In the U.S., for example, technological nightmares abound. Indeed, the whole idea of high tech and low tech is revealing. A project is high tech if it involves huge apparatuses and massive outlays of time and energy offering many profit possibilities. A project is low tech if it is simple, clean, and comprehensible (offering fewer profit possibilities). Why isn’t a project high tech if it greatly enhances human well being and development and low tech if it has the opposite effect?
Smart bombs are the highest of high tech. Deadly majesty in a deadly world. Sewage systems are the lowest of low tech. The former only kills and the later only saves.
Pursuit of new drugs with dubious or no health benefits is high tech. Working to get hospitals cleaner and germ free is low tech relying largely on tools for washing. The former profits for the rich and powerful. The latter benefits all society in accruing longevity and quality of life, but tends to diminish profits. Capitalism pursues the former and rejects the latter.
Capitalist pursuit of technology follows profit norms. It seeks to lower market-determined costs for owners which in any event misprice everything, especially discounting adverse effects on environment and workers. Technologies that use less expensive inputs are high priority. Technologies that spew less pollution or that impose less stress on workers are low priority.
Capitalist technology similarly seeks to increase market share by convincing audiences to buy products regardless of their value or the social cost their byproducts. Gargantuan resources go to packaging and advertising, often to promote distinctions among interchangeable and utterly redundant or even harmful products. Everyone knows this, but sees it as just another nauseating fact of life.
U.S. technology likewise seeks to increase dominance of managers, professionals, and of course capitalists regardless of the implications for workers below, including imposing divisive control and fragmentation.
Regarding the Industrial Revolution Andrew Ure, “the mule-spinners [skilled workers] have abused their powers beyond endurance, domineering in the most arrogant manner. . . over their masters. High wages. . . have, in too many cases, cherished pride and supplied funds for supporting refractory spirits in strikes. . . . During a disastrous turmoil of [this] kind. . . several capitalists. . . had recourse to the celebrated machinists. . . of Manchester. . . [to construct] a self-acting mule. . . . This invention confirms the great doctrine already propounded, that when capital enlists science in her service, the refractory hand of labour will always be taught docility.”
More recently, referring to modern circumstances, David Noble summarized that “Capital invested in machines that would reinforce the system of domination [in the workplace], and this decision to invest, which might in the long run render the chosen technique economical, was not itself an economical decision but a political one, with cultural sanction.”
Under capitalism there won’t be funds to research tools to enhance the well being and dignity, not to mention the knowledge and power of workers, but exactly the opposite. The idea is to avoid avenues of innovation that would diminish profit making possibilities for the already rich, even if this requires losing public and social well being for the rest of society.
Don’t even think about replacing oil as a social lubricant fuel as long as there are profits to be made from its use. The economy will push against doing so and only social movements will propel serious pursuit of wind, water, geothermal and other approaches, especially ones that would decentralize control, diminish specialization that benefits elite sectors, and challenge major centers of power regarding their current agendas.
And of course technology also seeks to implement the will of geopolitical war makers via provision of the tools of statecraft – smarter bombs, bigger bombs, deadlier bombs, and vehicles to deliver them. So if you are a young potential innovator, the pressure on what to study, what skills to develop, and what personality to nurture, if you want to “make it,” are enormous. No one honestly doubts any of this. It is even evident throughout popular culture just how much it is all taken for granted. What people doubt, only, is that there is any alternative. So our next and final essay in this series on Science and the Left will be: Good Technology. For how else can a left have policies regarding technology other than by knowing what is bad, but also what is good?
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5 Comments
On the other hand technologies such as the internet, free online information access, networking possibilities of all kinds have on balance been more beneficial in empowering ordinary people than they have been anti social in terms of improved surveillance opportunities for the power elite.
Smart phones, for all their faults, are possibly on balance positive for people in spite of existing only because their manufacture and distribution was enormously profitable.
Television on the other hand is probably on balance bad. Its mostly a soporific that blunts all energy of protest. Unlike the internet it blasts its message from a central location to an audience whose only resource is the off switch.
i think its desperately important that in the process of overthrowing capitalism we don’t throw all the babies out with the bathwater. Some of them deserve to live, grow up and flourish under popular community ownership and control.
This article is not anti-technology. Technology itself is neutral. Michael even says, “It aids generalized human well being and development” in some cases, but only as a byproduct in capitalism. You are looking at internet, phones, TV, etc through the lens of capitalism and forming an opinion about them. None of these examples HAVE to be bad, they just happen to have bad effects under capitalism. No one here is advocating we throw out technology altogether.
Some technology isn’t neutral – say, nuclear weapons, or for that matter, tools for controlling labor that really have no other purpose – but yes, most is. Pencils can be used positively, or rather horribly, ditto much else.
I call it alienation. Technologies that are pursued to large scale implementation in the current world are because of their utility for profits, power, etc. So when they have positive effects it is accidental often unintended by product – much disliked by powers that be – or due to pressurce forcing the results, etc. So the aims are alienated – meant for something other than human well being and development, even if to some extent they do foster that, or even on balance do. Take a cure for some disease. It is sought and implemented for profits – it could easily benefit humanity nonetheless. The result is positive, but alienated.
Unfortunately we are forced to look at things through the lens of capitalism because we are immersed in it.
You start by saying Technology is neutral but end with the implication that most of it needs to be thrown out.
My worry is that, although technology comes from the minds of inspired individual inventors, it is always delivered to us, historically, by multi national corporations. There is a whole technological infrastructure we need to keep while democratizing
the ownership and control of the agencies that are at present running it. A delicate operation indeed.
I wonder how anyone would know such a balance…
Yes, activists try to make use of the internet and often do a good job. I am one, far more so than most, using the internet, say, among other technologies. But, hell, we make use of pharmecuticals, bank loans, and so on, too. You have to consider the bad impact of any particular thing you want to assess, as well as the good. And while that is partly surveillance, I think it is much else as well – declining attention spans, closing of many direct personal vehicles of contact, cheapening of the meaning of friendship, and likely much else. The issue isn’t throwing anything out – expect things, like, say, tools of torture, or chemical weapons, say. It is trying to do technology well, when possible, even, with our own instances. I would imagine we agree.