The good and bad of technology, once and for all
(Catalogue Essay for “Negatec” Exhibition in Buenos Aires, March 2007)
I met Luis Camnitzer in a cafe in New York shortly after he invited me to write this text. Sitting across from me at a tiny wooden table he described each artwork in "Negatec" with much enthusiasm, drawing the blueprint of the exhibition on a napkin. The exhibition positions itself in the space between utopian and dystopian approaches to technology while probing this territory for its potential for social change. I am not part of the blame-technology-first crowd and neither is Camnitzer. His introductory essay for this catalogue, which I translated by pasting his Spanish original into GoogleTranslate, made this crystal clear. [1]
The perennial argument that technology is bad for you is neither dialectic nor productive. It's especially weird if it's not tied to the pros and cons of specific technologies. "If you give an axe to an oppressive regime they will cut your hands off." That is at least how science fiction author and technology critic Bruce Sterling phrased it with an upswing in his voice. [2] If you give powerful technologies to a democratic government it will probably do amazing things for its people. "You don't get the good without the bad." Conversations about the possibilities of technologies are all too quickly mixed up with the dance around the corporate campfire, where the magic of technology (and their projected futures) becomes the sales pitch.
Clearly, the Internet and all its mobile device tentacles have led to horrendous addiction and to an effect that the likes of Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson call "continuous partial attention." People use computers behind the backs of their friends and partners; screen addiction is a painful reality in the United States. Have you ever caught yourself in front of your email inbox with a thirst for interaction, waiting for signs of acknowledgments or love to tumble in? Do you check email every few minutes? Have you ever found that you waste time online drifting across the endless ocean of websites? This addiction to interaction and the increased number of choices that the Internet affords also makes us miserable (stressed, full of anxiety, and depressed). But instead of pointing fingers at this or that technology we should strive for an understanding of the grammar of these technologies which have us in their clutches.
The always-on condition of contemporary urban life leads to immediate availability of people, which has also led to shorter and shorter deadlines in the workplace. Given these present-day realities, how can we tackle social problems while seeing them as secondary in relation to technology? How can we divorce political from technological discourses? The technological future cannot be discussed in terms of de-contextualized debates about the Internet because the networks are populated by anything but autonomous players.
It is equally unhelpful to create a dichotomy between two camps: those with conformist views of technology and others who see technology as a monster that swallows us. Marcuse as well as Foucault analyzes society as life-draining machinery fueled by dominated citizens. The question about technology is not whether "to take it or leave it." While the assembly line was the long arm of management in 1913, today machines are powered by networked technological systems. In 1941 the Ford Motor Company experienced its first general strike at the River Rouge Plant and a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project predicts a movement of "tech refuseniks" who will live completely off the network and "will commit acts of violence and terror against technology-inspired change" in 2020. [3] We could link such pessimism back to the late 1970s when Langdon Winner and Jacques Ellul asked how technology improved human dignity, well-being, and freedom. Marx, who is otherwise sometimes perceived as a technological determinist, writes in Manuscripts that "The more the worker expends himself in the work, the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to himself." (Marx, p 122)
In the search for the potentialities of technology it is vital to go beyond the pessimism/optimism divide. Technology is one important dimension of human existence that matters a great deal. In relation to this technology-rich life, we should ask what offers meaning and fulfillment. At the same it is obvious that technology will not fix everything. How can we overcome social problems if we see them as secondary in relation to technology? Think of the fragmentation and de-humanization of labor. Manual labor is pushed to the global south and creative/intellectual work is concentrated in the "developed world." Global outsourcing and the unfulfilling work in call centers or the physically dangerous labor in "Free Zone" sweatshops are further examples. By the same token cultural power is centralized. In the developed world most people are "time poor" while in "developing countries" material poverty reigns. In the United States the workday gets ever longer. A mother with three children may work four jobs and still not be able to pay the rent. The working poor also belong to those 47 million Americans who cannot afford health insurance. People are completely controlled by credit ratings and kept in (the work) place by student loans. We could call this passive-aggressive capitalism. How can technology encourage people to see their life in terms of alternatives, preferences and choices?
Today, the intellectual horizons and qualifications behind jobs are decreasing. Nintendo's university in Washington State delivers just-in-time-knowledge and outright ignores the humanities. All what is needed from the worker is a particular set of skills necessary for an upcoming project. Such de-skilling is common practice in new media trade schools worldwide that follow the corporate imperative that rejects Alexander Humboldt's non-pragmatic notion of education for its own sake, later "Americanized" at Harvard University. Education is a central problem and in particular the global distribution of knowledge is a burning problem. The literacy rate in the United States is lower than that in Mexico. Initially I asked how we can overcome all these problems if we see them as secondary in relation to technology. I do believe that technology has a role to play in this context.
What is the role of technology? Today, education takes place not only in the classroom, but also informally online. "Peer education" is localized in discussion forums where strangers share their skills and knowledge. Individuals offer free podcasts with language tutorials, thousands got together to create the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia that out-cooperates any corporate effort, and citizens in Iraq report their part of the story on the blog "Iraq The Model." [4] Individual citizens can now make themselves heard. They have a novel opportunity to have a voice, to speak.
The speech situations that sociable media provide to millions allow them to experience themselves as speakers. This "massification" has never been there before on that scale. Millions of people blog, share their lives, or learn from each other. The years to come will show if the experience of having a voice on sociable web media platforms likes blogs, wikis, or peer-to-peer technologies will lead to more people taking part in the electoral process, for example. At this point, skeptics may rightfully interject that this phenomenon is geographically limited and that is true by all means. Africa has minimal Internet access, for example. But countries like Kenya also experience tremendous changes through the "networked sociality" afforded by cellphones. The developing world has a higher density of cellphone use per capita than the United States, which is mainly focused on text messaging. [5]
Technology reaches deep into the corners of the everyday, from Accra to Denver- it shapes habits and vastly directs our attention. A fund raising letter asking you to donate to Doctors without Borders may not get your attention while the same request posed through a widget on your desktop may engage you. Today's communication technologies are flexible distribution systems that can make use of the elusive windows of opportunity to catch our attention.
In the film Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky pointed out that he has limited hope for alternative media because the resources of the corporate mass media simply overwhelm activist efforts. When he stated this in the film, released in 1992, this might have been true. Today, however, blogs like the “Daily Kos” are read by almost 500,000 per day. [6]
If we exclude technology from our projections and ideas for social change and the future, if we do not even attempt to occupy the technological imaginary, then possibilities and probabilities are foreclosed by technological elite and their default vision of the market and the military-industrial complex kicks in. There is more to technology than sex, profit, fun and power. Yes, really.
"Technological development is a scene in which various competing groups attempt to advance their interests and their corresponding civilizational projects. Many technically feasible outcomes are possible and not just the one imposed by the victors in the struggle." (Feenberg, 2002: 143)
Our projections should be probable and go beyond computer game visions. The capitalist context into which most of us are socialized made us believe that there is a somewhat "natural," transhistorical inevitability to technological development under the banner of the market. What are the interests of the players in the realm of the technical sphere? Do we still realize how human values are systematically naturalized in this process? Almost everything practical wins and efficiency is the common denominator. The assembly line arguably led to the emergence of self-help, followed by psycho-pharmaceutical fixes of the "non-functional individual," proposing that what is wrong is really the worker herself and not the environment that causes her dissatisfaction, anxiety and depression. Today, addiction to networked devices is a growing and very serious problem.
Markets determine the development of the tools we are using and they shape our way of life. Economical values are the payoff for human potentialities in this society. Our lifestyle, soaked with technology, directly feeds into hegemonic domination. The interests of those in power are inscribed in the technical code, its machines and networks. Technologies are not just tools and things because they are not independent or isolated. They exist in relation to market relationships; they are embedded in a web of social players, market forces and institutions. Hegemonic interests are cemented into code and law. Programmers and technologists mold their image of the world and that of those with whom they work onto their creations. Therefore, the sandbox of technological development is not neutral. Technology is not a destiny but a scene of struggle. It is a social battlefield, or perhaps a better metaphor would be 'parliament of things' in which civilizational alternatives contend. What it means to be human is decided in large part in the shape of our tools. [7]
In his 1883 essay "The Right To Be Lazy" Paul Lafargue warns: "Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production." [8]
And today, the telecommunications company Sprint does not sound all that different. They advertise their network with the slogan “every place can be a work place." Itunes makes sharing music harder and harder with every new release. Music files are pushed into more and more proprietary formats. The BlackBerry keeps the office worker on the global leash of the manager.
Another example is the debate over Net Neutrality showed how rational, common sense arguments as presented by the likes of Lawrence Lessig in U.S. Congress were of little consequence. Corporate interests and not democratic participatory politics dictate what will happen to the Internet. Even explicit repeated public comments by the inventor of the World Wide Web make no difference. After hearings, the leader of the Senate commerce committee, Senator Ted Stevens, summed up his understanding of the issues by pointing out that "The Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes." These are the people who make decisions that will impact all of us. Such ill-informed people in power underline the fact that the process of technological development cannot be simply determined by The United States Congress alone. [9]
The networked machine has conquered time. Today, people are forced into jobs that require workers to carry a pager (or take a pay cut if they object). Such precarious labor processes deeply impact urban planning. In the current capitalist system, the imperative of efficiency outscores human fulfillment and democratic participation. Technological development is market-driven, which signifies that the primary goal is not to shape a better life but to make profit and gain power. Different worlds, flowing from different technical arrangements, privilege some aspects of the human being and marginalize others. [10]
The hopeful side of technology emphasizes mutual aid, cooperation, collaboration, and collective intelligence and it weakens participatory control. It is in search of novel, self-organized networked socialities. The odd term and interesting concept of the creative industries can become the context for thinking of an alliance of laborers (i.e. unions) enabled by emerging technologies.
For the technocracy the future looks always glitzy; just trust what is to come. It will all be good. But on the contrary, we should ask what technology could do about society's desperate crisis. The tools that we are using shape our way of life as much as the politicians who rule our countries. The latter is crucial, as everyday laborers need to be involved in the process of technological development. If this would succeed even to some extend then citizens would understand themselves more as active contributors rather than armchair passengers.
One response to the developmental process exists on the tactical micro-political level. Many art projects fall into this category. Feenberg calls this the "margin of maneuver of the dominated" receiver of technology. A small dog is biting an elephant, which makes the latter feel more alive. Small-scale tactical interventions meet the large-scale authoritarian apparatus, which also in Marcuse's view get readily absorbed into the capitalist spectacle of democracy. Jacques Ellul even believed that given the whole "ensemble of techniques" such tactical micro-interventions are insignificant. Where does that leave us?
Right now, effective participation in the technological design process is hardly in place. In Transforming Technology Andrew Feenberg calls for a politics of technological transformation and proposes widespread, democratic participation in the process of shaping technologies. "To the extent that we technicize the public sphere by transferring its functions to experts, we destroy the very meaning of democracy." (Feenberg, 2002: 9) While Feenberg does not provide concrete examples or proposals of how to reach such participation (short of waiting for the next round of real socialism), he is, of course, right to demand civic involvement. It seems obvious but it is a rarely implemented insight that the development of technology must be grounded in the interests of those who will use them.
Steve Kurtz argues in a similar manner that science, and biotechnology in particular, should not be left to experts. If we want to occupy the imaginary of, for example-- sociable web media, ways of public participation in technical decisions need to be considered. A clear language that cuts across disciplines is a starting point that lets "ordinary people" understand what technologists and artists are talking about. How can we achieve a contestation of technological ideas if we can't cut across professional languages and perhaps disciplinary hubris or even old boys' networks? At a time of steep decline of civic participation and much increased interaction online, what would motivate people to get involved in the technological development process?
Clear communication to the non-initiated amateur (who will adapt to these technologies) is a start to a democratic participatory process of technological development. How else will people get a sense of responsibility and ownership in these developmental processes that are otherwise totally guided by corporate interests? How can we build feedback loops for people whose life will be changed or at least impacted by emerging technologies? How can these participants in the technological lifestyle speak up about the application of this or that invention in their actual lives? Or, is it their fate to merely obey technological trends put in place by frighteningly ill-informed senators?
Networked technology is not the savior that will liberate Africa and MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte is not the messiah who will bring world redemption in three easy steps with his $100 laptop. However, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative is a pivotal step for education: it bring some knowledge resources that were created on the World Wide Web, such as the free encyclopedia Wikpedia, to geographical regions that don’t have Internet access. [11]
Screen addiction, in North America and Europe has been shown to be a significant issue not just for the young generation. Children become “Blackberry Orphans” through the growing and compulsive use of email gadgets. [12]
The technologies of the near future will be miniaturized and increasingly networked. The resources of the Internet will be more available throughout urban space and those millions of teenagers who spend hours per day in MySpace or games will soon be taking their professional places. Participatory, networked practices are a core of their experience with technology. Tomorrow's MyTube may replace today’s Youspace (specific social networks may fade away) but the importance of sociable web media, and social networking in particular, will not pop like the dotcom bubble. The sociality that we are experiencing in the Internet will be increasingly available on the boulevard. The way that this development unfolds should not be left entirely to those who pull the corporate strings.
To successfully activate the space between utopia and dystopia for social change, bodies and technologies need to work in tandem. The rethoric of social change is often associated with grand scale revolutions that turn continents upside down. But sometimes social changes start with chnages in the way we socialize. For example, Instant Messaging, not email, is the dominant technological communication channel for today's teenagers. Several art projects using mobile devices are situated in this realm of micro-interventions.
This is not the gargantuan revolution. However, beyond these micro-social interventions, sociable media tools can also contribute to the broad democratization of society. It'd be foolish to think that these micro-interventions are all that sociable media can do or that the desire for sweeping social change is based on assumed but non-existent alliances. Skeptics who argue in this line I’d point to Argentina or Brazil. Revolution is a desire anchored in the heart of many. Revolutionary change is hardly on the horizon in the US, but there are many countries where sufficient numbers of people are desperate enough. They will use whatever tools fit their agenda.
SMS has served as political tool in the process of governmental change in the Philippines and the number of mobile phone lines in Africa increased drastically. South African women in the rural KwaZulu-Natal province, for example, use cell phones to report on violations of their human rights as well as to assert other constitutional rights. [13] And despite intensive efforts by authoritarian governments, bloggers in Bahrain, Hong Kong, Iran, Nepal, and the United Arab Emirates have broken their news monopoly. [14]
Not only is it important to understand the p[olitical potential of these tools but it is also crucial to be able to use today's technologized communication channels. Requires skills include the judgement of an information source but also a sense of the ethics of participation. We are not slaves to technology: screen addiction, time management issues, and the pervasive exploitation of immaterial labor are not inevitable. Closing our eyes to technological developments does not make them go away; neither do blaming nor fetishizing of "the altered brain of today's teenagers." Instead, we need to acquire knowledge of the grammar of networked technologies to make them work for us instead of letting computers use us. Let's live in the cracks of forced cooperation. Let’s ask how our daily uses of technology contribute to our own well-being? Ask yourself, in whose interest you sit there at 6am in the airport typing away on your computer. Whose interests are served when your email inbox becomes your lifeline? Who benefits from your addiction? Online and off, let's turn our small daily social encounters around in our favor; they are one locale for social change. That is where we can start, right here-- now.
Trebor Scholz
Footnotes:
[1] http://www.google.com/translate_t
[2] http://www.mnstories.com/archives/2006/03/bruce_sterling.html
[3] http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/188/report_display.asp
[4] http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/
[5] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6241603.stm
[6] http://www.dailykos.com/
[7] Feenberg, A. (2002) Transforming Technology. New York: Oxford
University Press. p15
[8] Paul Lafargue (1883) The Right To Be Lazy
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/index.htm
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
[10] Feenberg, A. (2002) Transforming Technology. New York: Oxford
University Press. p19
[11] One Laptop Per Child
http://www.laptop.org/
[12] Wall Street Journal reports on Blackberry Orphans and how kids fight back.
http://tinyurl.com/ychxdd
Also in this context read about the fact that more than one in eight adults in the US show signs of being addicted to the Internet. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6062980.stm
[13] The number of cell phones in Africa rose from 15.6 to 135 million between 2000 and 2005. The article on OhmyNews reports about the women who fight for their rights with cell phones.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-06-30-politics-text-tool_x.htm?csp=34
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=339544&rel_no=1
[14] China reported that it had 20.8 million bloggers in 2006.
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,21047806%5E15322%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html
The "Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents" details case studies of bloggers in authoritarian regimes and the impact of their writing practice.
http://tinyurl.com/27lk2s
I met Luis Camnitzer in a cafe in New York shortly after he invited me to write this text. Sitting across from me at a tiny wooden table he described each artwork in "Negatec" with much enthusiasm, drawing the blueprint of the exhibition on a napkin. The exhibition positions itself in the space between utopian and dystopian approaches to technology while probing this territory for its potential for social change. I am not part of the blame-technology-first crowd and neither is Camnitzer. His introductory essay for this catalogue, which I translated by pasting his Spanish original into GoogleTranslate, made this crystal clear. [1]
The perennial argument that technology is bad for you is neither dialectic nor productive. It's especially weird if it's not tied to the pros and cons of specific technologies. "If you give an axe to an oppressive regime they will cut your hands off." That is at least how science fiction author and technology critic Bruce Sterling phrased it with an upswing in his voice. [2] If you give powerful technologies to a democratic government it will probably do amazing things for its people. "You don't get the good without the bad." Conversations about the possibilities of technologies are all too quickly mixed up with the dance around the corporate campfire, where the magic of technology (and their projected futures) becomes the sales pitch.
Clearly, the Internet and all its mobile device tentacles have led to horrendous addiction and to an effect that the likes of Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson call "continuous partial attention." People use computers behind the backs of their friends and partners; screen addiction is a painful reality in the United States. Have you ever caught yourself in front of your email inbox with a thirst for interaction, waiting for signs of acknowledgments or love to tumble in? Do you check email every few minutes? Have you ever found that you waste time online drifting across the endless ocean of websites? This addiction to interaction and the increased number of choices that the Internet affords also makes us miserable (stressed, full of anxiety, and depressed). But instead of pointing fingers at this or that technology we should strive for an understanding of the grammar of these technologies which have us in their clutches.
The always-on condition of contemporary urban life leads to immediate availability of people, which has also led to shorter and shorter deadlines in the workplace. Given these present-day realities, how can we tackle social problems while seeing them as secondary in relation to technology? How can we divorce political from technological discourses? The technological future cannot be discussed in terms of de-contextualized debates about the Internet because the networks are populated by anything but autonomous players.
It is equally unhelpful to create a dichotomy between two camps: those with conformist views of technology and others who see technology as a monster that swallows us. Marcuse as well as Foucault analyzes society as life-draining machinery fueled by dominated citizens. The question about technology is not whether "to take it or leave it." While the assembly line was the long arm of management in 1913, today machines are powered by networked technological systems. In 1941 the Ford Motor Company experienced its first general strike at the River Rouge Plant and a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project predicts a movement of "tech refuseniks" who will live completely off the network and "will commit acts of violence and terror against technology-inspired change" in 2020. [3] We could link such pessimism back to the late 1970s when Langdon Winner and Jacques Ellul asked how technology improved human dignity, well-being, and freedom. Marx, who is otherwise sometimes perceived as a technological determinist, writes in Manuscripts that "The more the worker expends himself in the work, the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to himself." (Marx, p 122)
In the search for the potentialities of technology it is vital to go beyond the pessimism/optimism divide. Technology is one important dimension of human existence that matters a great deal. In relation to this technology-rich life, we should ask what offers meaning and fulfillment. At the same it is obvious that technology will not fix everything. How can we overcome social problems if we see them as secondary in relation to technology? Think of the fragmentation and de-humanization of labor. Manual labor is pushed to the global south and creative/intellectual work is concentrated in the "developed world." Global outsourcing and the unfulfilling work in call centers or the physically dangerous labor in "Free Zone" sweatshops are further examples. By the same token cultural power is centralized. In the developed world most people are "time poor" while in "developing countries" material poverty reigns. In the United States the workday gets ever longer. A mother with three children may work four jobs and still not be able to pay the rent. The working poor also belong to those 47 million Americans who cannot afford health insurance. People are completely controlled by credit ratings and kept in (the work) place by student loans. We could call this passive-aggressive capitalism. How can technology encourage people to see their life in terms of alternatives, preferences and choices?
Today, the intellectual horizons and qualifications behind jobs are decreasing. Nintendo's university in Washington State delivers just-in-time-knowledge and outright ignores the humanities. All what is needed from the worker is a particular set of skills necessary for an upcoming project. Such de-skilling is common practice in new media trade schools worldwide that follow the corporate imperative that rejects Alexander Humboldt's non-pragmatic notion of education for its own sake, later "Americanized" at Harvard University. Education is a central problem and in particular the global distribution of knowledge is a burning problem. The literacy rate in the United States is lower than that in Mexico. Initially I asked how we can overcome all these problems if we see them as secondary in relation to technology. I do believe that technology has a role to play in this context.
What is the role of technology? Today, education takes place not only in the classroom, but also informally online. "Peer education" is localized in discussion forums where strangers share their skills and knowledge. Individuals offer free podcasts with language tutorials, thousands got together to create the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia that out-cooperates any corporate effort, and citizens in Iraq report their part of the story on the blog "Iraq The Model." [4] Individual citizens can now make themselves heard. They have a novel opportunity to have a voice, to speak.
The speech situations that sociable media provide to millions allow them to experience themselves as speakers. This "massification" has never been there before on that scale. Millions of people blog, share their lives, or learn from each other. The years to come will show if the experience of having a voice on sociable web media platforms likes blogs, wikis, or peer-to-peer technologies will lead to more people taking part in the electoral process, for example. At this point, skeptics may rightfully interject that this phenomenon is geographically limited and that is true by all means. Africa has minimal Internet access, for example. But countries like Kenya also experience tremendous changes through the "networked sociality" afforded by cellphones. The developing world has a higher density of cellphone use per capita than the United States, which is mainly focused on text messaging. [5]
Technology reaches deep into the corners of the everyday, from Accra to Denver- it shapes habits and vastly directs our attention. A fund raising letter asking you to donate to Doctors without Borders may not get your attention while the same request posed through a widget on your desktop may engage you. Today's communication technologies are flexible distribution systems that can make use of the elusive windows of opportunity to catch our attention.
In the film Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky pointed out that he has limited hope for alternative media because the resources of the corporate mass media simply overwhelm activist efforts. When he stated this in the film, released in 1992, this might have been true. Today, however, blogs like the “Daily Kos” are read by almost 500,000 per day. [6]
If we exclude technology from our projections and ideas for social change and the future, if we do not even attempt to occupy the technological imaginary, then possibilities and probabilities are foreclosed by technological elite and their default vision of the market and the military-industrial complex kicks in. There is more to technology than sex, profit, fun and power. Yes, really.
"Technological development is a scene in which various competing groups attempt to advance their interests and their corresponding civilizational projects. Many technically feasible outcomes are possible and not just the one imposed by the victors in the struggle." (Feenberg, 2002: 143)
Our projections should be probable and go beyond computer game visions. The capitalist context into which most of us are socialized made us believe that there is a somewhat "natural," transhistorical inevitability to technological development under the banner of the market. What are the interests of the players in the realm of the technical sphere? Do we still realize how human values are systematically naturalized in this process? Almost everything practical wins and efficiency is the common denominator. The assembly line arguably led to the emergence of self-help, followed by psycho-pharmaceutical fixes of the "non-functional individual," proposing that what is wrong is really the worker herself and not the environment that causes her dissatisfaction, anxiety and depression. Today, addiction to networked devices is a growing and very serious problem.
Markets determine the development of the tools we are using and they shape our way of life. Economical values are the payoff for human potentialities in this society. Our lifestyle, soaked with technology, directly feeds into hegemonic domination. The interests of those in power are inscribed in the technical code, its machines and networks. Technologies are not just tools and things because they are not independent or isolated. They exist in relation to market relationships; they are embedded in a web of social players, market forces and institutions. Hegemonic interests are cemented into code and law. Programmers and technologists mold their image of the world and that of those with whom they work onto their creations. Therefore, the sandbox of technological development is not neutral. Technology is not a destiny but a scene of struggle. It is a social battlefield, or perhaps a better metaphor would be 'parliament of things' in which civilizational alternatives contend. What it means to be human is decided in large part in the shape of our tools. [7]
In his 1883 essay "The Right To Be Lazy" Paul Lafargue warns: "Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production." [8]
And today, the telecommunications company Sprint does not sound all that different. They advertise their network with the slogan “every place can be a work place." Itunes makes sharing music harder and harder with every new release. Music files are pushed into more and more proprietary formats. The BlackBerry keeps the office worker on the global leash of the manager.
Another example is the debate over Net Neutrality showed how rational, common sense arguments as presented by the likes of Lawrence Lessig in U.S. Congress were of little consequence. Corporate interests and not democratic participatory politics dictate what will happen to the Internet. Even explicit repeated public comments by the inventor of the World Wide Web make no difference. After hearings, the leader of the Senate commerce committee, Senator Ted Stevens, summed up his understanding of the issues by pointing out that "The Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes." These are the people who make decisions that will impact all of us. Such ill-informed people in power underline the fact that the process of technological development cannot be simply determined by The United States Congress alone. [9]
The networked machine has conquered time. Today, people are forced into jobs that require workers to carry a pager (or take a pay cut if they object). Such precarious labor processes deeply impact urban planning. In the current capitalist system, the imperative of efficiency outscores human fulfillment and democratic participation. Technological development is market-driven, which signifies that the primary goal is not to shape a better life but to make profit and gain power. Different worlds, flowing from different technical arrangements, privilege some aspects of the human being and marginalize others. [10]
The hopeful side of technology emphasizes mutual aid, cooperation, collaboration, and collective intelligence and it weakens participatory control. It is in search of novel, self-organized networked socialities. The odd term and interesting concept of the creative industries can become the context for thinking of an alliance of laborers (i.e. unions) enabled by emerging technologies.
For the technocracy the future looks always glitzy; just trust what is to come. It will all be good. But on the contrary, we should ask what technology could do about society's desperate crisis. The tools that we are using shape our way of life as much as the politicians who rule our countries. The latter is crucial, as everyday laborers need to be involved in the process of technological development. If this would succeed even to some extend then citizens would understand themselves more as active contributors rather than armchair passengers.
One response to the developmental process exists on the tactical micro-political level. Many art projects fall into this category. Feenberg calls this the "margin of maneuver of the dominated" receiver of technology. A small dog is biting an elephant, which makes the latter feel more alive. Small-scale tactical interventions meet the large-scale authoritarian apparatus, which also in Marcuse's view get readily absorbed into the capitalist spectacle of democracy. Jacques Ellul even believed that given the whole "ensemble of techniques" such tactical micro-interventions are insignificant. Where does that leave us?
Right now, effective participation in the technological design process is hardly in place. In Transforming Technology Andrew Feenberg calls for a politics of technological transformation and proposes widespread, democratic participation in the process of shaping technologies. "To the extent that we technicize the public sphere by transferring its functions to experts, we destroy the very meaning of democracy." (Feenberg, 2002: 9) While Feenberg does not provide concrete examples or proposals of how to reach such participation (short of waiting for the next round of real socialism), he is, of course, right to demand civic involvement. It seems obvious but it is a rarely implemented insight that the development of technology must be grounded in the interests of those who will use them.
Steve Kurtz argues in a similar manner that science, and biotechnology in particular, should not be left to experts. If we want to occupy the imaginary of, for example-- sociable web media, ways of public participation in technical decisions need to be considered. A clear language that cuts across disciplines is a starting point that lets "ordinary people" understand what technologists and artists are talking about. How can we achieve a contestation of technological ideas if we can't cut across professional languages and perhaps disciplinary hubris or even old boys' networks? At a time of steep decline of civic participation and much increased interaction online, what would motivate people to get involved in the technological development process?
Clear communication to the non-initiated amateur (who will adapt to these technologies) is a start to a democratic participatory process of technological development. How else will people get a sense of responsibility and ownership in these developmental processes that are otherwise totally guided by corporate interests? How can we build feedback loops for people whose life will be changed or at least impacted by emerging technologies? How can these participants in the technological lifestyle speak up about the application of this or that invention in their actual lives? Or, is it their fate to merely obey technological trends put in place by frighteningly ill-informed senators?
Networked technology is not the savior that will liberate Africa and MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte is not the messiah who will bring world redemption in three easy steps with his $100 laptop. However, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative is a pivotal step for education: it bring some knowledge resources that were created on the World Wide Web, such as the free encyclopedia Wikpedia, to geographical regions that don’t have Internet access. [11]
Screen addiction, in North America and Europe has been shown to be a significant issue not just for the young generation. Children become “Blackberry Orphans” through the growing and compulsive use of email gadgets. [12]
The technologies of the near future will be miniaturized and increasingly networked. The resources of the Internet will be more available throughout urban space and those millions of teenagers who spend hours per day in MySpace or games will soon be taking their professional places. Participatory, networked practices are a core of their experience with technology. Tomorrow's MyTube may replace today’s Youspace (specific social networks may fade away) but the importance of sociable web media, and social networking in particular, will not pop like the dotcom bubble. The sociality that we are experiencing in the Internet will be increasingly available on the boulevard. The way that this development unfolds should not be left entirely to those who pull the corporate strings.
To successfully activate the space between utopia and dystopia for social change, bodies and technologies need to work in tandem. The rethoric of social change is often associated with grand scale revolutions that turn continents upside down. But sometimes social changes start with chnages in the way we socialize. For example, Instant Messaging, not email, is the dominant technological communication channel for today's teenagers. Several art projects using mobile devices are situated in this realm of micro-interventions.
This is not the gargantuan revolution. However, beyond these micro-social interventions, sociable media tools can also contribute to the broad democratization of society. It'd be foolish to think that these micro-interventions are all that sociable media can do or that the desire for sweeping social change is based on assumed but non-existent alliances. Skeptics who argue in this line I’d point to Argentina or Brazil. Revolution is a desire anchored in the heart of many. Revolutionary change is hardly on the horizon in the US, but there are many countries where sufficient numbers of people are desperate enough. They will use whatever tools fit their agenda.
SMS has served as political tool in the process of governmental change in the Philippines and the number of mobile phone lines in Africa increased drastically. South African women in the rural KwaZulu-Natal province, for example, use cell phones to report on violations of their human rights as well as to assert other constitutional rights. [13] And despite intensive efforts by authoritarian governments, bloggers in Bahrain, Hong Kong, Iran, Nepal, and the United Arab Emirates have broken their news monopoly. [14]
Not only is it important to understand the p[olitical potential of these tools but it is also crucial to be able to use today's technologized communication channels. Requires skills include the judgement of an information source but also a sense of the ethics of participation. We are not slaves to technology: screen addiction, time management issues, and the pervasive exploitation of immaterial labor are not inevitable. Closing our eyes to technological developments does not make them go away; neither do blaming nor fetishizing of "the altered brain of today's teenagers." Instead, we need to acquire knowledge of the grammar of networked technologies to make them work for us instead of letting computers use us. Let's live in the cracks of forced cooperation. Let’s ask how our daily uses of technology contribute to our own well-being? Ask yourself, in whose interest you sit there at 6am in the airport typing away on your computer. Whose interests are served when your email inbox becomes your lifeline? Who benefits from your addiction? Online and off, let's turn our small daily social encounters around in our favor; they are one locale for social change. That is where we can start, right here-- now.
Trebor Scholz
Footnotes:
[1] http://www.google.com/translate_t
[2] http://www.mnstories.com/archives/2006/03/bruce_sterling.html
[3] http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/188/report_display.asp
[4] http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/
[5] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6241603.stm
[6] http://www.dailykos.com/
[7] Feenberg, A. (2002) Transforming Technology. New York: Oxford
University Press. p15
[8] Paul Lafargue (1883) The Right To Be Lazy
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/index.htm
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
[10] Feenberg, A. (2002) Transforming Technology. New York: Oxford
University Press. p19
[11] One Laptop Per Child
http://www.laptop.org/
[12] Wall Street Journal reports on Blackberry Orphans and how kids fight back.
http://tinyurl.com/ychxdd
Also in this context read about the fact that more than one in eight adults in the US show signs of being addicted to the Internet. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6062980.stm
[13] The number of cell phones in Africa rose from 15.6 to 135 million between 2000 and 2005. The article on OhmyNews reports about the women who fight for their rights with cell phones.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-06-30-politics-text-tool_x.htm?csp=34
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=339544&rel_no=1
[14] China reported that it had 20.8 million bloggers in 2006.
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,21047806%5E15322%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html
The "Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents" details case studies of bloggers in authoritarian regimes and the impact of their writing practice.
http://tinyurl.com/27lk2s
[Trebor]
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