In April, Notre Dame cathedral in Paris burned, by all accounts the result of a construction accident. The damage was catastrophic and it will take a very long time to rebuild. But there are interesting lessons that future-centric techies can learn from ye olden days.
Two stories emerged from the fire coverage that I found particularly fascinating. Both centre around disaster preparedness. How to handle the before, and the after. How to learn from past experiences, never assume your cathedral is unburnable (or your Titanic unsinkable…) and use what’s happened to plan ahead. Way, way ahead.
This thread on Twitter was a great read and gets into both of these types of disaster preparedness.
Construction of Notre Dame began in 1160 and took about 100 years to complete. The cathedral suffered significant damage during the French Revolution and fell into such disrepair that, by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, some recommended demolition. Bullets also smashed some of the stained glass during the Second World War. The old girl’s got some scars.
Notre Dame has been repaired and restored after each period of damage or neglect. It has also been augmented and changed. The spire that so dramatically toppled in the inferno was only built in the 1800s.
Some of those projects have taken decades. But one thing you learn from a building that’s stood for 800 years is that disaster can and will happen. More than once.
Thinking in such a long-term way is hard to wrap a modern, tech-centric brain around. We may have begun things that could take 100 years to get right, but we don’t have specific projects that we know will go on that long. Where the architects or builders won’t live to see the completion.
The online world, for example, has never been destroyed by fire, angry mobs or super virus even once, let alone multiple times. Our disaster preparedness is so… localized.
As was well reported, there was a carefully plotted, well-rehearsed plan for Notre Dame in case of disaster. Who’s involved and does what, where and when.
The order of priority was very clear: get all people to safety, then save the art, altar and what furniture you can, then save as much of the structure as possible. In that order. From experience the responders knew what was most important and what could most likely be saved.
When you have a firefighter priest whose job it is to save the crown of thorns, you have a Serious Plan in place. (He was successful.)
How many tech companies have any plan in place, let alone a Serious Plan? Sure, really big companies have departments dedicated keeping systems running, detecting intruders, backups, etc. But generally, the smaller the company, the less prepared they are. And the more they rely on third parties for stability.
Hell, I know of companies that haven’t even documented what their services do in order to train new hires. Or how to access tools and systems if a key person is on vacation. Let alone what to do if there’s a serious attack or outage. You don’t need 800 years of accumulated wisdom to get on top of that.
Of course, the less experience people have with these issues, the clearer and more ironclad the plan needs to be. Because most people get stressed and panicky and don’t process well in the moment.
They need this training and practice before anything goes wrong. As they say in krav maga, you’ll fight like you train.
OK, so disaster has struck. What about the aftermath? There’s gonna be a big mess to clean up and a lot of rebuilding to do. The rebuilding, particularly, comes with a lot of questions.
Like when Notre Dame’s stained glass windows were damaged during the Second World War, do you try and recreate the medieval-era designs exactly, or try something new?
How do you reflect brand and tradition and changing tastes and an organization’s evolving needs and advances in technology? I bet they’d have killed for fire-retardant materials and concrete prefab in 1160.
When centuries-old timber beams burn, what do you replace them with? Good luck finding suitable stands in Europe. That discussion and its offshoots was one of my favourites regarding post-fire logistics.
As the Twitter thread mentions, there are oaks at Versailles that were planted in the 1800s in case they were eventually needed. As much as it would likely pain the gardeners to harvest them, they’re there.
There’s also a story I heard at Oxford University (which I’ve heard is also told about Cambridge, so it might be apocryphal), regarding a discussion years back about how to replace a great hall’s 500-year-old roof beams, which were succumbing to age and vermin. There wasn’t an overabundance of half-millennium-old hardwood in the British Isles anymore, either.
But then a groundskeeper came to the rescue, revealing a secluded grove of great old oak trees. Oaks that had been planted 500 years ago – the last time the great hall had needed its beams replaced. They’d known their lifespan and planned accordingly.
True or not, this is “the long now” in action. The philosophy and mindset that what we’re doing now isn’t just for now. It’s part of a continuum that started long ago and that will continue far into the future.
Sure, unlike now, centuries ago there was less going on, fewer distractions (and way more religious influence). Which, perhaps, made it easier to think of the very long term.
But we have responsibilities not to drop the ball or screw over those whose work will come after ours. Even if we won’t reap the rewards. It’s not about thinking specifically about what tech will become. Or even what companies or countries will become.
We can take a page from science fiction and many indigenous cultures. We can think of people’s lives, our societies and cultures, and the world as an interconnected whole, or continuum, as it were. What do we want to restore, remain, or develop into? From that perspective we can think about tech in 100, 500, or 800 years.
Some actions are easy, immediate and concrete, like funding research and innovation. We may not know exactly what will come of it, and not all areas of exploration will pan out. But man, we come up with some amazing stuff when they do.
Of course, science fiction is also a warning, one we should take to heart. It also points to the worst that could happen, particularly when we fail to address our responsibilities and forget our place in the long now.
Eight hundred years ago they only had stone and wood to work with, and it led to a Serious Plan that worked nearly a millennium later.
With everything we’ve experienced, and all the technology available to us, just think of the Serious Plan we could create to benefit our current and future selves.
