Technology Makes Us “Individuals”
This was the title of an article in the Harvard Crimson) I read in 1969 summarizing a report from Harvard’s Program on Technology and Society. In it one reads:
“This is probably the first age in history in which such high proportions of people have felt like individuals,” [Program Director Emmanuel] Mesthene said. “No 18th-century factory-worker, so far as we know, had the sense of individual worth that underlies the demands on society of the average resident of the urban ghetto today.”
Try saying that in the Ghetto. He conveniently overlooks how the union movement gave factory workers a sense of self worth, not to mention weekends, a movement now on the decline in these privatizing times. More than technology, could it be capitalism that makes us individuals, or the kinds of individuals we have come to be since Mesthene wrote?
But at the time, I was a graduate student and high tech felt empowering. I was all for it, especially digital computing (which figured heavily in my career path). As we know, this individualization business turned out to be all too true. We are now largely a society of individuals generally unencumbered by civic, social, and religious institutions. Families too are much more “individual” now, both within and among themselves. Compare your connections to your kids, neighbors, and community with those your parent’s generation knew. This is what living in an expanding universe feels like.
On top of that, there is less “society” to make demands upon now, thanks to the withering away of public institutions. Instead, most people’s demands are directed at corporations, which tend to have no social conscience or legal responsibility to undertake social reforms. Mesthene at least hinted that this is a problem that would have to be addressed:
“If it turns out on more careful examination that direct participation is becoming less relevant to a society in which the connections between causes and effects are long and often hidden — which is an increasingly ‘indirect’ society, in other words — elaboration of a new democratic ethos and of new democratic processes more adequate to the realities of modern society will emerge as perhaps the major intellectual challenge of our time.”
But note that he says “democratic processes” — not “corporate practices” — might need to change. He’s asking us to adapt to the “realities of modern society,” including machines.
We’ve been doing that. But now, so many of our interactions are at a distance and multiply mediated, and so many of them concern acquiring goods, services, or culture. Does that make us “individuals” or simply interchangeable consumers? What’s the point of individuality if all one uses it for is to follow trendsetters and create a lifestyle, just like everyone else? There’s a sort of solidarity in consumer chit-chat, I suppose, and tremendous energy that perhaps could be bent to better uses.
Technology may individuate us, but it didn’t have to work out this way. At root, it’s capital-driven acquisitiveness that atomizes us through technology, and only a transformation of capitalism can fix that. Techno-skepticism won’t get us very far if we don’t sign on to hack at our own acquisitiveness. We’re unique enough as it is and don’t need further personalization courtesy of corporations. If we say no thanks to those offering us shiny objects and stop obsessing about our lifestyles, we just might figure out how to accomplish something transformative altogether.
