An Interview With Yours Truly

The author, relaxing at home

I received a nice invitation recently from the popular blogger, Joseph Ratliff. Having read my book (Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology), he asked if I would care to respond to a few questions regarding my views on the world of machines. I said sure.

Here’s our “interview," as posted July 23 on The Ratliff Notepad.

Thanks, Joseph. 

Think Technological Progress Is Always Something To Praise? Not So Fast…

Posted on July 23, 2015 by Joseph Ratliff

As I’ve written before, I get a chance to interact with some pretty fascinating people.

One of those people you will be introduced to today is Doug Hill, who has some very interesting thoughts about technology (very similar to mine).  He had published a book on Kindle titled Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology. 

Currently, that book isn’t available for reasons Doug will provide at the end of this post, but I did get a chance to ask him 5 questions via email about it.

The result was a “mini-interview” that should broaden your perspective about technology, Silicon Valley, techno-utopians, and our lives.

Enjoy, my questions in bold, Doug’s answers in standard text…

1. You start in the introduction by introducing a hero of yours, Lewis Mumford, and his “bird’s-eye view of technology.”  Can you please give the readers of this interview a brief summary of what Mumford’s “bird’s-eye view” was?

I’m not sure how familiar your readers will be with Mumford. I’m no Mumford scholar but I’ve been profoundly influenced by his three monumental works on technology: Technics and Civilization, Technics and Human Development and the Pentagon of Power (the last two comprise two volumes of a collective work entitled The Myth of the Machine).

Those books are informed by an incredibly deep and broad knowledge of history, combined with equally remarkable powers of critical perception. Mumford’s “bird’s eye view” of technology is a product of that combination. As a longtime architecture critic for the New Yorker magazine, Mumford wrote well, but what’s most important are his observations regarding the fundamental characteristics of technological development.

I also quote in my introduction the philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann, who said that we can only begin to appreciate the nature of technology by looking at “the pervasiveness and consistency of its pattern,” just as we can only begin to understand its influence when we recognize the “normal totality” of technology’s presence in the world. That normal totality has created a massive forest/trees problem that afflicts everyone who lives in the technological society. You have to get a certain distance to be able to appreciate the degree to which technology has shaped and continues to shape our daily experience, which in turn has shaped and continues to shape who we are. That’s what Mumford meant by taking a “bird’s eye view” of technology.

2. In chapter 1 you have a focus on “technological utopianism,” or the general idea that we can use technology to move closer to a “utopian” future. You focus on several thinkers like Ray Kurzweil and Eric Drexler.  Can you please share a brief version of your own view on this “technological utopian” viewpoint?

Technological utopianism is a way of describing the belief that technology will deliver us, soon, to some version of Eden. The two most commonly promised features of this machine-made paradise are universal plenty and endless leisure. Ray Kurzweil and other transhumanists have added to the list of gifts technology will soon bestow infinite cognitive power and the eradication of death.

We hear a lot of utopian promises coming out of Silicon Valley today, and it’s startling how closely they match the promises of technological deliverance that have accompanied technological advance literally for centuries. (I quote some then and now examples of these parallels in my book, and it’s fun to see them side by side.) The utopians uniformly fail to recognize that they’re telling an old story, which testifies to the narrowness of their vision. They also fail to adequately acknowledge the myriad ways in which technological advance has taken us in the opposite direction of Eden, however you define it.

These qualities make the technological utopians truly dangerous, rather than simply annoying, because the fantasies they promulgate are so seductive. Yes, they tell us, the world is a mess, but relax: the engineers know how to fix it, and pretty soon, if we stay out of their way, they will, at which point everything will be really cool! It’s a sales pitch that drowns out recognition of technology’s dangers, thereby undermining the possibility that we might proceed on the basis of more realistic expectations. A more measured approach could celebrate the contributions of science and technology to the betterment of the world without stimulating the pursuit of gold, glory and distraction that so dominate the technical arts today.

3. My favorite part of the book is chapter 7, “The Nature of Technology.”  In that chapter you explain the 4 characteristics of technology’s nature.  Can you share a summary of those characteristics here?

I’m happy to hear that you liked that chapter, because that’s one I expect will rub some people the wrong way. The suggestion that machines collectively can be said to have a nature – a set of inherent characteristics that produce a consistent pattern of “behaviors” – might, at first blush, seem pretty wacky. My hope is that reading my analysis of those characteristics will allay that initial skepticism. Even if you don’t end up agreeing with my arguments, I think they can help you think about technology in a way you might not have before.

My argument about the nature of technology is set up by the book’s previous chapter, in which I review some of the definitions of technology that have been proposed by a variety of scholars over the years. My own view aligns with those who define technology broadly – systemically – a view that for me means that technological systems incorporate the human beings who run, manage, use or are used by them. At a certain stage of development – as the size, reach and ubiquity of the technologies in question increase – dehumanization becomes an inevitable result of that incorporation. Charlie Chaplin spinning on the massive gears of the factory in Modern Times is an expression of that view. Commercial air travel entails an especially immersive absorption in the technological web most of us are familiar with today. Many people have jobs that make them feel as though they’re cogs in a machine, and from technology’s point of view, they are.

The four characteristics that identify the nature of technology are:

1. Technology is by nature expansive.
2. Technology is by nature rational, direct and aggressive.
3. Technology by its nature combines or converges with other technologies.
4. Technology by its nature strives for control.

I won’t go into detail here about what I mean by those characteristics except to emphasize that together they lead to two of the most important points of my book:

1) That to see technology accurately is to understand it as a collective entity rather than merely a set of discrete artifacts, and…

2) That in its collective effects technology embodies a force in the world that is similar to but separate from the force of nature, and in opposition to nature.

A lot of writers disagree with that last point in particular. They argue that the opposite is true, at least as far as human beings are concerned: that human nature is inherently technological. I agree we have a tendency to bond with our machines, but again, as the size, reach and ubiquity of our technologies increase, the law of diminishing returns applies. As Jacques Ellul often said, at some point a change in quantity becomes a change in quality.

4. Then, in chapter 8 you bring up the possibility of humans losing control of technology.  Please explain?

That’s the chapter in which I talk about the question of technological autonomy. To suggest that we don’t control our machines is another unpopular point of view that becomes more convincing upon examination. If we’re in control of our technologies we should be able to choose whether or not we want them in our lives. We simply don’t have that choice. That’s true in part because technology becomes a form of embodiment. As I said above, we’ve defined our physical world (academics would say our “surround”) and therefore our existence, by the technological structures we’ve put in place. We’ve also lost control of the impact our machines have on the environment. Global warming is the ultimate demonstration of that. We know they’re killing the planet and yet we’re incapable of taking the necessary steps to stop the damage because we can’t undo our commitments to technology.

My argument in the book is that we live today in a state of “de facto technological autonomy.” What that means is that although it is theoretically possible to live without technology, practically speaking you can’t. To reject technology is to find yourself excluded from any meaningful participation in the culture. Try applying for a job without using the internet, for example. Try getting elected to Congress without using television. Getting by without a car is possible, but not easy; if you don’t drive, you’re marginalized. In all those examples some measure of choice is involved; they don’t account for the countless exposures to technology over which we have no control. Again, global warming is the ultimate example. The lives of Inuit fishermen in Alaska will be profoundly disrupted by climate change even though their carbon footprint is negligible.

A reasonable response to these sorts of arguments is to say, sure, there are some problems associated with technological development, but there are also innumerable benefits. On balance, we’re ahead. To that I’d say, maybe – I would never argue that technology is all bad, and I’m well aware that I personally wouldn’t survive a week in the wild without it. My own way of life is as committed to technology as anyone else’s (or almost as committed – I still don’t own a smart phone). The point of the argument about technological autonomy is whether we can choose which technologies we want to live with and which technologies we can choose to live without. Is it really an all or nothing proposition? The nature of technology suggests that it is, and the consequences of that are disastrous, for a multitude of reasons.

5. Throughout the book you refer to Jacques Ellul, as I have in many of my own essays on technology.  What are some of your favorite ideas about technology that Ellul explored?

Without question Ellul has influenced my thinking about technology more than anyone else. His work is brilliant, passionate, uncompromising and, I admit, occasionally over the top. A few years ago I wrote a piece for the Boston Globe intended to introduce general readers to Ellul; it’s here. I agree with what Albert Borgmann said when I interviewed him for that piece: It’s easy to dismiss Ellul as a bringer of bad news, but what makes him important is the comprehensiveness of his explanation of the technological phenomenon coupled with his powerful moral concern.

The essence of Ellul’s argument is that technology is a unified force that imposes demands that erode and ultimately destroy the fullness of what it means to be human. He used the word “technique” rather than “technology” to make the point that technology must be seen not merely as a collection of devices, but as a way of thinking and a form of being. Technique for Ellul includes the methods and strategies that drive technological systems as well as the quantitative mentality that applies those methods and strategies. The central goal and overriding value of that mentality is efficiency.

Here’s a representative quote from Ellul’s masterpiece, The Technological Society, published in French in 1954 and in English a decade later:

“It is mere vanity to wish to distinguish a technique as good or bad according to its end. Whether technique acts to the advantage of a dictator or of a democracy, it makes use of the same weapons, acts on the individual and manipulates his subconscious in identical ways, and in the end leads to the formation of exactly the same type of human being…the well-kneaded citizen.”

Here’s another:

“Technique worships nothing, respects nothing. It has a single role: to strip off externals, to bring everything to light, and by rational use to transform everything into means…Far from being restrained by any scruples before the sacred, technique constantly assails it…The mysterious is merely that which has not yet been technicized.”

One more:

“It is apparently our fate to be facing a ‘golden age’ in the power of sorcerers who are totally blind to the meaning of the human adventure.”

How can readers get in touch, and what is the status of your book?

The short story is that I’m a journalist who has studied the history and philosophy of technology for more than twenty years. My blog is The Question Concerning Technology. I also have a Facebook page and a Twitter account (@DougHill25) dedicated to my thoughts on technology.

I haven’t been very active on any of those fronts lately, due to the pressures of a new job, but I hope to resume regular communiqués soon. My book, Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology, is currently in the review process at a major publisher and not currently available, but I hope it will be soon.

I will keep you posted.

A Felicitous Environment, Achieved

"The overall sociological conditions in a society must provide a favorable environment for propaganda to succeed.” 

 Jacques Ellul, 1965

And speaking of Moby Dick...

I came across this quote from the novel today, from Chapter 58, "Brit": 

"….though but a moment's consideration will teach, however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make."

 


Illustration: Tony Millionaire

Andersen, Ortega, and the Decline of Western Civilization

José Ortega y Gasset    

As a fan of the late December thumbsucker – those journalistic attempts to take stock of the year's achievements in various fields of endeavor – I was struck by the marked pessimism of many of the 2011 entries. Two themes in particular regularly appeared: that the culture seems creatively spent, and that as a result artists are looking backward for what little inspiration they can muster. 

Jon Caramanica concluded in the New York Times, for example, that 2011 might be remembered "as the most numbing year for mainstream rock music in history," a year when even the best of a legion of mediocrities "walked blindly in footprints laid out years, even decades, earlier." Similarly, Salon's Matt Zoller Seitz noted that the year's most talked about movies and TV shows were drenched in longing for an earlier, pre-digital age, before everything became virtual and people could actually touch – and feel – the world around them. 

The most ambitious attempt to take the temperature of the Zeitgeist was Kurt Andersen's year-end essay in Vanity Fair, "You Say You Want a Devolution?" The article's subhead accurately described the gist of his argument: "For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape – its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment – changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new."     

Kurt Andersen    

There's nothing new about nostalgia, of course, but the despairing tone of Anderson's article and those of his colleagues was unusual. By coincidence, they happened to appear just as I was finishing one of those classics of philosophy I'd long intended to read, José Oretga y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses. Despair was a dominant theme in Ortega's work, too. Indeed, although much in Revolt of the Masses doesn't go down easily today – the book is overtly elitist and Eurocentric – there are intriguing parallels between Ortega's major themes and those sounded by the December thumb-suckers of 2011. Timing has something to do with that – Revolt of the Masses appeared in 1930, just as the Great Depression was gaining momentum – as does technology.  

Ortega's central point was that the emergence of modern consumer abundance coupled with liberal democratic ideals had bestowed an unprecedented increase in the scope of opportunity, experience, and freedom available to the average citizen. That was the good news. The bad news was that this expansiveness had led to a similarly unprecedented degree of self confidence on the part of those average citizens – confidence that was wholly unearned and undeserved. The masses had come to consider themselves, Ortega said, fully capable of determining what course the state and the culture should follow, with disastrous results. As an aristocrat and an intellectual, Ortega believed an appalling degradation was ongoing in the conduct of public affairs.  The "sovereignty of the unqualified individual," he declared, had taken hold. 

Sarah Palin    

As I say, some of Ortega's opinions can be cringe-worthy – I understand why some critics consider him a proto-fascist – but the text as a whole contains enough qualifications to defuse, for me, much of that discomfort. For one thing, what made an individual common for Ortega had nothing to do with class and everything to do with attitude. Nonetheless, he was no fan of the cacophony that prevails in the modern marketplace of ideas. "The leveling demands of a generous democratic inspiration have been changed," he says, "from aspirations and ideals into appetites and unconscious assumptions."

It's those appetites and assumptions that resonate most clearly with contemporary concerns. Like Kurt Andersen, Ortega saw a central paradox in modern experience between the "plentitude" of available choices and our tendency to withdraw in response to that plentitude. An excess of opportunity overwhelms us. Part of the reason that is so, Ortega believed, is that we have pridefully abandoned any respect for traditional values, leaving ourselves with no standards to hold onto in the maelstrom of change. At the same time, the environment created by technology – 1930s technology, yes, but still potently disruptive – demanded that we adapt ourselves in ways no tradition could prepare us for. We become, he said, "what our world invites us to be, and the basic features of our soul are impressed upon it by the form of its surroundings as in a mold." 

H.R. Giger, “Work No. 456”    

Also like Andersen, Ortega believed the culture had lost its creative vitality along with its sense of direction. Modern life is a time, he wrote,

when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create. Lord of all things, he is not lord of himself. He feels lost amid his own abundance. With more means at its disposal, more knowledge, more technique than ever, it turns out that the world today goes the same way as the worst of worlds that have been; it simply drifts. Hence the strange combination of a sense of power and a sense of insecurity which has taken up its abode in the soul of modern man.

Ortega was at his angriest when he denounced the childishness of modern culture, a childishness that from his perspective afflicted nations as well as individuals. Conditioned by plentitude, he said, the masses take their comforts for granted and, like spoiled children, throw tantrums at any suggestion of restraint. "To spoil," he said, "means to put no limit on caprice, to give one the impression that everything is permitted to him and that he has no obligations." 

Few of us, I suspect, would have trouble citing examples of childish behavior we encounter today, from cell-phone shouters in restaurants to the corporate executives who skirt safety standards for the sake of profit.

Another thing Ortega and Andersen share is an awareness that Western culture had cycled though periods of satiation and despair before, an awareness that failed to mitigate their apprehensions for the future. Andersen worries that Western civilization might be coming to an end "not with a bang, but with a long, nostalgic whimper." In translation from the Spanish, Ortega's premonition was odder, but no more cheerful. "Whoever has not felt the danger of our times palpitating under his hand," he wrote, "has not really penetrated to the vitals of destiny, he has merely pricked its surface."     

©Doug Hill, 2012

Say It Ain't So, Joe: A Football Machine Jumps the Rails

One of my favorite observers of current affairs is James Howard Kunstler, the author of The Geography of Nowhere and other books. Last week he posted on his blog a commentary on the Penn State football scandal that typically combined astute social and political analysis with moral jeremiad. Its opening sentence captures the flavor of his style: 

"The Penn State football sex scandal, and the depraved response of the university community at all levels, tells whatever you need to know about the spiritual condition of this floundering, rudderless, republic and its ignoble culture."

Kunstler's essay made me think more about the Penn State scandal and its relevance to the question concerning technology. I'll list here a few connections that came to mind, using as a lens the thought of Jacques Ellul.

First, I'd quibble with Kunstler's comment that American culture is "rudderless." In truth I think we have a rudder that steers us methodically in the direction of technology, or, more accurately, in the direction of what Ellul called "technique."

Technique is the word Ellul used to acknowledge that technology is more than just machines. It is a systemic phenomenon that encompasses, in addition to machines, the systems in which machines exist, the people who are enmeshed in those systems, and the modes of thought that promote the effective functioning of those systems. 

Ellul defined technique as "the translation into action of man’s concern to master things by means of reason, to account for what is subconscious, make quantitative what is qualitative, make clear and precise the outlines of nature, take hold of chaos and put order into it.” 

The relentless drive to bring all aspects of the technological society into conformity with the demands of technique is what I mean when I say that such a society is not, technically speaking, "rudderless" at all. We tend to overlook the steadiness with which we proceed on our technological course, given that it creates an infinite variety of disruptions in its wake.

Backpedaling now, Kunstler's use of the word "rudderless" was entirely accurate in the sense he intended. That is, we are rudderless because we are not in truth guided by the moral, ethical, or legal standards we profess to be guided by, or even by what might be considered common sense. 

The disjunction between our professed values and the values of technique leads to all sorts of hypocrisies. As Kunstler pointed out, college football programs are supposed to be about building character. In truth, as everyone knows, their primary purpose is to produce profit and institutional growth through various mechanisms, including TV contracts, sales of tickets and merchandise, alumni donations, student enrollments, and brand loyalty (also known as "school spirit"). 

As the owner and operator of one of the nation's most profitable sports machines, it's hardly surprising that for Penn State, keeping the machine running was more important than stopping child rape.

There's an apparent contradiction between technique's emphasis on rationality and the antithesis of rational behavior displayed by Penn State's student body in the wake of Joe Paterno's firing. In fact, as Ellul pointed out, riots and technique go hand in hand.

Mob psychology is one of the chief goals of technique in a consumerist society. Individuals are molded, with the help of journalism, entertainment media, and advertising, into a manipulable mass. The "chief requirement" of propaganda, Ellul said, is "to produce individuals especially open to suggestion who can be easily set into motion….The critical faculty has been suppressed by the creation of collective passions.”

Ellul also noted that propaganda has the power to create a "new sphere of the sacred," a sphere that is beyond criticism. Obviously, as far as Penn State was concerned, Joe Paterno had entered such a realm. 

Like many people, I was appalled by the rioting of the Penn State students, but their behavior was hardly inexplicable. They are, after all, children of the technological society, and thus products of that society. In the minds of many people extreme displays of emotion, often verging on violence, are part of the point of being a fan at sports events. College students today are also coming of age at a time when the excesses of technique have created a series of conditions that make the transition to adulthood especially challenging.

Ellul argued repeatedly that the technological society requires that human beings adapt to the conditions of technique, and that doing so creates a host of psychological insecurities. In order to allay those fears, technique provides various mechanisms of release and distraction. Sports hysteria fits that bill nicely. It makes little sense to expect rational behavior in the context of that hysteria.

One of the key reasons sports qualifies as technique is its emphasis on performance. "Technique is the instrument of performance," Ellul said. "What is important is to go higher and faster; the object of the performance means little.”

As the affirmation of performance, winning outstrips such niceties as character building, honor, or sacrifice for community. No coincidence that the emphasis on performance in sports parallels the emphasis on performance in business. Since the Industrial Revolution we've witnessed the introduction of an unbroken string of performance-enhancing techniques, from the assembly line to the human resources department. Emphasis on superior performance has been with us since ancient times, of course. The difference today is that the standard against which we measure ourselves is the machine. 

The use of performance enhancing drugs in sports is entirely consistent with those priorities. Here, too, it makes little sense to be surprised by behavior that exactly fits the context in which it appears. 

Today technology allows us to indulge our preoccupation with performance as never before. Doctors recommend a host of screening procedures that may or may not lengthen lives, while participants in the "quantified self" movement track every biological function, apparently in hopes that the constant monitoring of personal statistics will somehow provide a meaningful route to self knowledge.

Surely this was not what Socrates had in mind when he said the unexamined life is not worth living.

Photo Credit: Sean Simmers, The Patriot-News

©Doug Hill, 2012