewer preservatives and chemicals, but we don’t want to give up the convenience or low costs we’ve come to expect. As such, we’re inspiring even more technology. Food scientists are obliging with new advances like the Natick lab’s pressurized processing. Scientists at the University of Alberta, meanwhile, are experimenting with replacing chemical preservatives with natural ingredients such as mango pits and the fatty acids found in wheat and barley. These natural substances are turning out to be just as good at destroying harmful bacteria as their chemical counterparts. “If you replace chemicals with a natural preservative, without compromising safety, the [food] quality is better,” says one scientist.
¹⁰

Beyond the ever-shifting appetites of people in the developed world flutters the spectre of a growing population and shrinking farmland. Developing nations are also, well, developing—their food systems are catching up to those of the West. The amount of technology that goes into our food is only set to grow.

If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Join ’Em

War, porn and fast food don’t exist in a vacuum. It would be wrong to say these three businesses have driven
all
technological
advances—many other industries have contributed their fair share, and will continue to do so.

Computer and software giants such as Microsoft and Apple have developed scores of innovations, from the Windows operating system to the ubiquitous iPod. Soon we’ll be touching our computers and talking to them rather than typing and mousing. Carmakers have given us steadily better products, from power steering to collision detection, and they’ve created some remarkable robots. In the years ahead, our cars will drive themselves while we surf the internet on a dashboard-mounted, voice-activated computer. Pharmaceutical companies have developed a raft of miracles, with drugs that treat everything from blood pressure to erectile dysfunction. In the future, we’ll have better cold medicines and faster vaccines for potential pandemics. Telecommunications firms have connected us in myriad ways, from the internet to cellphones. Mobile chips inserted in our heads to give us an instant internet connection cannot be too far off. Hollywood studios have given us home video and are now introducing three-dimensional and motion-synced movies. Entertainment is becoming more immersive, and we are edging closer to fulfilling the early promise of virtual reality.

These industries are just as competitive as their military, porn and fast-food counterparts. They also depend on innovation to drive new products, and thereby profit growth. But for the most part, we consider them
clean
industries, inspired by entrepreneurs, ingenuity or generally noble needs. We don’t look down on them the way we do on our shameful trinity. But what’s funny is that none of them are
really
clean. As should be apparent by now, virtually every industry has directly or indirectly benefited from the innovations of war, sex and fast food.

In the end, we’re no closer to creating a society bereft of our shameful trinity of needs than we were a thousand years ago. There’s every reason to believe that the technologies of war, sex and fast food will continue to shape our world. Over the past century, these industries have been primarily Americadriven, but that’s changing as the world becomes increasingly globalized.

Food is already a global industry and will only become more so as more countries develop their markets. Demand for porn is global but there are very few international players like Playboy, largely because the industry is dominated by relatively small, privately run companies. The internet-driven decline in the business has everybody talking about consolidation, so many smaller players may have to merge into fewer bigger companies to remain competitive. As for war, you’d think it would be the one market that would never go truly global because of national security concerns, but it’s already surprisingly open. Historically, NATO and the Warsaw Pact had shared military industries, but today the market is realigning itself from West versus East to nation states versus terrorists. This reshaping may produce some strange bedfellows. Given the interrelatedness of China and the United States, it’s possible the two countries will some day jointly fight terrorists and share military technologies. Chinese companies such as Huawei are building American communications networks—infrastructure once deemed so vital to national security that DARPA was tasked with its development—so we’re already halfway there.

Indeed, the next century of technological development may be led by China. In 2008 the country for the first time became the number-two military spender in the world (France
and Britain were third and fourth, respectively). The country is modernizing its arsenal, which consists largely of fifties-era Soviet weapons, but experts don’t believe this is a sign that China is preparing for war; it’s simply playing catch-up.
¹¹

China is also the biggest market in the world with a ban on pornography. The communist government is iron-fisted in its attempts to stamp out porn, to the point where it seems as though officials are more afraid of sex as a subversive force than religion or ethnicity. There’s no reason to believe, however, that Chinese demand for porn is any less than it is everywhere else in the world, so its gradual creep into the country seems inevitable— and China will some day have its own sexual revolution. Perhaps the government is afraid that when the people have sexual liberty, they will demand political freedom as well.

As for food, the country is only now experiencing the kind of processing advances the United States had in the fifties. Not surprisingly, fast food is booming. Overall, China has seen double-digit growth in its food industry year on year for nearly two decades.
¹²
With more than a billion people to feed, there is no end to that growth in sight. It’s also reasonable to expect that during this massive transformation, Chinese scientists will put the same effort into developing new food technologies as their American counterparts have. Fifty years from now we may all be eating artificial chow mein created in
Star Trek
–like replicator machines.

China is only the biggest and most obvious example of what we can expect from developing countries. Much of the rest of the world is also modernizing and pursuing new technologies. And these new technologies won’t just change the stuff we have, they’ll also alter how this stuff affects us, how we see the
world and how we relate to each other. Technology isn’t about nifty new gadgets, it’s about bettering our lives. For the most part, despite what Luddites and anti-technologists may think, our lives
have
gotten better. Technology has brought us out of the dark ages by fulfilling our needs and desires. We can power our homes, feed our families, travel anywhere we want, learn about anything, answer questions, communicate with each other and acquire pretty much any object or experience we want, pretty much instantaneously. That sounds like progress to me.

Ultimately, our shameful trinity of needs is universal—and never-ending. Whether you live in the United States or China or anywhere in between, war, porn and fast food aren’t going away, and neither are the new technologies they will bring us. As a result, sex, bombs and burgers will continue to shape our world and the lives we live upon it.

NOTES

Introduction: A Shameful Trinity

¹
Huxley, Aldous,
Ends and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the
Methods Employed for Their Realisation,
London, Chatto & Windus, 1937,p. 268. Copyright © 1938 by Aldous Huxley. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for the Estate of Aldous Huxley.

²
Author’s interview with Colonel James Braden, April 2008.

³
Author’s interview with Joe Dyer, April 2009.

⁴
Author’s interview with Vint Cerf, March 2009.

⁵
Singer, P.W.,
Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-first Century
, New York, Penguin Press, 2009, p. 140.

⁶
Author’s interview with George Caporaso, Feb. 2009.

⁷
Reuters, “Global arms spending hits record in ‘08—think tank,” June 8, 2009,
www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/
id USL8101212020090608.

⁸
The Associated Press
,
“Global arms spending rises despite economic woes,” June 9, 2009,
www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/ global-arms-spending-rises-despite-economic-woes-1700283.html.

⁹
Wired
, “Pentagon’s Black Budget Grows to More Than $50 Billion,” May 7, 2009,
www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/05/pentagons-black-budget-grows-to-more-than-50-billion.

¹⁰
Singer,
Wired for War
, p. 140.

¹¹
Ibid., p. 247.

¹²
Ibid., p. 239.

¹³
Author’s interview with John Hanke, Feb. 2009.

¹⁴
Author’s interview with Ed Zywicz, Feb. 2009.

¹⁵
Salon.com, “The Great Depression: The Sequel,” April 2, 2008,
www. salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/04/02/depression.

¹⁶
CBS News, “The Cost of War: $136 Billion in 2009,” Jan. 7, 2009,
www. cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/07/terror/main4704018.shtml.

¹⁷
Author’s interview with Brad Casemore, March 2009.

¹⁸
Author’s interview with Michael Klein, Jan. 2009.

¹⁹
Author’s interview with Evan Seinfeld and Tera Patrick, March 2009.

²⁰
Author’s interview with Stoya, March 2009.

²¹
Author’s interview with Scott Coffman, March 2009.

²²
Author’s interview with Ali Joone, Jan. 2009.

²³
Author’s interview with Paul Benoit, March 2009.

²⁴
Statistics come from three places:
Los Angeles Business Journal
, “Family guy: Steve Hirsch followed in his dad’s footsteps by launching his own adult film company, now the leader in a very mainstream business,” Nov. 12, 2007,
www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-33572982_ITM;
Computerworld
, “Porn industry may decide battle between Blu-ray, HD-DVD,” May 2, 2006,
www.computerworld.com/ s/article/print/111087/Porn_industry_may_decide_battle_between_ Blu_ray_HD_DVD_;
Top Ten Reviews, “Internet Pornography Statistics,” http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/internet-pornography-statistics.html#corporate_profiles.

²⁵
Author’s interview with Jonathan Coopersmith, March 2009.

²⁶
Statistics come from a comprehensive study of the 2006 pornography market performed by the Top Ten Reviews website at http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/internet-pornography-statistics.html.