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Voting for harmonious technology
June 18, 2007
Technology is neutral—it’s the purposes to which we put it that are good, bad, or some of each. That’s the view of luminaries including the physicist, engineer, and businessman Simon Ramo and the management consultant Peter Drucker. Writing in the Winter 2006 edition of IEEE Technology and Society, Norman Balabanian collects several versions of the “technology is neutral” aphorism—and then demolishes them, asserting that “this litany of the happy technologist” constitutes an ideology of technology designed to mask the intentions of the political and economic forces behind technology development and deployment.
The problem, writes Balabanian, is that the “we” to which technology-neutral proponents ascribe responsibility does not exist as a collective entity: “Surely it’s some specific minds that shape technology, not an abstract “mind’.” He cites as an example the refrigerator, which technology-neutral advocates chide technology skeptics from refusing to give up. The arrival of the refrigerator, he says, brought about the demise of markets within walking distance of most American’s homes, in favor of supermarkets to which people drive to buy a week’s worth of perishable goods. Without neighborhood markets, he says, consumers have no choice but to have refrigerators.
He emphasizes that he is not passing judgment on the supermarket/refrigerator society—he’s only noting that the neighborhood market is no longer an option for most consumers, and that most consumers had no vote in the decision to entrench the supermarket/refrigerator society. The only voters, he suggests, are corporations seeking profit and market share.
He cites as another example the Pacific Electric Railway, which at its peak in the 1920s operated 1200 miles of interurban rail service in Los Angeles. General Motors, he says, bought the railway and dismantled it to drive demand for its cars and buses. (The extent of GM’s culpability is disputed.)
Balabanian advocates a “harmonious technology,” which “would be responsive to direct social needs and would not require a hierarchical, exploitative, and alienating relationship among human beings.”
What might such a harmonious technology look like? In the Summer 2007 IEEE Technology and Society, Jameson M. Wetmore presents a possible picture in “Amish Technology: Reinforcing Values and Building Community.” First, Wetmore dispels the stereotype that the Amish avoid all machinery. They adopt technology that they collectively decide will help the community. For example, Amish dairy farmers use electrically cooled and stirred bulk milk tanks to comply with state regulations. Amish adults will not drive cars but will in certain circumstances accept rides. The resistance to cars was not inherent, Wetmore writes, but stemmed in part from a 1907 advertisement that described them not as modes of transportation but as “the king of sports and the queen of amusements”—in short, unnecessary luxuries not in keeping with the Amish lifestyle.
Unlike Drucker and Ramo, the Amish ascribe values (usually negative ones) to technology, and they adopt it way too sparingly. Balabanian suggests the rest of us are forced to adopt it too rapidly. He doesn’t outline a program for achieving his “harmonious technology,” and I can’t imagine how one might work.
Perhaps the benefits Balabanian and Wetmore have provided in these articles are to contrast the results of extreme value-free and value-laden views of technology. Perhaps the rest of us can keep in mind that we are voting whenever we choose to develop, market, or purchase a technological product—and our votes shouldn’t be value-free.
Posted by Rick Nelson on June 18, 2007 | Comments (2)
