Quote for today, Friday, June 13th!!!!! GAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHH! on this suitably dreary day in mid-june, i'd like to turn to a subject near and dear to mi corazon--the intersection of technology and ideology. flash back to Eisenhower's address right before the inauguration of JFK. "Although waged for many reasons, the Cold War was fundamentally a contest between economic and political systems--capitalist democracy on the one hand versus communistic totalitarianism on the other. The stakes of this contest were perceived to be so high in the United States that a national security system emerged that paradoxically flew in the face of many democratic principles and traditions. Openness and accountability in the conduct of governmental affairs, for example, were compromised in order to meet the communist challenge. Openness of knowledge and free exchange of information--fundamental ideals in science--also gave way under the imperatives of national security. President Dwight D. Eisenhower identified incisively the dangers the Cold War science-technology-military dynamic posed to democratic traditions in the United States. He did so in a nationally televised farewell address to the American people delivered only hours before he, the nation, and the world witnessed the greatest outward symbol of democracy in action--a presidential inauguration and the peaceful transfer of power from one elected government to another. Fighting the Cold War, Eisenhower said, had produced two situations unprecedented in American history: the maintenance of a large military while the United States was not officially at war, and the creation and heavy reliance upon a large, permanent armaments industry. The conjunction of these two developments posed grave threats to American democracy. "The total influence--economic, political, even spiritual--is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal Government," Eisenhower said. "In the councils of government," he cautioned, "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." A "technological revolution during recent decades," Eisenhower believed, had initiated the dynamics of the military-industrial complex. At the center of this revolution lay research, which had "become more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government." The American university, "historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery," noted the former Columbia University president Eisenhower, "has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research." The research revolution on campus had produced a dynamic whereby "a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity." Then President Eisenhower delivered his gravest warning: "The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present--and is gravely to be guarded.... [I]n holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technical elite." " --excerpted from: http://www.cmu.edu/coldwar/NSFbookl.htm