A harder look at the soft luddite

I introduced the idea of “soft luddism” in a recent post, and attempted to define it by alluding to a genre of writing that I assume to be widely recognizable. I should have worked harder to give a more explicit definition, because the soft luddite is too easily confused for a number of similar characters.

The old-fashioned, “hard” luddite dislikes a specific technology or class of technologies for the enumerable disadvantages they deal him. The soft luddite, however, is uneasy about “technology” as an abstract category, because of the affront to humanistic values that it is perceived to represent. His error is diametrically opposed to that of the gadget fetishist or other bleeding-edge enthusiast, who loves this abstract category, “technology,” without regard to what use a given technology may be put.

This “technology” never includes familiar or naturalized technologies, but only the bleeding edge, technology in the most obvious sense. The humanistic values that the soft luddite defends are almost always underdefined, since to define them explicitly would be to make them available for fair comparison with the advantages offered by the technology under critique.

There is almost always an unconscious element of classism in this refusal. The soft luddite is usually a member of the upper-middle class. He mingles with the wealthy and knows their ways. He is thus acutely self-conscious of his need to live by the working-class values of utility and efficiency, but romanticizes the inefficiency that is the leisure of the wealthy. That same inefficiency is also the prison of the down-and-out, which gives us what is perhaps the most common criticism of the “voluntary simplicity” movement: that most of the world’s people are already practicing simplicity of the involuntary kind!

Rebecca Solnit has an article called “Finding Time” in the present issue of Orion magazine. It’s more honest than most soft luddite pieces you’ll read, in that it actually offers up some of the values that must be compared in making a rational technological choice:

The gains are simple and we know the adjectives: convenient, efficient, safe, fast, predictable, productive. All good things for a machine, but lost in the list is the language to argue that we are not machines and our lives include all sorts of subtleties—epiphanies, alliances, associations, meanings, purposes, pleasures—that engineers cannot design, factories cannot build, computers cannot measure, and marketers will not sell.

You’ll notice, however, that the comparison is handicapped. On Solnit’s telling, convenience, efficiency, and the rest of the first list are not human values but machine values. We’re back to the bogeyman of a looming technological essence.

To compare these two lists is not to compare machines with humans, but to compare two different tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. People who are struggling to feed themselves can’t worry, just yet, about epiphanies, meanings, and pleasures. Solnit explicitly rejects the accusation of elitism, but her “nomadic and remote tribal peoples” and “cash-poor, culture-rich people in places like Louisiana” (and other flyover states, presumably) are acting out of necessity, not free choice.

Both the gadget enthusiast and the soft luddite are to be contrasted with the rational actor who does not recognize one category of technology as more “technological” than another. This person first defines his individual and social ends—including, perhaps, values from both of Solnit’s lists. He then chooses technologies—new and old—which seem to him to be the ones most likely to bring those ends about.

Time and the Technium

I recently discovered that, in addition to his widely-read “Cool Tools” blog, former Wired executive editor and Long Now Foundation board member Kevin Kelly has a blog called “The Technium.” If you’ve never heard of it, go read a few entries. It’s everything I hope this blog could someday be.

In the inaugural post, “My Search for the Meaning of Tech,” Kelly introduces the idea of the Technium:

It’s a word I’ve reluctantly coined to designate the greater sphere of technology—one that goes beyond hardware to include culture, law, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types.

We all have a habit of referring to only the leading edge of innovation as “technology”—in part, no doubt, because of the process of naturalization I described earlier. Things that count as “technology,” in our vernacular way of speaking, include computers, biotech, advanced manufacturing processes, space-aged alloys. Things that don’t count include bricks, novels, roads, languages.

In order to understand how technology and society evolve and transform each other, however, the concept must be freed from the contemporary moment. Technology is more than a handful of arbitrary categories that history has brought to momentary prominence. Once you drop the “cutting-edge” requirement, it becomes difficult to draw a line between artifacts that count as technology and those that don’t. Eventually, one must concede that technology includes all structures, concrete and abstract, which humans have created in order to bring about some imagined, desired end.

Viewed in this way, technology becomes inseparable from techne, one of Aristotle’s five categories of human knowledge. The study of technology becomes the study, not of artifacts or a disembodied historical force, but of human being and knowing.

I can't let you do that, Dave

Two articles caught my eye over the weekend because of their opposed views on the relationship of society to technology: Regina Lynn’s “Rude People, Not Tech, Cause Bad Manners” at Wired.com and George Johnson’s “An Oracle for Our Time, Part Man, Part Machine,” at NYTimes.com.

Lynn’s column argues against a common complaint: that an increasing number of people defer face-to-face interaction in order to connect via IM, cell phones, etc., often leading to obliviousness of people in their immediate, physical vicinity.

According to Lynn, technology doesn’t impede, but only enables interpersonal relationships. An IM-only friend is as real as an in-the-flesh friend. Indeed, for the socially awkward, electronically mediated relationships may be deeper and more open than those conducted face-to-face. And the real problem with too-loud-in-public cell phone conversations is less the gadget than the oaf holding it.

I tend to agree, with some reservations. If technology is capable of enabling “good” socialization, it must likewise be capable of magnifying our rudeness.

Lynn sees us as in control of our actions. The technology has no insidious impact on human behavior. It is powerless and thus blameless: cell phones don’t offend people, people offend people. Yet no one can claim that antipathy towards public cell phone use isn’t a social phenomenon, or that it could exist if there were no cell phones.

Johnson’s piece begins by breaking down the etymology of “algorithm” before omenously announcing, “It was the Internet that stripped the word of its innocence.”

He takes issue with two distinct, but closely related phenomena of the internet age: the automation of judgment through the use of powerful algorithms, e.g. Google’s PageRank or NewsRank, and systems—both human- and machine-directed—which perform knowledge-intensive tasks through crowdsourcing, e.g. Wikipedia or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Johnson fears that these entities are robbing of us of judgment and enslaving us to a technological hive-mind. His is less an argument than an appeal to the viscera: on his account, these entities are horror-show symbiotes of man and machine, perhaps a “buzzing mechanism with replaceable human parts”, or “an organism with an immune system of human leukocytes”. The illustrations accompanying the article belong to a type commonly seen in the media of fearful technological essentialism: crude cyborgs of human tissue and forms superficially evocative of industrial tech.

It seems unlikely that Wikipedia will overthrow the nation-state as the leading technology for the subjugation of individual will (though virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, for one, is troubled by the possibility). Systems can and do take on a direction of their own, but they are always created to satisfy a set of human interests. Rather than framing our fears in terms of man-versus-machine, let us ask who the machine is working for, and if their values are our values.