Who’s Afraid of Technological Determinism?
In my last post, I attempted to provide a definition of technology that laid a framework for what I think are necessary future work in technology studies. Simply put, this definition identified technology as both a means to transform strata, and the act of commanding those environments. It is then a verb and a noun, artifacts and processes, which affect multiple layers of experience, from mental, physical social, and so on. My thinking here draws mainly from Steigler and Hiedegger but what is missing are some key qualities for moving forward.
It’s only fair to clear up a few things before I can elaborate further. First, why is it necessary to do this? What’s wrong with any of the previous hundred definitions of technology already out there? Recently I head a quip that “theories are like feces; everyone makes them but nobody wants someone else’s.” I don’t agree completely. While there is something to be said for the possessiveness we feel about ideas, and how everyone who intellectually labors wants to carve out their own niche, I think it’s foolish to ignore the fact that many very smart people have already given us most of the tools we need. It is as though we are miners looking for a fresh prospect — we cannot ignore the colonial forces, the homesteaders and founders of towns where we could go peddle our meager nuggets panned from remote streams. In a sense, we are looking for fresh sources of capital, to improve our own prosperity (the academic market demands it), but I hope that we are not all solely self-interested in this work as a means to an end (if that were the case, there are a good many business schools our time might be better spent at). But if there is a theory that already suits our purposes, I have nothing against using it. That’s not the case here, as I’ll explain.
Second, even as technology becomes more ubiquitous and increasingly necessary of study, there are more than a few specters haunting us. In the United States, we have a fractured approach to understanding it’s social impact. We have sociologists of media, the occasional philosopher of technology, historians of technology, media historians, science and technology scholars, ethnographers of media, communications studies, and so on. Each approach carries some baggage of its discipline — the historiographical aversion to whiggism, the failing of propaganda studies in communication, the instrumentalism and passion for social construction of technology in STS, and so on. I don’t meant to characterize each field in broad strokes, but merely point out that each individual studying technology comes to it with the baggage of a disciplinary and departmental approach that often emphasizes certain bodies of theory, methodologies, etc. In the US, we also have a very technophilliac culture, in which we believe that material abundance (made possible through better technology) is the best indicator of improved quality of life. This was recently clearly reiterated when US Representative Jason E. Chaffetz claimed that the rising cost of healthcare could be offset if people just budgeted for it instead of a new iPhone. Insightful, resourceful and needed criticism of technology is fighting an uphill battle, in both the academy and in the public.
Third, the ground has already been salted by the well-intentioned who got there first. The lineage of critique of technology typically goes something like this: Ned Ludd, Heidegger, Ellul, and then splits off in directions such as “appropriate technology” (Ivan Illich, Arnold Pacey), anarcho-primitivists and neo-Luddites, neo-marxist, post-phenomenological and critical critiques (Herbert Marcuse, Don Ihde, Andrew Feenberg) and ecofeminist, posthumanist and deep ecology thinkers. Of these, the first was dead on arrival — Langdon Winner notes that the Whole Earth Catalog was more of a shopping magazine the the lifestyle conscious yuppie than a genuine means of changing society. The second has done the most salting, intentionally and casually — it is the moral panic directed towards the most current uses of technology and the critique of horrific marriages between economic forces to availible technology, resulting in factory farming, electronic surveillance, civilian deaths via drone bombings, “trash TV,” climate change, and so on. The anxieties these produce generated an entire genera of both existential panic over machines (found in the work of Freddy Perlman, John Zerzan, Jerry Mander and the “Unabomber.” Related is the desire to “rewild” or recover some lost sense of the “natural” (as seen in digital detox retreats, the “National Day of Unplugging,” paleo diets, the anti-TV movements of the 1980’s and 90’s, urban farms, fears over automation in manufacturing and the desire to move “off-the-grid,” etc.).
The trouble with this last point is that “off-the-grid” is increasingly nowhere. As I argued in my previous post, successful technologies are marked by the way that they drift in the cultural stratum towards both an involuntary and formalized type of use. It becomes impossible for us to live sensibly without them, and our refusal makes us unintelligible to the world. For instance, I cannot abandon the use of “language,” (despite my anxieties that what I say will never be completely understood by another person who I do not believe can fully know my intended meaning). Language is essential to my identity as a “human being” as we currently understand it. Likewise, clothes and cooking food are almost universal to the quality of being homo sapiens. In an urban, developed environment, we depend on large technologies to help us remain sensible. I cannot really walk everywhere — if I do not own a car, I must take a bus or a train to where I need to be. I cannot grow (all) my own food, I must use the grocery store (and if I want to eat meat, the vast infrastructure of factory farming or fishing is necessary, unless some totally trustable marketing convinces me my chicken is abuse-free). Refusal and resistance to technology has always been a privileged position. It’s patron saint, Henry David Thoreau, is mocked because his myth has cultivated a character of self-sufficency, when he effectively lived more like a child pitching a tent in his parents backyard for a weekend. This mockery comes from the realization that we are all highly dependent on each other and how difficult true “escape” is. It is something like faking your own death or pulling a con — we only hear about when it’s a failure. The successful stories will never be known to us. This is why I think we need to articulate a “post-luddism” approach, where we recognize the difficulties of refusal and resistance to social forces like technology we personally disapprove of, how to mitigate our sense of culpability and our involvement in them.
The neo-marxist/post-phenomenological/critical approach has the most traction in the academy, and makes for lively debates. One pays respects to Bruno Latour, perhaps engages in a case study, and denies the heresy of technological determinism (depending on how much professional agency they actually have). “There is no ghost inside the thing, controlling it,” as one scholar recently told me — It is an anathema to suggest otherwise. This is one of the reasons I am trying to articulate a new definition of technology. For the most part, we have moved beyond thinking about it as just artifacts or things, but we still think of it as inert, inanimate or sterile. It is essential to who we are. For humanists, it has both a sense of ennobling us via critical reasoning, traveling to the moon, and that sort of thing. For the marginalized or disposed, it seems to restore us, via prosthetics, media platforms that promise to elevate voiced ignored, and elegant stories which retell neglected stories and provide new representation for invisible or misrepresented populations.
But one of technology’s key features is like a genericized trademark, its ubiquity, involuntary and formalized success make it mundane and invisible to the role it takes in making us presently human. This union of the human and non-human into some marvelous perfection is what David E. Nye and others call the “technological sublime.” If we follow that term back to aesthetics, we find a antithesis in both the grotesque and the uncanny. There is an unfamiliar intimacy with technology, something that everyone seems to accept yet we know does not belong there, like mass graves of trash leaching out petrochemicals, or fuel gathered from fracking which pollutes the groundwater. The impact of the atomic bomb was a more than just destroyed cities and many thousands dead, but a deep psychic trauma that we now accept as just another piece of history. The latent fallout from nuclear testing has been normalized as another essential means to do science. We cannot only explore these phenomena in critical terms like “power” when they prefigure any political dynamic.
As technology transforms the strata, we accept this “archaeosphere,” a man-made layer of earth, as just another natural part of the environment in the anthropocene. The archaeosphere exists not just in the physical stratum — it makes up nearly the whole of the mental and cultural strata as the role of other organisms become less relevant to our lives. As John Berger wrote in “Why Look At Animals,” the horse, the cattle, and all of nature was once right at our doorstep. Aesops Fables and other elements of folklore drew heavily from the known environment. The Big Bad Wolf, for instance, is based on symbols of the very real danger and hunger that exists beyond the edges of the farm. Today, my daughter is more likely to remember a myth about machines (like Thomas the Train Engine) than she is a story about animals (like Mother Goose).
I don’t intend here to sound like some insufferable romantic about how the past was always better. Survival is an ugly business and the archaeosphere and technology insulates us from the brutality in natural ecology. But what is missing from the academic perspectives on technology is the holistic organicism metaphor from ecology (here I borrow from Stephen Pepper). We largely depend on humanist and Englightenment distinctions between humanity and nature. We elevate “consciousness” and sapience and we lose what ecofeminists, deep ecologists and post-humanists are currently working towards. The decentering of the human, deanthropomorphizing and working towards a nonhuman phenomenology provides us with something we had before we insulated our thinking with layers and layers of the archaeosphere. Very deep down is this form of non-human intentionality, something that both material hermeneutics and media archaeology are running towards. It is a special type of material agency, something that the bulwark of “technological determinism” cannot hold against for long. It acknowledges that we live in a world of things, and as Ian Hodder writes, we are dependent on them, as they are dependent on us. Furthermore, just as we depend on other humans, things depend on other things. There is an ecology of non-human relations that is operating past view of the gatekeepers who say non-human consciousness will be the shining achivement of AI researchers.
Non-human minds are already here, whether you are a panpsychist or not. I do not consider myself an animist to look for a type of spirit inside of non-humans. Who is to say that biological drives are not a form of intentionality brought about by the slow march of evolution? Steigler calls technology “life by means other than life,” and argues technics are a form of co-evolution or epiphylogenesis. This resonates with Hodder’s claim of co-dependnece. But what is the root model for this? It comes from ecology, where organisms form codependent chains of both competitive calorie accumulation and symbiotic relationships. This symbioses is emerging between a co-dependent view of technology/humans and work like Haraway’s Staying With The Trouble. We are coming to recognize that we cannot survive without this non-human other, and that absolutely exploiting it can be catastrophic.
I think that a way into future technology research is then to work with definitions and articulations that acknowledge a form of intentionality/agency/consciousness on behalf of non-humans. Animals and ecology are a valuable asset to this enterprise because they are the oldest co-dependent system we have, both in how we have affected each others strata. Animals also remain the largest population of non-users of human technology. In some cases, they have come to adapt to altered strata, as their habitats have changed from technology. The peppered moth is a classic example. But what of future impacts, or impacts we haven’t even considered? The proposed wall along the Mexican-American border has been decried by environmentalists even as the Trump administration works to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency. Walls and barriers are probably one of our oldest form of technology (shelter). What happens when we consider the way non-humans have had to adapt to them (in the case of the house-mouse, or the termite)? What about unintended barriers, as in the case of transmission lines and bird migration? Whales and other sea-life have had their soundscape changed by the acoustic impact of ship motors, sonar and other technology. This is a secondary sort of effect technology has on a physical and organic stratum — the indirect impact on what is possible for life, which occasionally comes back to haunt us (but always haunts someone, from an ecological point of view).The argument here is that we could better understand the role of non-human actants (to borrow Bruno Latour’s term) if we compared the environment, animals and technology, and elevate each (rather than continuing to treat them as an inexhaustible resource).
My ultimate point is to say that the approaches taken so far are insufficient in scope to understand the impact of technology. The wall is more than an object for policy analysis, a historical idea, the embodiment of some social values, or an instrumentalist artifact. Discourse has given it a clear presence on our mental stratum. The impact on a physical stratum would extend to users and non-users, humans and non-human animals. The wall is an agent and expresses a multitude of consequences, intended and otherwise. We have to approach this and other technologies with the holistic understanding that they express interiorities with far reaching impacts, which loop around the non-human and back to us in unexpected ways.
