As we look back on 2011, the year stands out as one of historic significance. One may recall the deaths of figures such as Kim Jong Il and Bin Laden, the overturning of governments in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen and birth of a new country in South Sudan, the continuing famine in East Africa and the costliest year for natural disasters to date. The year was marked by mass protests against political and economic oligarchies through the Arab Spring protests, Occupy, and Russian election protests. Time magazine named “the Protestor” as the person of the year.
Unfortunately, the engineering community at Waterloo seems to be largely unfazed by the wave of social change going on; two out of three The Iron Warrior articles about Occupy mocked the movement as hypocritical and pointless; the BOT theme this year was Occupy POETS. Unlike UW, schools like Harvard are staging walkouts of first year economics classes for their dysfunctional ideologies and peaceful demonstrators at UC Davis are being gratuitously pepper-sprayed. It is certainly within the rights of any individual to reject how Occupy has been carried out and the themes it represents however, the current atmosphere around our engineering student community seems to be one of laughing the movement off without really thinking about it. Many other areas of society have been turned off by the movement due to the mainstream media’s portrayal and coordinated efforts to shut down and belittle the movement; therefore, as Canadian engineering students, we really need to be listening.
Firstly, as Canadians, Occupy was initiated by the Canadian anti-consumerist organization, Adbusters. The issues it seeks to address are not simply American bank bailouts and the Wall Street crash but the wider lack of control of a country’s political and economic future by its own people; this is entirely relevant to Canada especially in the context of a government so cooperative with American-style policies.
Secondly, as young people, we have the greatest stake in the future. We’re set up to walk into a world with unprecedented challenges of food, water, energy security, extreme weather and political instability; things are bad all over. These are the consequences of unsustainable and unjust policies of previous generations which will continue if not forced to change.
Thirdly, if we are not part of the 1% with our being engineers, we are still a part of a socioeconomic and intellectual elite with the power and responsibility to have a positive role in society. The profession strives to preserve the life, health, property and welfare of the public by developing technologies that enable us to be more effective and efficient at the things we do. However, in our economic context, technologies largely serve to enable the 1% to exploit the 99% by concentrating efficiency gains on the owners of industrial machinery and not the workers. In industrial Europe, people (Luddites) realized this dynamic and, paralyzed to change the social structure, instead attacked technology itself by sabotaging machines. Obviously, this sort of action is incredibly wasteful and fails to leverage the amazing things technology can do.
The interaction between technology and society is more complicated than can be covered in a List A CSE. If Waterloo engineers wish to remain relevant in orchestrating solutions to today’s complex problems, a sincere examination of global milestones such as Occupy should be taken.
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