Thumb Screws and Firing Squads

With the arrival last week of a set of "Identimat" handprint encoding machines and the narrowly aborted threat that our hands would be scanned electronically every time we are. It seemed to many people as thought the shadow of the Police State had passed over Harvard. One University vice-president voiced a general sentiment when he said that the new machines would be more appropriate in Leavenworth than in the Freshman Union, and he was expressing more than just a personal feeling of outrage--his reaction betrayed the sure instinct of a public relations officer confronted with botulism in the vichyssoise. The first thing Charles Daly must have thought of when he stumbled on the Identimat machines was a grim features page in The New York Times: the irresistable headline, "Nineteen Eighty Four Arrives at Harvard," and the inevitable stark photograph of gaunt, sallow-faced summer school students fining up at the Union to be processed by the machine. In any case, Harvard's vice-presidents went into a quick huddle and came out reaffirming the sovereignity of our palm prints.

Meanwhile, the identimats are delivered and Harvard is going to use them somehow, palm prints or no. Students entering the dining halls will have to slip their bursar cards into the slot and push down on the machine, just as though their palm prints had been encoded, while the checkers check them off the old way. The whole business is worse than pointless--it's easier than ever to lend your card to someone else, and the dining hall personnel have the extra burden of supervising machines that are just there for show. People practicing on the new machines in Memorial Hall last week, after the hand-print plan had been called off, seemed more amused than outraged, but the spectre of the penitentiary is still there. The identimats continue to inspire morbid humor about guillotine attachments and what not. It would take a first-class selling job to overcome the visceral loathing these electronic wonders inspire.

That may be one reason Stephen S.J. Hall, the earnest godfather of the Identination project, hasn't taken the machines out of service altogether. Some of the plan's proponents are still openly holding out hope that the University's investment won't be wasted. The summer is as good a time as any for people to start getting used to military efficiency in the lunchline, and when they get over their initial, unthinking repugnance, who knows? After all, the University of Georgia hasn't had any trouble to speak of. But Hall and company have their work cut out for them. There is something sinister about the little iron boxes with their guts of printed circuitry they conjure up visions of guard towers and concentration cartps, armed guards frisking students in the corridors. All you have to do is put your fingers in the slots and you smell the jail house.

The odd thing is that Hall has reason on his side. If you ignore his less-than-deft handling of the whole affair and set aside the question of why he didn't simply tell the checkers to look more carefully at people's bursar card photographs, the Identimat plan begins to make a certain amount of sense. It's possible that Hall did his thinking on a purely financial basis and failed to consider anything else, but it's also possible that he decided rationally that the hand-print machines were ideologically innocent.

From a purely rational point of view he would be right. A machine that records the shape and transparency of your fingers on a strip of magnetic tape--no central files are kept, so the authorities don't know anything about your hand--is no more invidious than the cameras they use for bursar cards now. People who don't balk at showing an ID card every time they want to get into the dining room or the library stacks should have no qualms about hand prints. It's the same principle. The new system is only a way of letting a michine do what people did before, on the theory that the machine will do it better. The palm-prints are only for convenience; if they had a machine that could compare your face to a photograph, they would be able to leave your hand out of it entirety.

Harvard is different from Leavenworth, in any case. One imagines that if Leavenworth had identimats they would be used on different sorts of occasions. Around here a bursar card, with or without hand print, is a mark of privilege--let's face it, you pay $5000 a year so that you and not somebody with a different shaped hand can have Harvard's food and library books. Charging totalitarianism when your palm is scanned in the Harvard dining halls is no more reasonable than complaining when a bank teller checks your signature before handing over the money.

Hall may have been sincerely surprised at the hostility his project engendered. He would certainly be within his rights to think of himself as an island of rationality in a sea of unthinking emotion, and to expect an enlightened community to look beyond the gut connotations of identimats to their real, innocent purpose. But there is still something to be said for the gut reaction. The technology involved in the new machines is forbidding in itself--electronic gadgetry scanning your fingers, read and green lights rendering judgement. If a simple, Thurberian mistrust of machinery were not sufficient reason to fear and detest and hand-print machine, there would still be the cool efficiency that would replace the myopic checkers. At Harvard, as elsewhere, we've come to treasure inefficiency as a substitute for less capricious guarantees of benevolence. If the tangled mess of Rules Relating is not oppressive, it's because it is so easy to circumvent all of the "ordinarilies." And if we have to carry around ID cards with photographs on them, there is comfort to be found in their blurry unrecognizability. There are some liberties we've given up in principle to have in fact. If the identination program is only a more efficient version of the old bursar card, that alone is reason enough to be wary.

And if reason speaks for the Identimat, unreason has to have its say, too. It may be unjustified, it may be silly to look at the hand-print machines in their Harvard context and automatically think of thumb-screws and firing squads, but the connotations of the machine are no less real for being illogical, identimats in the food lines make Harvard that much more faceless and mechanical, and worse: No amount of ratiocination can cover up the first could smell of the thing when you put your hand in it.