How (Not) to Learn From the History of Technology

One of the first things I wrote on this blog nearly eight years ago, on an “About” page that has since been significantly abbreviated, was that we should aim at neither unbridled enthusiasm for technology nor thoughtless pessimism. Obviously no one is going to accuse me of unbridled enthusiasm for technology. While I may more justly be accused of a measure of pessimism, which in my view is not altogether unwarranted, I trust it does not come across as thoughtless.

So what I would like to know, from those who tend to be on the other side of the divide, is what constitutes, in their view, legitimate expressions of concern or worry that will not be dismissed with handwaving rhetorical gestures about how people have always worried about new technologies, etc., etc. (For starters, let us set aside the words “worry” and “concern” altogether. They too readily evoke the image of fainting couches and give off the odor of smelling salts.)

Consider Zachary Karabell’s piece for Wired, “Demonized Smartphones Are Just Our Latest Technological Scapegoat.” Karabell is responding to a series of recent articles exploring the fraught relationship between children and smartphones. Most notably, two groups of Apple investors publicly called on the company to take action to combat smartphone addiction among children.¹ Karabell cites a handful of other examples.

I have tried to read Karabell carefully and sympathetically, but I am not entirely clear what I am to take from his piece. Chiefly, it seems he simply felt the need to bring some calm to what he perceived to be a panic about technology. (Given the title of the article, however, I’m not sure it’s the critics who are panicking: smartphones aren’t being criticized, they are being demonized!)

The first move in this direction is to remind us that “Alarm at the corrosive effects of new technologies is not new” followed by obligatory references to Plato’s warning² about writing and the Catholic Church’s response to the printing press after which we get brief mention of similar warnings about a series of other technologies from the telegraph to Grand Theft Auto.

This is an all-too-familiar litany, and my question is always the same: What’s the point?

This question is not meant to be dismissive. It is an honest question. What is the point of the litany? It cannot be, of course, that I should therefore discount the present warnings because this would be a non sequitur as Karabell himself acknowledges. “Just because these themes have played out benignly time and again,” he writes, “does not, of course, mean that all will turn out fine this time.”

Indeed not. And this is so for a reason that is easy to grasp: each technology is different. This is especially the case when we consider the capacities and scale of more recent technologies when compared to earlier examples. Early in his piece, Karabell asked, “Is today’s concern about smartphones any different than other generations’ anxieties about new technology?” The answer seems straightforward to me: Yes, obviously so … because we’re talking about different technologies.

But let’s go a bit further. How sure are we that things “have played out benignly time and again”? How would we know? Is mere survival the bar? If not, what is? By what standard are we to conclude that the impact of these more recent technologies has been altogether benign? As Karabell acknowledges, these earlier complaints are often not wrong; we just don’t care anymore. Should we? Does this say more about our insensibilities than it does about their anxieties? Frankly, I’m increasingly convinced that we must be prepared to ask such questions and consider them with care and imagination.

After we’ve been reminded that we are not the first generation to express a measure of concern about new technologies, we are presented with a brief catalogue of the problems attributed to smartphones. Karabell seems both to believe that these are genuine concerns that should not be ignored and that we are not in a position to give them much weight. It’s an intriguing tension within this piece. It is as if the author understands that he is dealing with valid criticisms but cannot quite bring himself to take them too seriously.

Chiefly, it would seem that Karabell wants us to be open-minded about new technologies. The jury is still out in his view, and we don’t yet know with certainty what the long term effects will be. This paragraph is representative:

It’s hard for me to read that and draw any firm conclusions as to what Karabell thinks we ought to do. Which is fine. I don’t always know what to do regarding the stuff I write about. But this piece ostensibly aims at relieving concerns and dismissing warnings; I’m not sure it succeeds, at least I don’t see that it give us any grounds to be relieved or to set warnings aside.

What’s more, if things do in fact play out benignly (assuming that everyone affected could agree on what that might mean), it would seem to me that the warnings and criticisms would be at least part of the reason why. Writers like Karabell assume that whatever early turbulence a new technology causes for a society, in time the society will right itself and cruise along smoothly. You would think, then, that such writers would enthusiastically welcome criticisms of new technologies in order to figure out how to steer through the turbulent period as quickly as possible. But this is rarely the case; they are merely annoyed.

It’s rarely the case because these technologies are often proxies for something much larger, something more like a worldview, an ideology, or a moral framework. Technology is code for Modernity or Progress or Reason, so to call a technology into question is to call these deeper values and commitments into question. Karabell’s closing paragraphs reveal as much.

“More than not,” he writes, “the innovations we call ‘technology’ have transformed and ameliorated the human conditions. There may have been some loss of community, connection to the land, and belonging; even here, we tend to forget that belonging almost meant exclusion for those who didn’t fit or didn’t believe what their neighbors did.”

It is difficult to overestimate the degree to which those sentences unwittingly betray a host of moral judgments the author seems unable to perceive as such. “[L]oss of community, connection to the land, and belonging”—they are casually listed off as if the author has only heard rumors of people that care about such things and can’t quite fathom such attachments.

“The smartphone is today’s emblem of whether one believes in progress or decline,” Karabell writes in his last paragraph.

Maybe that’s just too much of a burden to put on a technology, any technology. Maybe progress and decline shouldn’t be measured exclusively by technological innovation. Maybe it is not the critic who needs to be admonished to consider new technologies with an open mind.

January 27, 2018