The trouble is that Nazis are human beings, and they have many benign thoughts along with their antisemitism. So I might

My first read didn’t get me anywhere because the book was written in design-ese. At the time I spoke fluent engineer-ese, which made it easier for me to read equations, principles, and anything involving computation. But the book stayed with me throughout the years, and eventually by the fourth read I found myself chuckling at Banham’s droll yet witty prose. I guess that was proof that by then I’d become fluent in design-ese too. And yet the title’s reference to “the first machine age” signaled to me that the ability to speak engineer-ese was still highly relevant.

Mencken had a point. Professors (I am one of them) are mainly selected from the category of people who got good grades in school. Let us hope that our grades are a mark of our intelligence, our excellent work, maybe even — if schools are sound institutions — our expertise in our fields of study. Our grades might also indicate other, darker talents and inclinations. Maybe we received high marks because we have the gift of pleasing our teachers. Maybe we are the kind of people who want to please our teachers. Maybe we love thinking and speaking agreeably.

The kind of machines that Banham refers to are mechanical, steam-powered ones that disrupted how civilization works. The steam engine of the 1700s was the technological catalyst for “the first industrial revolution” because it radically altered what a business could accomplish. Before the steam-powered locomotive, the only alternative to long-distance transportation was horses. Horses need to take regular rests, eat, and sleep. Machines don’t need to take breaks, you can pour fuel into them while they’re running, and they can operate continuously.

How does self-censorship degrade academic honesty? The classic account is Glenn Loury’s 1994 essay “Self-Censorship in Public Discourse.” In Loury’s model, you know what I say but you don’t know what I think. I say that I’m not a Nazi, but Nazis rarely own up to being Nazis, so you might still wonder if I am thinking Nazi thoughts.

I’ll be posting weekly as part of the Medium team’s special invitation for me to share what I’ve learned over the years about how to speak both machine and human. If the topic of How To Speak Machine interests you, there’s a book for that. Thank you for tuning in! — JM

I’ll be posting weekly as part of the Medium team’s special invitation for me to share what I’ve learned over the years about how to speak both machine and human. If the topic of How To Speak Machine interests you, there’s a book for that. Thank you for tuning in! — JM

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ecent history that insurance companies are explicitly too big to fail,” says Whitehouse. “Everyone who works for an insurance company will be fine. What we’ve effectively decided then as a political system, as a society, is that hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies are better than six or seven. We’ve decided that it’s okay that there’s an ever-growing population of the country that in an ever-expanding set of circumstances just gets no downside risk protection, even if they paid for it.”

What is it like, today, to study at a small liberal arts college in the U.S.? Are these schools the “rolling mills” of conformity that Mencken wrote about? Part of an answer is suggested by a Gallup poll conducted in 2018 at Pomona College (where I teach): 88 percent of students agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that “the climate on my campus prevents students/faculty from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.” Sixty-three percent of faculty agreed or strongly agreed with the same statement. At a faculty forum where Gallup representatives presented the results of the poll, one result stood out: 70 percent of faculty said they had changed their approach to teaching in order to avoid offending students.

The strongest case against academic freedom is that professors are not a freedom-loving people. H. L. Mencken made this argument a century ago. Professors show by their choices that they do not love thinking and speaking freely. They have gone into the business of education, a civilizing business where they manufacture “citizens who are as nearly like all other citizens as possible.”

In 1999, David Bowie accurately called out this fourth industrial revolution as our being “on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.” Each industrial revolution has moved the center of gravity into dimensions that are increasingly intangible and difficult to comprehend. During Banham’s era, it was possible to see the mechanical results of technology with one’s eyes and touched it with one’s hands. A steam engine hissed. An electric generator quietly hummed. A personal computer silently blinks its LED. The cloud projects no tangible trace of its existence, but it responds to those who speak machine during this second machine age. Knowing the language of the first machine age won’t get you far these days. It’s a beautiful history to know, but be prepared to receive a yellow discount sticker if you don’t keep up.

Maybe, like Mencken, they think that schools in the U.S. are mere finishing schools rather than research institutions. Self-censorship, whether motivated by fear or agreeableness, polishes students and professors until they are “as smooth as possible, and rub one another as little as possible.”

Unfortunately, this is a misinterpretation of the poll question. Respondents did not say that their virtue or their good manners prevented them from saying what they believed. They were agreeing with a statement about the prohibitive influence of the campus climate. (I am astonished that anyone could misinterpret the question. However, since the people who propose this misreading are the same professors and students who were polled in the first place, I must admit the possibility that a perhaps considerable number of them made the same reading mistake when they answered the questions — which would mean they thought they were being polled about their social graces.)

Banham’s book ends when it’s just starting to get even more interesting. Because the “third industrial revolution” of the personal computer took off only a decade after Banham’s declaration of the first machine age. My favorite way to describe this big shift is the famous Steve Jobs quote to describe the personal computer as “a bicycle for the mind.” In other words, computing machines had transcended just supercharging physical power and instead had enabled humanity to refigure their cognition powers with a new level of efficiency. And just a few decades later, the so-called “fourth industrial revolution” began to emerge with billions of people all connected through computing machinery running at an ethereal scale we commonly refer to as “the cloud.”

Some claim that this is an encouraging result. The wish to avoid giving offense, they say, is not a sign of self-censorship; it is common politeness. Perhaps the faculty and students here are decent people who care about others, enter into the feelings of others, and avoid saying hurtful things.

And then electricity came onto the scene as a viable technology during the late 1800s. All of the sudden, there was no need for a bulky steam engine to sit on-site and take up space. Instead, the electricity could be transmitted at a distance to power on-site electric motors, with the added perk of bringing the high-tech invention of incandescent light. This changeover from steam to electrical power marks “the second industrial revolution”, during a period when British manufacturers were dominant and had mastered using steam power. The resulting complacency and resistance to change — just as manufacturing in the U.S. was kicking off — resulted in the British getting disrupted by the upstart Americans who used electricity to power their factories. You can read a lot of this subtext in Banham’s book. Design’s centrality switched from being European-centric to US-centric, primarily due to this technology shift.