The Convivial Society, No. 19

Selected Readings in Tech Criticism

Jun 18, 2019

Consider this a special edition of The Convivial Society. We will return to the usual format with the next installment.

If you, like me, persist in using Twitter against the sound counsel of the wise, and if you, like me, follow lots of academic who study technology, then you almost certainly know that Tristan Harris was pilloried for tweeting the following:

Many of you reading this will immediately recognize why Harris brought upon himself the wrath of academic tech twitter: his tweet appears to suggest that we need to invent a field of studies that already exists. The most common way to refer to this field is by the acronym STS, which is short for Science and Technology Studies or, sometimes, Science, Technology, and Society. In either case, it denotes a well-established interdisciplinary field of study devoted to studying pretty much what Harris appeared to believe we needed a new field to investigate. For those of you who have no idea who Tristan Harris is, I'll just mention that he is a former Google employee, who has made a name for himself over the last two or three years as one of the most prominent insiders to turn on the tech giants as part of the so-called tech backlash. He is also one of the founders of the Center for Humane Technology.

Even if you are not an academic studying technology, as most of you are not as far as I can tell, I'm sure you can see why this tweet occasioned some eye-rolling exasperation on the part of people who have devoted their life's labor to this task. I'm sure it happens all the time, of course, and to people from all fields of study. And, as we know, Twitter invites this kind of exasperated tone anyway. Calling out this sort of thing for your followers seems to be precisely what the quote tweet invites almost as if by design. It would not be enough to drop into Harris's DM's and kindly point him in the right direction. Because, of course, no one gets any Twitter identity points for that. Also, it's worth noting that Harris is a bit of a lightning rod for reasons that appear to me sometimes legitimate and sometimes petty.

Now, while I certainly understand the frustration and may also have indulged in some eye-rolling myself, my reaction takes slightly different direction. When I hear fellow academics who study technology complain about how their warnings and admonitions have fallen on deaf ears, something that happens with some frequency, my reaction is simply to observe that they are in venerable company. As it turns out, long before STS itself was a thing, there was already a long tradition of techno-science criticism, to borrow a phrase from Don Ihde, that has also been mostly neglected or marginalized, and sometimes by the same people who now complain about how their work is being ignored.

I readily admit that this is a soap box for me, so you'll need to indulge me. Yes, there are brilliant contemporary scholars working to understand technology and how it relates to society. But there is, in my view, something to be gained by engaging this older tradition of tech criticism. My sense is that we are too close to our situation to understand it as well as we should unless our intellectual and moral imagination is expanded through an engagement with these older critics. As I've written elsewhere,
I find these critics especially useful precisely because of their distance from the present ... If we read only contemporary sources on tech, we would be unlikely to overcome our chief obstacle: our thinking is already shaped by the very phenomena we seek to understand. The older critics offer a fresh vantage point and effectively new perspectives. They begin with different assumptions and operate with forgotten norms. Moreover, their mistakes will not be ours. (My point here is not unlike that made by C.S. Lewis writing in defense of old books.)

Chiefly, their distance from us and their proximity to older configurations of culture and technology means that they can imagine modes of life and ways of being with technology that we can no longer experience or imagine when we rely only on the work of contemporary critics, much of which is, of course, essential.
With all of this in mind, I thought it might be useful to compile a list of sources for those who might be interested in dipping into tradition for what it may offer. Consider the list below incomplete and provisional. Naturally, there will be sources left off that should be included or gaps that should be filled. Also, some of these works are chosen for both the content and their method. The method or approach is the most valuable aspect of such works because it can be reapplied to new cases. Consider this also a reflection of my own interests and proclivities, it reflects material that I have found helpful. Some choices will seem quirky I suspect, but I've found them all illuminating in one way or another.

All of those qualifications aside, I trust some of you will find this compilation valuable. If you have ideas as to what else ought to be included, please feel free to pass them along. I've grouped the selections loosely in five categories, but some of these works are hard to classify. Also, some of these works are written by scholars who are still active, but most are not. The most recent titles are from the mid 90's, most are a good bit earlier.

Finally, I should say that some of the most useful resources for understanding technology have nothing to do with technology, at least not directly. This is because thinking about technology involves not only an understanding of how technologies relate to us, our communities, and our world; it also involves an intellectual and moral frame of reference from which we judge various technologies and the overall character of our technological society. In this list, I've mostly kept to sources that deal with the former, that is works that deal with technology directly.

I included links were appropriate. I leave it to you to find the books in your usual manner. I thought about annotating the list, but that's a task I don't quite have the time to pull of right now.

Cheers,

Michael

Philosophy of Technology

Anders, Günther. Christian Fuchs on Anders as a source for a critical philosophy of technology.
Borgmann, Albert. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984).
Dreyfus, Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus. Mind Over Machine (1988). Also, here is Mark Coeckelbergh on how Hubert Dreyfus's work can inform a philosophy of technology.
Grant, George P. Technology and Empire (1969).
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology (1954).
Ihde, Don. Technology and the Life World (1990).
Jaspers, Karl. Man in the Modern World (1933).
Jonas, Hans. The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (1979) and "Toward a Philosophy of Technology" (1979).
Mitchum, Carl. Thinking Through Technology (1994).
Ortega y Gasset, José. "Meditación de la técnica" [Translated as "Man the Technician."] (1941).
Simon, Yves. "Democracy and Technology" in Philosophy of Democratic Government (1951).
Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics (1977). Interviews here (1994) and here (2010).
Winner, Langdon. Autonomous Technology (1977) and The Whale and the Reactor (1986).

History of Technology

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology (1983).
Franklin, Ursula. The Real World of Technology (1990). You can listen to the lectures that became the book here.
Giedion, Sigfried. Mechanization Takes Command (1948).
Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New (1988).
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden (1964).
Marx, Leo and Merritt Roe Smith, eds. Does Technology Drive History? (1994)
Noble, David. The Religion of Technology (1997).
Nye, David. Electrifying America (1990) and American Technological Sublime (1994).
Ovitt, George. The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture (1987).
Rydell, Robert W. All the World's a Fair (1984) and World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (1993).

Social Sciences

Bijker, Wiebe, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds. The Social Construction of Technological Systems (1987).
Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society (1954), The Technological System (1980), and The Technological Bluff (1988).
Gehlen, Arnold. Man in the Age of Technology (1957).
Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization (1934) and The Myth of the Machine (Vol. 1, 1967 and 2, 1970).

Media Ecology

Boorstin, Daniel. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962).
Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979).
Innis, Harold. The Bias of Communication (1951) and Empire and Communication (1950).
McLuhan, Marshall. Undestanding Media (1964) and Laws of Media with Eric McLuhan (1988).
Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place (1985).
Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy (1981) and The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (1967).
Postman, Neil. Technopoly (1992) and Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985).

Miscellaneous

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition (1958).
Berry, Wendell. What Are People For? (1990). Also, in Harper's from 2008: "Faustian Economics."
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451 (1953).
Bush, Vannevar. "As We May Think" (1945).
Carlyle, Thomas. "Sign of the Times" (1829).
Forster, E. M. "The Machine Stops" (1909).
Goodman, Paul. "Can Technology Be Humane?" (1969).
Guardini, Romano. Letters from Lake Como (1920s).
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "The Birth-Mark" (1843), "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" (1837), and "The Celestial Railroad" (1843). You can read a symposium on Hawthorne's work in relation to science and technology over at The New Atlantis.
Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality (1973) and In the Vineyard of the Text (1993).
Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man (1943).
Mander, Jerry. In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations (1991).
Marcel, Gabriel. "The Sacred in the Technological Age" (1962).
Ruskin, John. On the value of Ruskin as a resource for thinking through technology see Alan Jacobs's "Prophet of the Human Built World: An Introduction to John Ruskin."
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (1818).
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden (1854).
Weizenbaum, Joseph. Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (1976).

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The Convivial Society