A Theory of Technology

A Theory of Technology Just as the market or the free play of competition provided in theory the optimum long-run solution for virtually every aspect of virtually every social and economic problem, so too does the free play of technology, according to its writers. Only if technology or innovation (or some other synonym) is allowed the freest possible reign, they believe, will the maximum social good be realized. Technology, in their view, is a self-correcting system. Temporary oversight or “negative externalities” will and should be corrected by technological means. Attempts to restrict the free play of technological innovation are, in the nature of the case, self-defeating. Technological innovation exhibits a distinct tendency to work for the general welfare in the long run. Laissez innover! The men and women who are elevated by technology into commanding positions within various decision-making bureaucracies exhibit no generalized drive for power such as characterized, say, the landed gentry of pre-industrial Europe or the capitalist entrepreneur of the last century. For their social and institutional position and its supporting culture as well are defined solely by the fact that these men are problem solvers. (Organized knowledge for practical purposes again.) That is, they gain advantage and reward only to the extent that they can bring specific technical knowledge to bear on the solution of specific technical problems. Any more general drive for power would undercut the bases of their usefulness and legitimacy. Moreover their specific training and professional commitment to solving technical problems creates a bias against ideologies in general which inhibits any attempts to formulate a justifying ideology for the group. Consequently, they do not constitute a class and have no general interests antagonistic to those of their problem-beset clients. What is important about technical language is that the words, being alien to ordinary speech, hide their meaning from ordinary speakers; terms like foreign aid or technical assistance have a good sound in ordinary speech; only the initiate recognizes them as synonyms for the old-fashioned, nasty word, imperialism. Such instances can be corrected but when almost all of the public’s business is carried on in specialized jargon correction makes little difference. …technology in its very definition as the organization of knowledge for practical purposes assumes that the primary and really creative role in the social processes consequent on technological change is reserved for a scientific and technical elite, the elite which presumably discovers and organizes that knowledge. But if the scientific and technical elite and their indispensable managerial cronies are the really creative (and hardworking and altruistic) element in American society, what is this but to say that the common mass of men are essentially drags on the social weal? The structures which formerly guaranteed the rule of wealth, age, and family will not be destroyed (or at least not totally so). They will be firmed up and rationalized by the perpetual addition of trained (and, of course, acculturated) talent. In technologically advanced societies, equality of opportunity functions as a hierarchical principle, in opposition to the egalitarian social goals it pretends to serve. To the extent that it has already become the kind of “equality” we seek to institute in our society, it is one of the main factors contributing to the widening gap between the cultures of upper and lower class America. …technology is creating the basis for new and sharp class conflict in our society. That is, technology is creating its own working and managing classes just as earlier industrialization created its working and owning classes. Perhaps this suggests a return to the kind of class-based politics which characterized the US in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, rather than the somewhat more ambiguous politics which was a feature of the second quarter of this century. I am inclined to think that this is the case, though I confess the evidence for it is as yet inadequate. This leads to a final hypothesis, namely that laissez innover should be frankly recognized as a conservative or right-wing ideology. Would it surprise you to learn that the piece from which these passages are taken, with its discussions of free markets, technological meritocracy, benevolent tech services, class anxieties, and right-wing ideology masquerading as something else, all packaged into a tidy narrative, is not about Uber or venture capitalists or Silicon Valley at all? “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals,” by John McDermott was published in New York Review of Books nearly fifty years ago, in 1969. Its primary concern was not apps or the sharing economy, but “the very frontier of American technology” at the time, the Vietnam War, where computers were being used to, among other things, decide on bombing targets with perfect rationality by calculating the probability of striking enemy or troops or supplies with the idea that “American lives are very expensive and American weapons and Vietnamese lives very cheap.” The point of surfacing this piece is not to equate Uber’s logistical systems or Facebook’s social graph with computers that directed a war machine that took a number of lives because it was rationally calculated to be expedient, but to show how neatly these concerns from nearly fifty years ago — about a class of people permanently buoyed far above a new underclass by a deeply rational technological regime — map onto anxieties about the Valley and inequality today, down to the underlying political economy. Which is all to say, if the State of Things makes you feel anxious, maybe you’re right to feel that way? And if you don’t, well, you’re obviously right to feel that way. Giph by Huffington Post https://www.theawl.com/2015/11/a-theory-of-technology/