Technologie partout, liberté nulle part

Let’s focus, for instance, on the need for precision, prescription, and control that such a production process develops. In contrast to what happens in holistic technologies, the potter who made molds in a Chinese bronze foundry had little latitude for judgement. He had to perform to narrow prescriptions. The work had to be right – or else. And what is right is laid down beforehand, by others. When work is organized as a sequence of separately executable steps, the control over the work moves to the organizer, the boss or manager. […] In political terms, prescriptive technologies are designs for compliance. […] When working within such designs, a workforce becomes acculturated into a milieu in which external control and internal compliance are seen as normal and necessary. […] As methods of materials production, prescriptive technologies have brought into the real world of technology a wealth of important products that have raised living standards and increased well-being. At the same time they have created a culture of compliance. The acculturation to compliance and conformity has, in turn, accelerated the use of prescriptive technologies in administration, government, and social services. The same development has diminished resistance to the programming of people.

Looking at technology as practice, indeed as formalized practice, has some quite interesting consequences. One is that it links technology directly to culture, because culture, after all, is a set of socially accepted practices and values.

The common theme that runs through many disasterminimizing endeavours is the conviction that ordinary people matter – in the way Schumacher meant when he called his book Small Is Beautiful; Economics as if People Mattered. But we must remember that, in the real world of technology, most people live and work under conditions that are not structured for their well-being. The environment in which we live is much more structured for the well-being of technology. It is a manufactured and artificially constructed environment, not what one might call a natural environment. While our surroundings may be a milieu conducive to production, they are much less a milieu conducive to growth. […] Why don’t we speak about nature? It seems such an egocentric and technocentric approach to consider everything in the world with reference to ourselves. Environment essentially means what is around us, with the emphasis on US. It’s our environment, not the environment or the habitat of fish, bird, or tree.

The social history of the industrialization of clothing is similar to the current phase in the industrialization of eating. Food outlets put frozen or chemically prepared “unit meals” together like sleeves and collars for shirts – there are “Mc-Jobs” and no security of employment. Indeed, women sew less, cook less, and have to work hard outside the home to be able to buy clothing and food. What turns the promised liberation into enslavement are not the products of technology per se – the car, the computer, or the sewing machine – but the structures and infrastructures that are put in place to facilitate the use of these products and to develop dependency on them.

While the eighteenth century exercised control and domination by regarding human bodies as machines, the nineteenth century began to use machines alone as instruments of control. […] Industrial layout and design was often more a case of planning against undesirable or unpredictable interventions than it was of planning for greater and more predictable output and profit. […] What the Luddites and other groups of the period clearly perceived was the difference between work-related and control-related technologies.

What does this all mean to us as humans, as social and political beings, evolving within the patterns of nature and culture? It’s not that I believe everything asynchronous is “bad” and that everything synchronous is “good.” Not at all. Women in particular have often treasured the opportunity to work asynchronously – getting a bit of writing done when the kids are asleep, sneaking in a slice of private life into their tightly structured existences. But I see a real difference between supplementing a rigidly patterned structure with asynchronous activities and substituting synchronous functions by asynchronous schemes. I will elaborate on these distinctions later because what troubles me is not as much the nature of asynchronous processes but their increasing prevalance, if not dominance.

Technology, like democracy, includes ideas and practices; it includes myths and various models of reality. […] Technology is not the sum of the artifacts, of the wheels and gears, of the rails and electronic transmitters Technology is a system. It entails far more than its individual material components. Technology involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset.

It is my conviction that nothing short of a global reformation of major social forces and of the social contract can end this historical period of profound and violent transformations, and give a manner of security to the world and to its citizens. Such a development will require the redefinition of rights and responsibilities, and the setting of limits to power and control. There have to be completely different criteria for what is permissible and what is not. Central to any new order that can shape and direct technology and human destiny will be a renewed emphasis on the concept of justice. The viability of technology, like democracy, depends in the end on the practice of justice and on the enforcement of limits to power.

Lots is known about the life expectancy of people in different parts of the world, about the caloric requirements for their well-being, and so on. Almost nothing is known about the global energy need of devices or about their lifespans. China can embark on a rigorous one-child-per-family policy for the sake of the country’s future, and in general that policy has been approved by the world community. But where in North America, western Europe, or Japan is there serious discussion on the political level about, for instance, the need for a one-car-per-family policy for the sake of the country’s or the world’s future? Now may be the time to take machine demography seriously and enter into real discussions about machine population control.

The real world of technology seems to involve an inherent trust in machines and devices (“production is under control“) and a basic apprehension of people (“growth is chancy, one can never be sure of the outcome“). If we do not wish to visualize people as sources of problems and machines and devices as sources of solutions, then we need to consider machines and devices as cohabitants of this earth within the limiting parameters applied to human populations.

The daily barrage of advertising and propaganda.

Science is not the mother of technology. Science and technology today have parallel or side-by-side relationships; they stimulate and utilize each other. It is more appropriate to regard science and technology as one enterprise with a spectrum of interconnected activity than to think of two fields of endeavour – science as one, and applied science and technology as the other.

But the pseudorealities and the images are there, and the world is structured to believe in them. If I want to promote change I need to understand and appreciate the structuring of the images, even if I don’t trust their content. Opting out by individuals really doesn’t change the agenda of what is urgent and what is not, unless there is a collective effort to supplement and substitute the images with genuine experience. Just because the imaging technology has emphasized the far over the near, the near doesn’t go away. Even though the abnormal is given a great deal more play than the normal, the normal still exists and, with it, all its problems and challenges. But somehow observing a homeless person sleeping in the park around the corner doesn’t seem to register as an event when it’s crowded out in the observer’s mind by images from far-away places.

This is why I have a sense of urgency to map the real world of technology, so that we might see how in our social imagination the near is disadvantaged over the far.

There is a lot of talk about global crises and “our common future.“ However, there is far too little discussion of the structuring of the future which global applications of modern technologies carry in their wake. What ought to be of central concern in considering our common future are the aspects of technological structuring that will inhibit or prevent future changes in social and political relations. […] Once technical devices are interposed, they allow a physical distance between the parties. The give and take – that is, the reciprocity – is distorted, reduced, or even eliminated.

I’d like to stress that reciprocity is not feedback. Feedback is a particular technique of systems adjustment. It is designed to improve a specific performance. The performance need not be mechanical or carried out by devices, but the purpose of feedback is to make the thing work. Feedback normally exists within a given design. It can improve the performance but it cannot alter its thrust or the design. Reciprocity, on the other hand, is situationally based. It’s a response to a given situation. It is neither designed into the system nor is it predictable. Reciprocal responses may indeed alter initial assumptions. They can lead to negotiations, to give and take, to adjustment, and they may result in new and unforeseen developments.

Let me emphasize again that technologies need not be used the way we use them today. It is not a question of either no technology or putting up with the current ones. Just remember that even in the universe of constructed images and pseudorealities there still exists a particular enclave of personal directness and immediacy: the world of the ham-radio operator. It is personal, reciprocal, direct, affordable – all that imaging technology is not – and it has become in many cases a very exceptional early warning system of disasters. It is a dependable and resilient source of genuine communication. I am citing this example so as not to leave the impression that the technological reduction of meaningful human contact and reciprocal response is inherently inevitable.

The common problem of road safety has been transformed into the private problem of fines and demerit points and into a technological cat-and-mouse game. One might say that the technological tools designed to establish random criminality have prevented the development of techniques to establish collectively safe driving patterns. Thus it may be wise, when communities are faced with new technological solutions to existing problems, to ask what these techniques may prevent and not only to check what the techniques promise to do.

One of the reasons I emphasize the link between public policies related to the provision of infrastructures and the spread of technology is the following: Rarely are there public discussions about the merits or problems of adopting a particular technology. For example, Canadians have never been asked (for instance, through a bill before the House of Commons) whether they are prepared to spend their taxes to develop, manufacture, and market nuclear reactors. Yet without publicly funded research and development, industrial support and promotion, and government loans to purchasers, Canadian nuclear technology would not exist. The political systems in most of today’s real world of technology are not structured to allow public debate and public input at the point of planning technological enterprises of national scope. And it is public planning that is at issue here. Regardless of who might own railways or transmission lines, radio frequencies or satellites, the public sphere provides the space, the permission, the regulation, and the finances for much of the research. It is the public sphere that grants the “right of way.” It seems to be high time that we, as citizens, become concerned about the granting of such technological rights of way.

Technology has changed this notion about the obligations of a government to its citizens. The public infrastructures that made the development and spread of technology possible have become more and more frequently roads to divisible benefits. Thus the public purse has provided the wherewithal from which the private sector derives the divisible benefits, while at the same time the realm from which the indivisible benefits are derived has deteriorated and often remains unprotected.

The concept of a conserver society arises from a deep concern for the future, and the realization that decisions taken today, in such areas as energy and resources, may have irreversible and possibly destructive impacts in the medium to long term. The necessity for a conserver society follows from our perception of the world as a finite host to humanity and from our recognition of increasing global independence.

If one doesn’t watch the introduction of new technologies and particularly watch the infrastructures that emerge, promises of liberation through technology can become a ticket to enslavement.

To recap: many new technologies and their products have entered the public sphere in a cloud of hope, imagination, and anticipation. In many cases these hopes were to begin with fictional, rather than real; even in the best of circumstances they were vastly exaggerated. Discussion focused largely on individuals, whether users or workers, and promised an easier life with liberation from toil and drudgery. Discourse never seemed to focus on the effects of the use of the same device by a large number of people, nor was there any focus on the organizational and industrial implications of the new technologies, other than in the vaguest of terms. In spite of the exaggerated individual promises, techniques were treated as if they would fit easily into “normal life.” Carefully selected phrases used to describe new technical advances could generate an image of chummy communities and adventurous users. But once a given technology is widely accepted and standardized, the relationship between the products of the technology and the users changes. Users have less scope, they matter less, and their needs are no longer the main concern of the designers. There is, then, a discernable pattern in the social and political growth of a technology that does not depend on the particular technical features of the system in question.

You see, if somebody robs a store, it’s a crime and the state is all set and ready to nab the criminal. But if somebody steals from the commons and from the future, it’s seen as entrepreneurial activity and the state cheers and gives them tax concessions rather than arresting them. We badly need an expanded concept of justice and fairness that takes mortgaging the future into account.

Whenever someone talks to you about the benefits and costs of a particular project, don’t ask “What benefits?” ask “Whose benefits and whose costs?”

Oral traditions do not codify transmission and interpretation of laws and values in the way that textually based societies do. Indeed, strict adherence to the letter of the law is only possible when the letter or the writ exists and carries with it the belief in its authority almost regardless of context.

However, the current widespread use of computer networks and related technologies has led to something different: the prevalence of asynchronicity, indicated by the loosening, if not the abandonment, of previously compulsory time and space patterns. This is a most significant change. No longer is one pattern superseded by another pattern; the change now appears as a move from an existing pattern to no discernable structure. I consider the evolving destructuring by asynchronicity as an extremely important, if not the crucial facet of the new electronic technologies.

Mitchell’s vision is as breathtaking for what it depicts as for what it does not. The inhabitants of the City of Bits are still real live human beings, yet nature, of which humans are but a small part, appears to have no autonomous space in the bitsphere. There are no seasonal rhythms, no presence of the land nor the ebb and flow of individual lives, even though these are the synchronous patterns that have shaped culture and community throughout the time and, through their patterns, have provided a source of meaning to people for many generations.