I’ve taken the EMU back to Shanghai, the same D31 as before. But the schedule has changed: instead of leaving a little after 11 a.m., it now leaves a little after 8 a.m.; the speed has also been raised somewhat; the dwell times at each station have become much longer; and the stations served have all changed too, basically shifted to the new high-speed-rail stations. If someone hadn’t remembered to check yesterday, I still wouldn’t have noticed these changes, and I would have nearly missed the train.
As for the EMU rear-end collision, I don’t want to say much. Of course, if one says that because of this incident one has lost all hope in this country, then one should already have lost hope long ago. In my view, especially judging from the public reaction and the movements of public opinion after the fact, I can still see hope. What is meant by hope is not waiting for a “miracle” to happen, but rather that there exists a real force that can turn events in a better direction.
Solving the problem of the Ministry of Railways may also not be too difficult. Like the breakup of China Telecom back in the day: separate government from enterprise, then split it into several companies competing with one another, and the situation would be completely different. Of course, the root of this disaster is not merely that one rotten-to-the-core Ministry of Railways; rather, it also reflects the basic predicament of technologism.
The logic of technologism manifested itself in all kinds of extreme ways in this disaster. One of the most extreme was the disregard for life, treating the death toll as just a set of numbers. It is said that “30 deaths” and “a 48-hour interruption” are accidents of the “same level”? Or that “compensation” means the payment of money and the signing of agreements. Another thing is that the logic of technology tends to reduce any disaster to “objective causes”; even when the conclusion is that humans were at fault, those who made the mistakes are still regarded as “objective” causes. Let alone the fact that investigating these objective causes is fraught with difficulty; even if these causes and mistakes are ultimately clarified, the victims can only receive a cold answer: “Such and such; this is how it happened.” The surviving victims are demanding “the truth,” but in fact, rather than saying they care about truth itself, it would be more accurate to say that they are demanding that the relevant departments pay attention to the truth. What we really demand is “respect” from the relevant people toward the victims, and actively pursuing the truth is an important way of expressing that respect. If the relevant departments could sincerely respect the victims and the rest of the public, then even if they ultimately failed to investigate enough truth, people would still find some solace; but if the relevant departments merely went through the motions, then even if people came to know the cold, hard truth, they would still feel humiliated. One major consequence of technologism is the objectification of meaning; objectification means objectification of the object, which means that we stand as observers opposite the object, pointing at those “facts.”
Another basic logic of technologism is the worship of progress and the pursuit of speed. The logic of GDP is just like this: in short, we are always growing at high speed, and this kind of high-speed growth has even become a pillar of regime legitimacy. But is moving forward at high speed necessarily a good thing? As for the train I took, high speed is not some great thing. In the beginning, going from Beijing to Shanghai took more than a day, which was certainly not very convenient; but an express train took 12–14 hours to get to Shanghai, and that was a proper speed. Less than five hours on the high-speed rail—how does that compare with 14 hours? The old express train left at night and arrived the next morning, so one could go straight to school or work without delay, and one could also sleep soundly on the train. But what about a five-hour high-speed train? If it runs in the daytime, it inevitably takes up working hours; if it runs at night, then once it arrives in the middle of the night there isn’t even any subway to take, and there isn’t even enough time to sleep half a sleep.
Technical progress can indeed provide more possibilities. For example, early fast trains could only run at 12 hours and could not get down to 5 hours; while today’s high-speed rail can run at 5 hours, but technically it is also possible to make it run for 14 hours. But the question is: once we have the technology to run at 5 hours, would we still deliberately make it run for 14 hours?
People spare no effort in pursuing technological acceleration, but they rarely attach importance to restraining technology. In a certain sense, getting the Ministry of Railways, which “masters” high-speed rail technology, to constrain the application of high-speed rail is a harder task than introducing high-speed rail technology in the first place. In fact, we have never truly “mastered” technology; rather, we are mastered by technology, forced to submit to its speed, unable to slow down at all. Was this EMU accident caused by defects in the relevant technology? I would rather say the opposite: it was not that technology was lacking, but that technology was excessive; technology developed too quickly, while people’s ability to regulate these technologies did not keep up. People rely excessively on advanced technology, and once something goes wrong with that technology, tragedy can result.
Most fatal of all, people are also prone to a certain illusion, becoming pleased with themselves over increased speed. In fact, the improvement of speed is by no means some human achievement; it very likely is precisely the result of people doing nothing at all. If people do nothing and simply let the logic of technology dominate the market and the scientific community, then many speeds will naturally “increase.” Take the computing speed of a computer CPU, for example: before it hits the physical bottleneck, it will grow at an exponential rate. This does not need to be credited to anyone’s special creativity. Rather, if you do not increase the CPU’s speed and still manage to survive in the market without being swallowed up by the tide of technology, that is what truly requires creativity. Acer’s netbook did it, and Apple’s iPad did it even better.
What our country most needs right now is to figure out how to slow “speed” down. Of course, slowing down is only a matter of sooner or later: either by crashing into a wall or falling off a cliff, or by taking the initiative to turn the dragon around.
Just some random thoughts. Tomorrow the whole family is going out to have fun for two days, and then when we get back I’ll revise the thesis。。
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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