RUTHFULLY YOURS

One of my better moments as a manager came early in my first job as editor of a small newspaper, one that, as it turned out, was still (in the early 21st century) using a DOS-based publishing system dating from the first Reagan administration. My deputy editor offered to set aside an afternoon to instruct me in the eccentricities of the old system, and assured me that I should be able to master it in a short time. I had the old system, DOS terminals and all, in the dumpster by the end of the day.

Training the staff to use a modern desktop-publishing system wasn’t easy — the median age of my staff was about 58, and many had never used a mouse before — but it got done. The process was helped along by my publisher, who, foreseeing that the necessary technological changes might meet resistance from the staff, offered some helpful advice: “Fire them all.” As it turned out, I had to fire only one of them.

Oddly enough, I’d faced a similar problem training young editors in India in the late 1990s. The Indian upper class today is very technologically sophisticated, but at the time, my trainees, who came almost exclusively from well-to-do families, had a significant handicap: Most of them did not know their way around a computer keyboard, because they’d always had servants to do their typing for them. In Delhi, you could find professional freelance typists working outdoors, in the shade of a tree, with a manual typewriter on a folding card table. If you needed to fill out an official document such as a lease, you just walked down to the corner and had it done.

Technological change is a part of cultural change, and vice versa. I am in my early forties; when I try to explain to a colleague in his twenties that there was no web when I was in high school, that e-mail was an exotic thing reserved to hardcore nerds, and that only very rich people had mobile phones, I get that look that says: “That’s funny, Grandpa! Tell me more about the Dark Ages!” I feel like I should be talking about how we walked to school in eight feet of snow, uphill both ways.

Technological change becomes more difficult as you get older and the decreasingly elastic brain resists learning new things. I might write that you know you’re middle-aged when you dread an operating-system update rather than getting excited about it, but I suspect that we are only a few years away from people wondering what an operating-system update is, as though you were talking about something truly ancient, like a card catalogue or a fax machine.

It takes incentives to get people to embrace change and to put out the effort to do the work necessary to accommodate it. In the case of my newspaper staffers, there was a little bit of carrot (at least some of them understood that the acquisition of current skills would improve their future job prospects), but it was mostly stick, the threat of losing their positions and having to look for other work.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is 68 years old and not known as a technological sophisticate, went to extraordinary lengths to set up an offsite e-mail operation in the toilet of some obscure mom-and-pop firm in what seems to be, even by the account of the remarkably gentle State Department report, a fairly straightforward effort to avoid ordinary oversight. The attorney and commentator Mark Levin, among others, has made a fairly persuasive case that this is illegal, a violation of the Federal Records Act, which contemplates up to three years in prison for anyone who “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office.”

Proving that the Clintons are dishonest is like proving that water is wet. Mrs. Clinton has committed more interesting transgressions — what’s interesting here is that here we have a case of government officials willing to show some initiative where technology is involved.

Incentives matter. Boy, do they.

At the other end of the incentives spectrum, we learn from the Government Accountability Office (typing those three words always fills me with merriment) that the nation’s nuclear arsenal is dependent upon eight-inch floppy disks, something that even I, a man whose first real computer experience was on a university mainframe called Alice, can barely remember. Let me emphasize that: In the event of a nuclear war, the men in charge of our response will need to dig up some Love Boat–era floppy disks in order to run the system that coordinates our ICBM launches with our bombers and support aircraft. According to CNN, the federal government currently spends about $60 billion a year maintaining these hilariously/horrifyingly out-of-date systems, which is more than 10 percent of the Defense Department’s budget and three times what it spends on investment in more-modern systems.

Incentives matter.

In my head, I hear the voice of my old publisher: “Fire them all.”

— Kevin D. Williamson is the roving correspondent for National Review.