One thing I’ve noticed among my students is the use of the word technology as a kind of god-like force. Firstly, they use this extremely broad term to refer to a rather specific set of phenomena—more or less, the things that happen on Internet-connected smartphones or laptops. Secondly, they attribute to it a sort of power and agency that, I fear, reduces the space of their own power and agency.
On this point, I’m grateful to a recent footnote from L. M. Sacasas for giving an extended quotation from the final paragraph of Leo Marx’s 2010 essay “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept.” The passage follows a meticulous exploration of just how recent and particularly modern it is to speak of technology at all. (It turns out the name of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology helped establish it as a household word.) The quotation bears repeating here:
Technology, as such, makes nothing happen. By now, however, the concept has been endowed with a thing-like autonomy and a seemingly magical power of historical agency. We have made it an all-purpose agent of change. As compared with other means of reaching our social goals, the technological has come to seem the most feasible, practical, and economically viable. It relieves the citizenry of onerous decision-making obligations and intensifies their gathering sense of political impotence. The popular belief in technology as a—if not the—primary force shaping the future is matched by our increasing reliance on instrumental standards of judgment, and a corresponding neglect of moral and political standards, in making judgments about the direction of society. To expose the hazards embodied in this pivotal concept is a vital responsibility of historians of technology.
I wish I had had this passage on hand when working on my paper about “Innovation Amnesia.” Innovation amnesia is the phenomenon of forgetting pre-existing rules and power structures when a novel technology comes along. (Think: Uber bypassing taxi regulations because it is an app, or cryptocurrency bypassing securities regulations because it is on the Internet.) This phenomenon, in turn, depends upon the kind of culture that Marx here describes—one in which, “as compared with other means of reaching our social goals, the technological has come to seem the most feasible, practical, and economically viable. It relieves the citizenry of onerous decision-making obligations and intensifies their gathering sense of political impotence.”
There are two moves at once at work: the creeping belief that technology is the only efficacious path to social change, and the subsequent and pernicious relief that we no longer need to do the hard work of collective governance. These combine into a self-reinforcing pattern: political deskilling leads to an ever greater reliance on technological gods to do the work of problem-solving for us.
This pattern is alive and well in today’s AI discourse. Politics has failed to solve the climate crisis, so now we need energy-guzzling data centers to somehow solve it for us. Politics has failed to address economic injustice, but agentic workers will produce such phenomenal abundance that the problem will go away.
The same is also true about the dystopian visions. Don’t worry about the politics of arms races or military interventions, because the real threat is autonomous robots. Don’t worry about the new colonialism of data extraction and digital labor exploitation, because the real problem is a rogue AI killing us all with a bioweapon.
I am not suggesting that computers could not possibly be assistive in addressing climate change or that we should ignore the possibilities of so-called “existential risk.” What endangers human well-being most is the erosion of political agency. If people lacked the capacity to address climate change politically before the AI energy boom, can we really expect to tackle it after? If we can’t mobilize to pass regulations against discrimination and surveillance by social media companies, what makes us think we can do it for even wealthier AI companies?
As a new paper by Janet Vertesi et al. has pointed out, the political economy of the AI industry depends on the use of rhetorical “decoys”—fake problems we cannot solve that distract us from the real ones we can. This is just one technique among many by which the broad, god-like conception of technology continually gets in the way of people solving problems with each other, and it tricks us into thinking that we won’t need to.
With my students, I have stumbled on a useful protocol: Avoid, wherever possible, the word technology. Just don’t say it. As Leo Marx reminds us, we haven’t had it for most of human history. Instead, be more precise about what particular things or systems you are referring to. Perhaps that will dispel the god-like illusions and help us get back to the work of self-governing.