Why I don’t believe in their “Technology”​.
By: Jam'On Digital
Tags: History Of Technology, Media Criticism, Technology, Technology Criticism, Progress

While I write this, somewhere somebody is drafting tomorrow’s outrageous headline on the excesses of that politicized cultural construct we now even spell with a capital initial letter.

On the right, Shosana Zuboff’s vision of the “empowered consumerist”, on the left, Evgeny Morozov’s “ collectivization final solution”. In the middle, “ Weapons of Math Destruction” and all sorts of “ Political Turbulence”.

Technology, that vague concept that we primarily identify today with digital artifacts and the private lives and public declarations of its engineers, academics, salesmen and all of their respective organizations, has become a new routine in the global political agenda. It even re-opened old discussions on Ethical and Moral universal principles that postmodernity and its cynicisms seemed to have settled.

What started as a practical matter about the limits of market researchDuring the Enlightenment, science could only describe what IS, whereas human reason had the revolutionary power to decide what OUGHT to be. The difference between the “IT” and the “OUGHT” was the difference between Science and Ethics. today implies a political statement on the very same definition of progress or even the human condition.

We all know this is all but a new phenomenon. Our fascination with technology is nothing more than a physical symptom of our old love for science, which took us out of darkness and led us to Enlightenment. Back then, the place for techniques and artifacts in human matters was much clearer, though. It was people’s reason, will and passions what commanded History, and only that, our performance, could determine the level of Progress obtained throughout it. Science and technology helped a lot, of course, but they were precisely the mirror in which we could see our own imperfection. That mirror showed with scientific irrefutability what was physical reality, but it was only for human minds to democratically decide how reality and metaphysics should be.

And then Auguste Compte happened. Around 1865, positivists declared facts and its scientific verification our only possible source of knowledge, and so, ironically, our irrational faith on science was born. Marx’s Historical Materialism and the unquestionable assertion that the History of mankind is the History of its technological advancements came hand in hand with the positivists during that same period. From that point on, it wasn’t anymore so clear who should sit behind the wheels of History, human reason democratically organized, or scientific knowledge geared with the latest tech.

In 1959, the novelist and scientific C.P. Snow re-openend the debate Technology VS Humanities in a conference entitled “The two cultures”, and since then sociology and philosophy never stopped warning us about the dangers of our technified societies organized around the principles of scientific hyperrationality.

So, does that mean that it has always been like that? Were dongles and screws always such a complicated moral matter? When did technical artifacts, their inventors and merchants, become one of the most influential ingredients of our perceived everyday reality? Had electrification, the telephone or the TV the same impact on our views on politics, progress or even historical development, to the point of replacing us in our role and responsibility towards History?

It would be a longlife suicide -and a rather boring one- trying to summarize here some of Lewis Mumford’s or Brian Winston responses to this question. But if I chose those two authors in particular, it is precisely because they, in their disagreement, scientifically (!!) prove the inexistence of a simple answer.

Given such apparent impossibility to prove who’s making the world go round, I’m not going to be the first to rise the hand. What I dare to say, though, is that, in our daily overdose of #technews and its respective scandals, moral lessons and political manifestos, we seem to be definitely abandoning the humanist ideas of the Enlightenment, giving more and more importance to machines instead, to the extent of forgetting their instrumental and essentially human condition.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the continent known for its more idealist, less hobbesian take on the principles of Enlightenment, is also falling prey of the same fears towards the coming age, but giving it a more “ethical” and “democratic” twist. If America is all about violent “market disruption”, Europe is about civic tech, citizen-centric gov and GDPR compliance.