Technology

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Babel: The View From Metropolis (Slideshow)

2015-01-10

Frightening Babel nameplate from the movie

The Tower of Babel, for me, was always a cautionary tale about the limits of technology: The more sweeping your vision, the more complex to build, and once it gets too complex, it will collapse entirely because no one working on the thing will understand what anyone else on the project is doing..

Confusion of tongues (confusio linguarum) is how Book of Genesis 11:1–9 witnessed it.

Anyway, those were the contours of the Babel Palace as I roughly envisioned. But like any great myth that aids in human understanding, Babel is preggers with multitudes.

For the first time, I recently saw the Fritz Lang's 1927 silent movie masterpiece "Metropolis" (the Giorgio Moroder remixed version that was all the stoner's rage in 1984), and its take on what went down on Babel surprised me:

For Lang, Babel failed from a top-down communication bottleneck, not peer-to-peer chaos. The architects, while enthrawed with their design, cared little for the workers who were to build it. And the workers neither knew, nor cared, of why they toiled, making them (presumbly) angry and bitter at their labors--and their task masters.

Only when the designer and the laborer know each other can progress be made, Lang held.

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