Technology then and now

Reagan was in the White House, Gorbachov in the Kremlin. Tetris had yet to be invented. Steve Wozniak was just about to leave Apple Computers.  A leading-edge personal computer might have 5 megabyte of hard disk storage and twin floppy drives.

It was 1985.  I'd recently quit my job to work full time for an outfit I'd read about in a book, called Greenpeace. It was the beginning of a zigging and zagging path which would involve many  roles -- I had the privelege to be a volunteer, a fundraiser, campaigner, administrator, press officer, hot-air balloon pilot, speech writer, information technology specialist, deck hand, and web editor.  In the course of that journey, I witnessed an organisation grow from a church-basement charity run by a handful of hippies (and that is NOT a derogatory term in my lexicon) to a multinational environmental powerhouse. 

The fact that Greenpeace was a force in the world in 1985 through the medium of television, and remains one in 2005 via the internet, underscores how much the organisation has managed over the years to bend with the winds of change, even as we struggle to shift their course.

The overall mission hasn't changed.

The dedication of our activists and supporters hasn't changed. 

But the gadgets sure have.

Greenpeace is part geek.  Since its earliest days, tinkerers and boffins on land and at sea have bent technology to our purpose and we're still doing it today.

Telex: Worldwide communications via punched paper

In 1985, word that the Rainbow Warrior had sunk went out via telex.  In those days, the telex was the latest in modern communications, a kind of personal telegraph. Every Greenpeace office, every ship had one, which made us the communications equal of embassies and diplomatic missions around the world.

If you've never had the joy of sending a telex, I can only begin to explain what a monumental effort it took to complete a task which today takes seconds.  First you'd type out your message into a hulking piece of iron and steel machinery that combined the operative features of a typewriter, a hole punch, and a player piano.

This produced a series of holes on a long strip of paper.  You had to lock two fingers together and slam the key with as much velocity as you could muster, lest your holes not punch cleanly. This was painstakingly slow, and combined with the fact that sending a telex was outrageously costly, meant your messages had to be as short as possible.  (Sk8ter kids may think they invented "C U" and "Tnx" but there are grandmothers and grandfathers out in the world today who are fluent in SMS shorthand as a result of parsing telex messages in their youth.)  Once you had stored your message to a strip of paper the length of an anaconda, you fed it into the reader device which then reproduced your every keystroke in a rapid fire punch-punch onto a roll of paper and carbon paper with a room-shaking din which befit a message important enough to travel around the world.

In 1984 I was a door-to-door canvasser for Greenpeace Boston, and I can still remember hearing that machine all the way across the vast warehouse of an office we occupied -- despite the fact that the telex had a room all to itself.  Incoming news usually meant a hot button item to mention at the door, and a flock of canvassers would charge from one end of the office to the other to find out what news was coming in all the way from headquarters in England.  

Bits and PCs

Today, for better or worse, we have email. Documents zip around the planet daily and nobody flocks around the computer to marvel at words from far away.  

This pains me.  Greenpeace über-geek Dick Dillman set up the first Greenpeace email connection in 1983.  This  was the answer to the challenge that had been set to me by a colleague -- set her up so she could  send texts to Washington, and have them edited and returned without retyping them. In hindsight,  e-mail was an insanely obvious choice for that task.  But in those days we had no "Information Technology" department, just part-time boffins and enthusiasts.  I was called in to the job on the rather hilarious principle that I "knew something about computers," which was true insofar as I'd actually read the manual that came with the first personal computer that arrived in the Boston office --The boxy aluminum-cased Kaypro II portable, with 64K of memory and twin floppy drives -- and could consequently fix it more often than the receptionist.

E-mail was simply one upstart contender among many communication technologies that were viewed as vying for dominance at the time, and I had to consider another new technology called "Telefax" along with electronic telex as well.  But email fit the bill, and with a few false starts we finally had it chucking WordStar files back and forth over the pond.  The twice daily downloads at Headquarters always drew a crowd, and soon everyone wanted one. It wasn't long before modems in several offices were delivering messages at an amazing 1200 baud -- so fast you could no longer read the message line by line as it arrived on  your little green monochrome screen -- and people were actually envisioning a day when there would be a computer in every Greenpeace office.

But remember life before email?

And while a younger generation of activist complains about spam and too many messages and all the ills of email, I can remember what it was like not to have it at all.  I remember when we were setting up Greenpeace in the Soviet Union, where it took three days to book an international call and you were completely isolated from world events unless they involved Siberian tractor factories. It was real joy when we set up our first connection, the 11th email account in the history of the Soviet Union and the first for an NGO, and saw that stream of words going out and coming in on a monochrome Toshiba laptop, which meant we were linked to the rest of the world, we were a part of the synaptic network of the planet. 

It's easy to forget that before our lives became ruled by email, it was an astoundingly enabling technology. Some have said (well, alright, *I'm* saying) that Greenpeace's early adoption of e-mail held us together as an international organisation across a time when we could have easily descended into nationalist schisms.

Today, the internet and mobile communications are making globalists of us all -- creating a vast neurologic map which looks more and more, at least to an aging hippy like me, like a planetary consciousness.

Consider the cell phone.

Tethered to a ringing telephone

In 1985, Rainbow Warrior crew member Steve Sawyer was in a restaurant in Auckland when the ship was blown up.  In order to get the news to him, someone had to locate where he was, call the restaurant, have him found, have him get up from his table and walk over to a device fixed firmly into the wall.  No herculian effort that, but had he not been where he was expected to be, crucial information about who was on the ship and who was not would have been delayed.

Today, Mr. Sawyer, like most Greenpeace staff, is reachable 24/7 on a cell phone that he keeps at least within reach of his person. For most of the day it's actually attached to his person.  When seconds count, that's a technological advance of crucial importance. However, when he's in Hong Kong, unbeknownst to a colleague calling with routine business on Amsterdam time, it's a major step backwards in the field of human annoyances.  Something about our expectations of technology means we focus on the annoyances.

The cell phone has the power to be both technologically revolutionary as well as politically subversive.  At the "Battle in Seattle" in 1999 WTO protestors outflanked police by using fast, decentralised communications via Cell and messaging, and that model has transformed mass protest ever since. When George Bush visited the UK at the height of protest against the invasion of Iraq, his security team actually asked the UK government to disable cell phone reception in a wide swath around him as a security measure to disrupt organised protest.  Greenpeace activists have used cell phones to call lawyers and media from inside the paddy wagon,  send pictures from hideouts within nuclear weapons facilities, and organise instant "flash-mob" protests against the war in Iraq.  MMS messages bearing pictures of placard-holding individuals poured in by the thousands to our virtual march on the in Ulsan, Korea, where they were beamed onto the building where the International Whaling Commission was meeting.  And when an official of a logging company in Finland left her cell number in the auto-reply of an email box targetted by cyberactivists, she found her vacation interrupted by calls demanding to know why her company was logging ancient forests to make paper that could be produced from less irreplaceable ecosystems.

Beware of darkrooms

For an organisation that works in imagery, the most enabling change which technology has wrought since 1985 is in the availability and transmission of images, video and still.

In 1985, Fernando Pereira, the Greenpeace photographer killed in the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, had two choices for getting his photographs off the ship: fly out the negatives, or use the "AP Leafax Rotating Drum Transmitter" which was based on technology that had been invented in 1924.  The process would go like this: photographer shoots an image, take the film into the ship's darkroom, and develops it with wet chemicals.  Finds an image he likes.  Gets a good print, which isn't easy when using a mechanical enlarger on a moving boat.  Use a typewriter to put a caption onto a piece of adhesive paper and stick it on the print.  Attach the print to a metal drum and connect via radio.  On a good day, the print would take ten minutes to transmit, line by line of black and white dots, to a wire service receiver.  On most days, 8 minutes or so would elapse before the connection was broken or jumbled to the point that the transmission had to be restarted all over again from scratch.

Today, an image goes straight from camera to computer to wire service via Inmarsat marine satellite, (almost) anywhere in the world.  In 1983, five of us walked for ten hours across a desert bombing range to ground zero on the Nevada nuclear weapons test site.  An underground blast was imminent, and to stop it we had to prove we were out there by taking pictures and sending our fifth team member back to Las Vegas with the film.  He disguised himself as a mad gold prospector.  Four years later, another squad was beaming still pictures out via microwave relay direct from the test site. Lightweights.

In 1985 our video was still being put on tape and physically delivered from our office to news outlets.  But by the time the Rainbow Warrior returned to Moruroa in July 1995, we could beam video from the ships to a ground station in London via satellite.  This

involved using a 486 computer so full of interface cards that it needed several extra fans duct-taped to the back for cooling.

It was thanks to that technology, and the work of one very quick-thinking Radio Operator, that the world saw footage of French Commandos attacking the Rainbow Warrior with teargas and boarding the ship by force.  In those days, it took more than 20 minutes to transmit one minute of video.  Footage of the boarding was fed by wire down to the radio room where Thom Looney had seconds to load it up and start transmitting to London.  When the French Commandos began pumping tear gas through a hole they made in the locked radio room door, he reached around back and pulled the power plug from the monitor so that the computer seemed to be off.   Then he climbed out the porthole and up on to the deck for a little fresh air, while incriminating video streamed skyward for the next several hours from the "arrested" ship.

The revolution will be hyperlinked

But nothing since 1985 has changed Greenpeace, or the technosphere, more than the web.  In 1985, if we wanted to exert pressure on a politician or a company, we'd print postcards.  Go door to door with petitions.  Try to get stories about their sins published in the paper or on TV. Today we can publish an exposé ourselves, unfiltered through the media lens. We can generate 20,000 E-cards or petition signatures overnight.  We can help the world bear witness to environmental crimes with streaming video that doesn't have to compete for space on the evening news with the latest Hollywood love affair. We can put a GPS transmitter on a moving target to find out exactly where to aim our protest.  We can monitor activists inside a corporate headquarters by tapping into the wireless frequencies of the building's own security cameras.   And we can organise in ways that Saul Alinsky and Gandhi and Martin Luther King would have craved.

Sjoerd Jongens, a technophile who had done radio communications from our Antarctic base in 1988, foresaw that internet might be something we'd want to use in future, and started a gopher, WAIS, and FTP server at www.greenpeace.org in 1992. He set up our first web presence on a second-hand 386 PC with a 20 megabyte hard disk running Xenix.  Keychains today have more memory than that.

By 1995, we were using the web to expose the secret route of a shipment of plutonium waste, running a fax action, and an on-line petition. It had to be printed out, signed, and returned by snail mail. 3,781 people responded.

In 2003, when 30 million people gathered in streets around the world to protest the Bush administration's decision to pursue a unilateral pre-emptive war, it was the largest public demonstration ever to occur on this planet -- the largest demonstration of collective sanity against collective madness.  Without any central organisation, people around the world were able to agree a single date on which they would gather in numbers -- an extraordinary example of networked decision-making.  It was an event unprecedented in the history of mass protest, and it was largely enabled by the information network of the internet.  And while it may not have succeeded in stopping a war, it was enough to make war-makers think very hard about how to avoid a repeat performance.  Because with exercise, muscles like these simply get stronger.

As telecommunications and the internet bring individuals out of geographical isolation and into touch with one another, we are creating a system of nerves by which world events and threats to our planet can be sensed, communicated, understood and addressed with astounding speed.  The entire population of the world is becoming a single mass consciousness.  The job of Greenpeace remains the same in 2005 as it was in 1985: ensure that consciousness has a conscience, and that the fragile earth is given a voice.

Greenpeace's love affair with technology is an uneasy one.  E-waste is piling up in Asia  -- full of toxic materials.  The phones and computers we use to organise mass protest are consuming resources and energy at alarming rates. And we can't stand to hear industry flacks claiming that technology can fix any environmental threat from the disposal of nuclear waste for 10,000 years to stopping climate change.

Technology isn't inately good or evil.  Personally, I like to think it has Karma, and if it isn't being used for good this time around the wheel, Greenpeace is one place where it can check in for an adjustment.

Alan Kay once said  "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."  He may have been talking about technology, but I don't know a monkey-wrencher, a culture-jammer, or an environmental activist who wouldn't say "Amen, Brother," to that.