The Technoutopianism of Howard Rheingold (Part 2)
In the first installment, I pulled passages from the last chapter of The Virtual Community. Here, I delve into a variety of my published writing over the past 20 years, to pull on the thread throughout my work of my critical enthusiasm for digital media, networks, and technology in general. I do write as an enthusiast: for a writer, moving from a typewriter, telephone, and library card to a laptop, online social network, and search engine was like starting out with a horse and buggy and ending up with my own starship. But as a writer, I tried to look at what the tools I was personally enthusiastic about might lead to in years to come, when adopted by whole populations -- both beneficial and malign effects.
(passages are not all continuous)
"Taming Technology" (1994) from The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog:
The most important part of any technology, more often than not, turns out to be invisible. If you could peer through magical spectacles that would reveal the parts of aluminum cans that you normally don't see, for example, you would perceive lines of force connecting the contents of your refrigerator to global geopolitical conflicts.
When I pop open an aluminum can, it hardly ever occurs to me to think about the working conditions in the West Indies (bauxite is mined in Jamaica), or the costs of rejecting nuclear power in favor of other energy-production technologies (if the energy used to manufacture cans doesn't come from a nuclear reactor, it comes from one fossil fuel or another or from a dammed river). An aluminum can affects and is affected by the the cost-effectiveness of truck tires (which translates to miles-per-gallon-per-pound of cans) and the price of petroleum needed to transport all that ore, refined metal, and end-products around the world. Aluminum begins with someone digging the right kind of ore out of the earth, but the most expensive component of a can is the energy required to extract, process, manufacture, and transport it to your hand.
Profits and benefits from new technologies like aluminum foil and aluminum aircraft are visible, but costs and delayed or distant effects are invisible. What we need badly right now is a way for more and more people to see, understand, and decide collectively, through our discussions and our buying and voting decisions, exactly which trade-offs we are willing to make in return for technological conveniences. We need to find ways to make the invisible parts of technology more visible.
While an endless addictive quest for a "technological fix" is not the answer to the problem of building a sustainable civilization for billions of people on a planet with limited resources; neither, I believe, is it wise to reject the very technologies we are going to need in years to come. We need the best tools we can muster to manage the world of energy-consuming billions we've inherited. We can't discard our tools, despite their evident defects, because we need them for our survival.
How do we find new modes of perceiving technology, new ways to think about, design, and use tools? How can we develop more conscious means for democratic societies to make decisions about technologies? The next step beyond access to tools is access to understanding how to use them. In what directions does that step proceed? How do we start learning to look at the world of technology, and our places in it, in new ways? Before we can hope to achieve answers, we must elevate the level of discourse from an argument between tree-huggers and nuke-lovers. The world is more complicated than that. We need richer, more widespread, less simplistically polarized discourse about technology and social issues, because that is the only kind of environment where viable solutions are likely to emerge.
What Technophiles Need to Know (1998)
Are we awake to the world we’re building, or are we, as an old Sufi saying goes, merely asleep in life’s waiting room?
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?
Where are we going? Do we want to go there? Is there anything we can do about it? I have written this because I hope we can think together about where these questions lead. Perhaps there are solutions that can only be found by many of us, working together.
Thinking critically about the technosphere we inhabit, which defines who we are and dictates how we live and die, is scary — like thinking about performing surgery on yourself. Your internal denial alarms are going off already, I know. But I urge you to repress the urge to rise to the defense of penicillin and civilization, and consider how I came to rethink my attitudes.
You’re reading this on the web, after all. I do all the HTML myself. I upload it to the server. I do a little PhotoShop, a little Unix. I’m not an archgeek, but neither am I totally unaware of how this new stuff works. It is possible to think critically about technology without running off to the woods — although, I must warn you, it is possible that you will never be quite so comfortable again about the moral dimensions of progress and the part we all play in it. I know that I’m not.
We are all partaking in, and many of us are helping to build, something that none of us understands. There are taboos against looking too critically at the real politics of technology. Marx was just as deluded as Adam Smith when it came to understanding the real invisible hand that has influenced how humans work, live, and think for the past several centuries. Although a few people understand the urgency and relevance of the history of technologies, most people aren’t even aware that progress wasn’t always our most important product.
One of the things that makes technology dangerous is the way people forget where tools come from, and what they were designed to do.
We have forgotten, and have been encouraged to forget, about the origins and provenance of fundamental thinking tools we all benefit from — rationality, progress, democratic self-governance, universal acceptance of the superiority of the scientific method to other ways of knowing. A specific manner of systematically examining the world, extracting knowledge, and applying that knowledge to extend power, a system that was developed only a few centuries ago, has been so extraordinarily successful that it has totally sucked our attention. Our technologized culture shapes and fascinates us to the extent we don’t even see other ways of knowing and interacting with the world and each other. As Langdon Winner claims above, people in industrial, megatechnological civilization seem to sleepwalk through the world we’ve created, oblivious to the worlds that have been destroyed, never really thinking about the worlds technology will engender in years to come.
At the end of the twentieth century, it is easy to see that technological progress based on systematically gathered scientific knowledge, coupled with industrial capitalism (or socialism, for that matter), requires continuous growth, damages the environment that supports life, diminishes both biological and social diversity, and everywhere seems to move us toward societies in which humans learn how to be components in larger social machines. No matter how convenient it makes life for billions, this process of extracting resources, expanding power, and stimulating perpetual growth in energy consumption seems to be headed for ecological, political, economic catastrophe within the next few decades, at most.
The question of what to do about increasing human alienation within the increasingly larger-and-faster-than-human environment is a serious one. People who communicate via computer networks definitely should be instructed about the danger of mistaking messages on computer screens for fully authentic human relationships. And we definitely need to be skeptical of claims that online discourse can effectively substitute for or revitalize the public sphere that was enclosed and fragmented by mass-media technology and public relations techniques.
If we are going to look unblinkingly at whether it is humane to support a world where more and more people spend more of our time driving single-passenger, petroleum-fueled vehicles through concrete landscapes to our cubicles inside big ugly buildings, where we spend our time staring at computer screens, manipulating symbols, and exercising our fingers — we need to look closely at the room, the building, the urban landscape, the entire civilization that computer screen is situated within, as well as questioning whether life in front of a screen is healthy.
As Langdon Winner pointed out in his book, Autonomous Technology, the main question in the philosophy of technology now is whether to believe it is possible for humans to maximize the noble part and minimize the worst, whether technological progress is autonomous and therefore there’s little we can to to influence it, or whether it is possible to separate the benefits from the liabilities. The evidence thus far isn’t good. I’ve been looking for examples of humans recognizing a problem caused by technological intervention in their lives, finding a solution, and making it work in action. Such people can be found, and they have much to say to us about what we need to know to find a solution that is democratic, humane, and workable. Right now, I think the first struggle is to get more than a tiny minority of people to recognize it is important to try to think together, as a civilization, about where technology came from, where it’s going to, and how to have a say in what happens next.
Mindful Disconnection (2006): Counter powering the Panopticon from the Inside
by Howard Rheingold, Eric Kluitenberg
Perhaps the act of mindfully disconnecting specific times, spaces and situations in our lives from technological mediation ought to be considered as a practical form of resistance – an act of will on the part of individual humans as a means of exercising control over the media in their lives. It remains uncertain whether it is possible or preferable to disrupt the technological augmentation of human thought and communication that is becoming available to most of the earth’s population. We are not as convinced as others that technology is only, primarily, or necessarily a dangerous toxin. There is a danger in locating technologies’ malignancies in the tools themselves rather than the way people use them and mentally distancing us from responsibility for the way we use our creative products might diminishes our power to control our tools. We are increasingly convinced, however, that we need to resist becoming too well adapted to our media, even as creators. Perhaps tools, methods, motivations, and opportunities for making the choice to disconnect – and perceiving the value of disconnecting in ways of our choosing – might be worth considering as a response to the web of info-tech that both extends and ensnares us.
The capacity and freedom to disconnect might well be necessary to prevent the intoxication of technology from tipping into toxicity: it seems more effective and more humane to resist technologies’ dangers through mindfulness, not through prohibitions, regulations, revolutions, or guardrails. It makes sense to expend intellectual energy instead of fossil fuels, deploy thought instead of bureaucracy, employ awareness rather than conflict. Mindful disconnection doesn’t require a top-down change in large-scale institutions or a redesign of installed infrastructure. It only requires that enough people make a decision and act on it.