To Save Everything, Click Here by Evgeny Morozov

Author:Evgeny Morozov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2013-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

Against Technological Defeatism

Viewed in the abstract, it may seem that the tides of digital preemption, situational crime prevention, and reputation-based controls are unstoppable and irreversible. Information is everywhere, and it’s getting cheaper. All of us are carrying mobile phones. Technology seems to be moving in accordance with its own law—Moore’s law—and we, the humans, can only conform and tinker with our laws to meet technology’s demands.

This sentiment pervades our public debate about technology. Thus, the Wall Street Journal ’s Gordon Crovitz writes that “whatever the mix of good and bad, technology only advances and cannot be put back.” The New York Times’s Nick Bilton, writing of multitasking, notes that “whether it’s good for society or bad . . . is somewhat irrelevant at this point.” Parag and Ayesha Khanna argue in Hybrid Reality that “the flow of technology is at most slowed by reluctant governments, but it is more accurate to say that technology simply evades or ignores them in search of willing receivers.” All these commentators adopt the stance of what I call “digital defeatism,” which—by arguing that this amorphous and autonomous creature called “Technology” with a capital T has its own agenda—tends to acknowledge implicitly or explicitly that there’s little we humans can do about it.

This view of technology as an autonomous force has its own rather long intellectual pedigree; in 1978 Langdon Winner offered perhaps the best summary in his Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of- Control as a Theme in Political Thought. This view has been debunked hundreds of times as a lazy, unempirical approach to studying technological change, and yet it has never really left the popular discourse about technology. It has recently made a forceful appearance in Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants, and Kelly’s thought is not a bad place to observe technological defeatism up close, if only because he is a Silicon Valley maven and the first executive editor of Wired. Besides, very diverse thinkers about “the Internet”—from Tim Wu to Steven Johnson—cite Kelly’s What Technology Wants as an influence. Thus, it won’t be such a great stretch to say that Kelly’s theories do provide the intellectual grounds on which Internet-centrism grows and flourishes.

The defining feature of Kelly’s thought is its explicit denial of its own defeatism. Kelly, using a fancy word, “technium,” as a stand-in for “Technology” with a capital T, reassures his readers that “the technium wants what we design it to want and what we try to direct it to do.” This sounds like a rather uplifting, humanist message—but the very next sentence shatters it: “But in addition to those drives, the technium has its own wants. It wants to sort itself out, to self-assemble into hierarchical levels, just as most large, deeply interconnected systems do. The technium also wants what every living system wants: to perpetuate itself, to keep itself going. And as it grows, those inherent wants are gaining in complexity and force.”

Kelly offers the best of all possible worlds: technology is both what we make it of it and an autonomous force with its own wants and desires and largely independent of humans.

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