Dystopian visions: Disappearing Act

Is computer programming etc enough?

This time I’ve set a couple of questions for you at the end of the article, so pay attention now!

This short story was first published in 1953, and is part of the collection in Virtual Unrealities.

Click here to see this book on Amazon (affiliate link)

The situation in this story is that there is a war going on, and everything — literally everything — is geared to the war effort. It’s very much tongue-in-cheek, but what struck me on reading it is passages like this one:

We must dig in against the hordes of barbarism”, General Carpenter [the person in charge of the war effort] said. “give me a thousand engineers.”
One thousand engineers were forthcoming...
”Give me five hundred sanitation experts, three hundred traffic managers, ... one thousand communication chiefs...”
...
The list of General Carter’s demand for technical experts was endless. America did not know how to supply them.
”We must become a nation of experts”, General Carter informed the National Association of American Universities. “Every man and woman must be a specific tool for a specific job, hardened and sharpened by your training and education to win the fight for the American Dream.

This reminded me of the insistence for at least the past fifteen years, in England at any rate, on the importance of churning out experts in computer programming. I’ve never been wholly convinced of this view, believing that more people stand to benefit from being digitally literate than being able to write code or think like a systems analyst. I further believe that most companies would benefit more from a digitally literate workforce than a workforce of computer programmers. Indeed, I am especially convinced of this since I discovered that ChatGPT can do in under five minutes what it used to take me a few hours.

I especially worry about the displacement of subjects like art, drama, music, history and geography, all of which are vitally important but which seem to be treated as the poor cousins in the curriculum. Yes, STEAM *Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Maths) is better than STEM, but it’s not enough.

Back in 2012 I visited a company specialising in 3D and augmented reality. In my report of the visit I wrote:

Augmented Reality glasses are being developed, for use in head-mounted displays to put the wearer in an immersive environment. Obvious applications include games, defence and warfare, but there are potential medical applications too, such as in helping the rehabilitation of stroke victims.

If any of your students show an interest in this line of work, then maths and physics are key skills, but not the only ones. For instance, one person we spoke to is a human interaction specialists, which sounds like a training in psychology would not go amiss. Programming skills are an obvious recommendation, but as Augmented Reality, 3D and haptics all have application in, and can “join up”, several disciplines, no doubt a whole range of skills and qualifications can be useful in this fledgling industry.

Indeed, I remember making a mental note of the fact that the computer programmers in the company were very much in the minority, being outnumbered by graphic artists, psychologists and assorted others.

So, back to Disappearing Act — and here I should repeat my warning of spoiler alert. Soldiers suffering from what today we would recognise as PTSD start to disappear from their locked and guarded hospital ward. When they reappear, and are questioned about where they’d been, they relate meetings with historical figures. As well as that being impossible, their accounts are even more impossible, involving meetings with several people at the same time, none of whom actually lived at the same time.

The conclusion drawn was that the soldiers had somehow travelled to a time and place that existed only in their imagination, not one that had ever existed in fact. The next conclusion drawn was that the only kind of people who might be able to understand what was going on would be poets, because poets already half live in their own imaginations. The story ends like this:

Carpenter snapped up his intercom. “Send me a poet,” he said.
He waited and waited... and waited... while America sorted feverishly through its two hundred and ninety millions of hardened and sharpened experts, its specialized tools to defend the American Dream of beauty and poetry and the Better Things in Life.

Taken literally, the story is bonkers of course. But I do believe that as an allegory it is incisive, and very prescient. We treat subjects like art and music as if they have little bearing on the cutting edge of technological innovation and economic prosperity. But, even aside from their intrinsic value, learning music can help you learn maths, and learning about art and literature can help you develop a different, and probably more holistic perspective, on problems which would benefit from a technological solution.

As for economic prosperity, I wrote in an article called Big News Which Isn't News: Writers' Earnings Are Down (June 2019)¹:

The All Party Parliamentary Report [on writers’ earnings] makes a few excellent recommendations, [including]:
Government: stop providing perverse incentives to schools and students to reject the idea of offering/taking creative subjects, or universities from offering degrees in them. According to the APPG, the creative industries are now valued at over £100 billion. As for ‘poor returns’ on investing in a creative arts degree, it can take years for someone to build up a profile and a career for themselves.

Also, stop the closure of libraries. We need readers, some of whom will go on to be writers. Let’s face it, as I think I made clear in an article called The New DfE² Education Technology Strategy: A Textual Analysis, the people who write government documents in the Department for Education (assuming it is people who write them, as opposed to a bot), are not very good at it.

I definitely think that, if you look beyond the impossible situation and the humour, nearly seventy years ago Alfred Bester was on to something.

The lit crit bit

The first thing to note about the story is its irony. They are fighting for the American Dream, for poetry and the finer things in life. Just before the speech about the hordes of barbarism, America has dropped 10,000 H bombs on its enemy, who have in turn reciprocated. American cities have been reduced to rubble, and are being rebuilt underground — hence the need for sanitation experts and so on.

Secondly, the way the story has been written is quite humorous. General Carpenter picks up the phone and asks for thousands of experts in a particular discipline, and these are immediately delivered. Apart from the impossibility of conjuring up all these people in no time at all, note the language: they are “delivered”. It’s exactly the same language as is used by the Department for Education, who regularly promise to deliver new resources and even new teachers. For example, the Education Secretary in Britain has said:

From day one, we are delivering the change this country demands and putting education back at the forefront of national life. We will work urgently to recruit thousands of brilliant new teachers and reset the relationship between government and the education workforce.

Who knew that the postal service could be so efficient? Or are they going to use Amazon?

Thirdly, there’s the irony that the one thing that can’t be “delivered” is poets, yet poetry is what they are supposed to be fighting for.

And there’s also, of course, the clever (and mocking) repetition of the phrase “hardened and sharpened experts”.

What’s also noteworthy is that this was published in 1953, a time when satirising the American Dream or the brinkmanship of the Cold War was likely to get you accused of being anti-American. I don’t know if McCarthy³ read science fiction. Probably not, as I’m not aware of Bester’s coming to the attention of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

This story is a fine example of why good science fiction can really shine a light on societal issues, in perhaps a safe (for the writer) way. That’s because the story can be set in a different time or on a different planet or in an alternative present. Sometimes, the underlying premise of the story can be so intriguing that it doesn’t even matter that much if the story is not especially well-written from a literary point of view. I have to say that I don’t think that’s the case here. I think Alfred Bester was a great storyteller, and I hope the extracts I’ve cited convince you of the same.

Discussion points

1. Is there too much emphasis (by governments mainly) on Maths and Computing at the expense of the creative arts subjects?

2. If so, does it matter?

1. This refers to the UK, but apart from the figures cited would apply to the USA as well.

2. Department for Education.

3. You may be interested in my review of a satire on Mcarthyism called The Investigator. It’s in the form of a radio play, and is still available online.