Sex, Bombs and Burgers Read online

  SEX,

  BOMBS

  AND

  BURGERS

  SEX,

  BOMBS

  AND

  BURGERS

  How War, Porn

  and Fast Food

  Created Technology

  As We Know It

  Peter Nowak

  VIKING CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published 2010

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

  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

  * * *

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see

  www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 2477 or 2474

  For Ian, Greg,

  Richard and Charlie

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: A Shameful Trinity

  1 Weapons of Mass Consumption

  2 Better Eating Through Chemistry

  3 Arming the Amateurs

  4 A Game of War

  5 Food from the Heavens

  6 The Naked Eye Goes Electronic

  7 The Internet: Military Made, Porn Perfected

  8 Seeds of Conflict

  9 Fully Functional Robots

  10 Operation Desert Lab

  Conclusion: The Benevolence of Vice

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Credits

  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.

  Millions of years later, little has changed. People still fight for food and sex, and we still use food (and other gifts) to try to get sex. These hard-wired, intersecting instincts have, over time, become our obsessions. Open any newspaper or watch any television broadcast and you’ll see the proof. Endless broadcast hours and column inches are given over to the latest updates on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the ongoing obesity epidemic or the latest diet craze, and the sex lives of celebrities or politicians caught in prostitution scandals. War, food and sex are everywhere because we demand them.

  We feel compelled to fight each other, to compete and amass more than our neighbours have, whether through physical combat, political battle, verbal sparring or even just sports. War is an integral part of the human experience. Lust, meanwhile, leads people to do stupid, stupid things, from risking unwanted pregnancy and diseases by having unprotected sex to courting identity theft by giving their credit card numbers to shady websites or provoking the loss of their families and relationships by conducting poorly concealed affairs. Mythology is rife with conflicts fought over sexual jealousy, such as the Trojan War, which started when the King of Troy’s son stole the King of Sparta’s daughter, while even Adam disobeyed God by eating the forbidden fruit in hopes that Eve would get it on. The need for food is just as basic. Wars still start over the land that produces food, while in the most extreme cases, a lack of food even drives man to eat fellow man.

  Huge industries have developed around each need; war, sex and food are not only humanity’s oldest businesses, they are some of the biggest as well. But the question does arise: with three such basic instincts, why the need to tinker? If our needs are so elemental, why does meeting them require such ongoing innovation? The reasons, it turns out, are many.

  The Whys Have It

  As Thomas Friedman explains in The World Is Flat, the iron law of American politics is that the party that harnesses the latest technology dominates. FDR did it with his fireside radio chats, JFK did it with his televised debates against Nixon and the Republicans did it with talk radio. More recently, Barack Obama did it through his use of social media such as YouTube and Twitter, leaving his opponent John McCain—who admitted he didn’t even know how to use his computer—looking like an out-of-touch Luddite.

  The American government believes that this rule of politics, a diplomatic form of war, extends to the actual battlefield, which is why its military is both a big creator of technology and a longtime early adopter. Most obviously, superior technology gives an army an advantage over its enemies, at least temporarily and especially psychologically. Once the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, there was no question the Second World War was over. Similarly, the Gulf War was quick and decisive—it lasted only two months—because coalition technology such as smart bombs, GPS and night vision allowed for a devastating aerial bombardment. By the time the ground war started, Iraqi troops were ready to give up. Today, insurgents in Iraq are more determined and aren’t as intimidated by technology—still,imagine how scary it must be to see robots firing at you. That’s the sort of edge the U.S. military is always looking for, says Colonel James Braden, who fought in Desert Storm and is now a project manager for the marines. “I don’t ever want to be in a fair fight,” he says.2

  As military officials are quick to point out, technology also saves lives. Whether it takes the form of body armour, night vision or robot scouts, that’s worth any price. “America, Canada, the U.K., Australia and others are countries willing to make a substantial investment in the safety of their sons and daughters, and thankfully so,” says Joe Dyer, a retired navy vice-admiral and executive with robot maker iRobot. “The value we place on any life is the engine that drives that. Two things—a reduction in the number of people that we put in harm’s way and an improvement in the survivability for those that go into battle—those are the central pillars of American technology.”3

  In recent years, technology has focused on making fighting not only safer, but more comfortable. Pilots are now flying robot drones in Iraq from air bases in Nevada, then going home to pick up their kids from soccer practice. Front-line troops, meanwhile, get to spend their downtime with Xbox video games. There’s no more playing the harmonica or writing long letters to Betty Sue back home. Now they’ve got email and the internet.

  Besides saving troops’ lives and making them more comfortable, technology can limit the damage inflicted on the enemy, particularly on civilians. This is important in weakening the pervasive circle of hate, where the ruined lives of one war become the revenge-bent soldiers of the next. “There’s an efficiency in attack, but there’s also a minimization of damaged infrastructure and collateral damage and lives lost in military forces and civilians,” says Dyer. Today’s enemies, he adds, may become tomorrow’s allies.

  In the United States, investment in military technology has also become a pillar of scientific research. The military and its various labs, especially the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, do much of the long-term work that is too expensive or far-out for industry. The internet is one example; created by DARPA during the Cold War, the communications network took a full twenty years to get up and running. Vint Cerf, the computer scientist who made the network’s first connections, says civilian companies don’t have the patience for such projects: “If I had to cite one aspect of DARPA’s style, it was its ability
to sustain research for long periods of time.”4 As we’ll see, since its inception in the late fifties, DARPA has generated one important technology after another, including cellphones, computer graphics, weather satellites, fuel cells, lasers, the rockets that took man to the moon, robots and, soon, universal translation, thought-controlled prosthetics and invisibility. None of these were developed in one fiscal quarter. War historians and social scientists say DARPA has “shaped the world we live in more than any other government agency, business or organization.”5

  National labs staffed with rank-and-file scientists are also key. For these institutions, performing research for the military is a win-win-win situation: they get funding to do basic scientific work and the military gets the results, which are ultimately passed on to the civilian world. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, west of San Francisco, is a good example. The lab was opened in 1952 with a mandate to conduct defencerelated research. Livermore is responsible for looking after the U.S. nuclear arsenal, so much of its research has concentrated on that area. You’d think such a lab would operate under the strictest of security—and it does, but the scientists there are only too happy to talk about how their weapons work has spun off into everyday life. Those spinoffs have been numerous: three-dimensional collision-modelling software, originally devised to predict the impact of bombs, now used by carmakers to simulate crashes and by beer companies to test new cans; genetic research that kicked off the Human Genome Project; laser-hardening systems that are now helping planes fly farther; and the latest, a proton accelerator beam that promises to revolutionize cancer therapy. George Caporaso, a scientist who has worked on beam research at Livermore for more than thirty years, says there’s no way such breakthroughs could have happened in the civilian world. “When I came here I saw the scale of things that were being done, things private industry wouldn’t dare take a risk to explore, only the labs could do that,” he says. “Really high-risk, high-reward things ... very important problems for national defence and security ... things that in many cases no one else can do.”6