The seductions of technology (1)

It has always been the case that technology is seductive — at least in the sense of persuading, without much effort, humans to yield to its power. And here power does not so much entail power over people, but also, especially, empowerment of people. In this sense technology is not simply a set of tools, but rather, in the etymological sense of the word, prostheses or “extensions” of human abilities.

To be sure, one should never forget that technology embodies a kind of knowing, as Heidegger reminded us by pointing to the word’s derivation from the ancient Greek techné, which meant a kind of knowledge possessed by artists and craftspeople. As such, technology is therefore in the first place something that issues from human knowledge. Once created, however, a certain dialectical process is set in motion; the creature reciprocally re-creates the creator, who is therefore a changed being when it embarks on its next stage of technological innovation. Technology does not leave human beings unchanged, and the change in question affects the creative capacity of human beings in turn.

Sometimes, however, technology has to cater for social changes that are less than salutary on the part of human beings. It is a sad fact, for instance, that in the postmodern age of society’s saturation by electronically disseminated images, many people in technologically advanced countries are becoming illiterate. Referring to a kind of cash register made for illiterate people, and to science fiction stories in which robots are depicted as doing everything menial for humans, Rosanne Stone remarks (in The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, p168):

“At the inception of the virtual age, when everything solid melts into air, we have other, far more subtle devices that don’t do for us but think for us. Not computers, really — they think, in their machinic fashion, and then tell us the answers. Ubiquitous technology, which is definitive of the virtual age, is far more subtle. It doesn’t tell us anything. It rearranges our thinking apparatus so that different thinking just is.”

If this seems counter-intuitive, consider the following. I recall coming home one day and finding my elder son working on his computer, except that he was not only working, he was work-playing, or vice versa. In one window on the screen he was chatting to someone in California, in another he was writing an assignment for an English university course, and in another he was playing an online game with friends scattered all over the world. And he was doing this more or less simultaneously, alternating smoothly between one activity and the next. (Those people who have seen Fincher’s recent The Social Network, will recall the scene near the beginning where Mark Zuckerberg is shown blogging, while simultaneously setting up the social revenge site, Facemash — precursor of Facebook. Same thing.)

In an age where the software called Windows did not yet exist (in combination with computers and the internet), it would have been difficult to imagine this kind of intellectual/communicational activity (although there were gifted individuals who were capable of it, like Mozart and Goethe, for instance). Before the advent of computers and the internet, intellectual activity was largely determined by the prevailing experiential and didactic model to be linear, syntagmatic (semiotically sequential), instead of a combination of syntagmatic and paradigmatic (semiotically associative). But today the way in which people think is determined by the latter — a fundamentally different experiential-didactic conception. Both models have their strengths and weaknesses, of course.

If the internet, and especially email, provided a welcome alternative to those, like myself, who find snail-mail just too cumbersome and slow to engage earnestly in the kind of correspondence sustained by Freud and his contemporaries for the promotion of science, Facebook, MySpace and their cyber-relatives have taken the possibilities created by email to new proportions. (And now Zuckerberg is reportedly set to launch what has been described as a “Google-taunting” Facebook email service, too.)

The use of email (or the frenetic use of cellphones) has its own identity and psyche-transforming capacities, as the recently deceased French thinker Jacques Derrida shows so convincingly in his Archive Fever. Among other things, Derrida argues that Freud already indicated an awareness that, when a new “archiving” technology (including different tools for writing and storing data, such as the children’s writing toy, the “mystic writing pad”, computers, email and mobile phones) appears on the scene, it is a concrete embodiment of something that has already changed in the human psyche (at least on the part of the inventors of this technology), which will, in its turn, contribute to reconfiguring the psyche of the people who use it.

Just how seductive such technology is — especially when it is new, usually for a relatively short duration of time — is apparent from the ease with which novel gadgets are sold to eagerly waiting consumers, and the eagerness, if not addictiveness, with which they use these gadgets. Who is not familiar with the strange “alternative” social phenomenon of a bunch of teenagers sitting next to one another, texting on their cellphones instead of talking among themselves? Is this still seduction, or a species of enslavement?

In Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle offers a graphic reminder of the ambivalent status of the virtual realm’s capacity to enchant, seduce and simultaneously enslave its adherents. Alluding to Wim Wenders’ film Until the end of the World where a scientist invents a device that transforms brain activity into such alluring digital images that people are able to see their innermost dreams and fantasies in vivid form, she says (p268):

“However, the story soon turns dark. The images seduce. They are richer and more compelling than the real life around them. Wenders’ characters fall in love with their dreams, become addicted to them. People wander about with blankets over their heads the better to see the monitors from which they cannot bear to be parted. They are imprisoned by the screens, imprisoned by the keys to their past that the screens seem to hold. We, too, are vulnerable to using our screens in these ways. People can get lost in virtual worlds … our experiences there are serious play.”

Needless to point out, science fiction is a genre that has the uncanny capacity to anticipate what sometimes transpires in social reality at some future time. Like Wenders’ film, Kathryn Bigelow’s neo-noir Strange Days similarly thematises the ambivalent kind of virtual reality technology that enables people to experience sensations as if they are more real than the “original” body sensations, with the predictable result that people get addicted to it.

What Turkle observes, above, goes for social networking sites such as Facebook as well. Lest we become imprisoned by them, we should remind ourselves that, although the experiences they enable are not insignificant, they cannot amount to human social reality in its entirety, and we allow ourselves to be assimilated by them at our peril, that is, at the risk of being drained by it, vampire-like, of the life-blood of being human. (This comes across in Fincher’s film, The Social Network, where Fincher’s representation of genius programmer Zuckerberg depicts him as being pitifully lonely, despite his creation of Facebook.)

What I have said so far does not nearly exhaust the seductive capacity of technology. One of the other ways in which it is exercised, is in the imaginative projection of technologically created utopias (of which there are many corresponding dystopias, of course).

In the free-download film Zeitgeist: Addendum, Peter Joseph and his like-minded colleagues at the Venus Project (mainly Jacque Fresco) argue that what society needs is a switch to a resource-based economy from the global scarcity and money-based economy, and that, concomitant with such a transition, there should be a corresponding acceptance of the need to replace human labour “entirely” (or as much as is feasible) with technology.

In the scenario they envisage, rather than people losing their jobs to machines, as technology progressively replaces people in certain key areas of employment (as is currently the case), the present system of labour should (and allegedly can) be replaced by one where people do not have to work, but instead spend their time creatively on other things. This sounds a lot like a similar argument on the part of Marx, according to which those who were workers at the time could look forward to a time when they would be freed from the necessity to labour, instead being able to hunt in the morning and fish in the afternoon.

The merits of Joseph and Fresco’s argument concerning the benefits of technology aside (and it should be vigorously and fearlessly debated), it represents yet another instance of the seductiveness of technology, and an understandable one into the bargain. Who would not be in favour of a technology that frees us from having to earn our living by the sweat of our proverbial brow, especially if such advanced technology is depicted as almost entirely nature or eco-friendly, with clean magnetic levitation transport systems (which are already being used in countries such as China and Japan) replacing colossally carbon-emitting aircraft, and geothermal replacing oil-dependent energy?

Whether it is a feasible proposal remains to be seen, not only in technological terms, but ESPECIALLY in political-economic terms. The countries and corporations that control the remaining oil reserves in the world will most certainly not give up what money can still be made out of oil without a fight. And that ultimately means that the very economic system that determines the parameters within which we conduct our lives, will be at stake.

The question is therefore: can people imagine a totally different kind of world (to the one of the present), where technology is the ultimate liberating force? And would they have the courage to work towards such a world as the one depicted in Zeitgeist: Addendum, where benign technology has replaced another kind of technology, such as military machines, without which the current world order cannot operate? I’m willing to bet that here, too, technology will prove to be seductive, but it is a moot question whether it can be such that it could persuade people to accept the underlying, alternative political and economic system.