Technology Criticism Part One

Now that the appropriation of online social networks Twitter and Facebook by weaponized AI propaganda has raised alarms about the negative impact of social media on democracy and technologists such as Tristan Harris are blowing the whistle on ways distraction and addiction are engineered into today's social apps, American attitudes toward digital media have grown more critical. I say "American" because my first real exposure to critical thinking about silicon valley came when I traveled in Europe. Until very recently, America and California have looked upon the explosive growth of digital media and networks through the lens of prodigious wealth creation. Now that attitudes are changing, perhaps some of us can at least aim for a more nuanced kind of technology criticism

I am often named as a straw man uncritical enthusiast for social media, which causes me to wonder whether these critics read "disinformocracy," final chapter of my 1993 book "The Virtual Community." I found myself dissatisfied with the quality of technology criticism that cast the issues in manichean terms -- utopia or dystopia. When I started digging deeper, I found that a couple of pre-computer-era critics did have a more nuanced, if often dark, view of human relationship to technology. Lewis Mumford wrote in the early 1960s about the "megamachine," which was not a physical apparatus, but the way in which hierarchical, coercive, organized projects such as the great pyramids and irrigation-building projects of the early agricultural age treated individuals as components in a machine. Certainly physical tools and engineering innovations were involved, but to Mumford, the driving force of the megamachine -- and the evolution of technology over the past 10,000 years -- must be considered in a socio-political context. 

When I discovered the writing of Jacques Ellul, another pre-computer critic, I saw an extension of Mumford's concern with the sociopolitical drivers of technology. Ellul's equivalent of the megamachine was what he called "technique," which applies to any procedure, whether it is a machine or a methodology (such as the assembly line) that renders a human activity more efficient. Technique is not necessarily a malevolent force, but it is one that colonizes other ways of dealing with the world: cultures not based on technique tend to adopt it or be conquered by it when they encounter technique-based cultures. And not everything should be rendered more efficient if that efficiency clashes with other human values. Indeed, it has been claimed that hunters and gatherers had more time for those activities that contemporary societies say we value -- family, religion, art -- the "original affluent society." And now we're seeing a revision of the cultural agreement that "civilization" means some kind of "progress" from the more "primitive" lifestyle of hunters and gatherers.

The word "Luddite" is often used a pejorative aspersion on those who question the value of technological progress. The irony is that the original Luddites were not anti-machine. They were against turning humans into mechanical components in an economic engine that profited owners but degraded the lives of workers:

As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”

When I was contemplating these issues, during the time I was editor of Whole Earth Review, I wrote up my thoughts and published them on my website; more recently, I published "What Technophiles Ought to Know" on Medium:

The petroleum economy, nuclear power, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, lasers, organ translants, telephone and television and personal computer networks — today’s technologies have put staggering amounts of power into the hands of billions of people. More power is on its way in the next several decades, as present scientific knowledge drives future technological capability. Do we know what to do with the powers over matter, mind, and life that tomorrow’s technologies will grant us?

If we don’t already know the answers to these questions, what do we need to know to design, deploy, control, and live humanely with the tools we are creating?