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- Robins and Webster, Ch. 3 -

Introduction: Deus Ex Machina

In the theatre of the seventeenth century, the plot often turned around mistaken identity, confusion and a chaotic series of events in which heroes and heroines had to go through a series of trials before everything was resolved at the end of the play. Sometimes the confusions and contradictions were such that an artificial device was used to resolve all of the problems in the play’s conclusion. A god came down from the heavens - actually from a machine that lowered him/her down on to the stage - to make everything right. The god and the machine were known as deus ex machina or the god from the machine.

The term is an entirely fitting one for describing a set of attitudes that has clustered around technology and that we can label techno-boosterism. Whatever the problems generated by technology, the hidden hand of progress will resolve them. The concept of the hidden hand, which Adam Smith first used to describe the role of the marketplace in generating progress, was extended to technology. Indeed, the analogy was pushed much further than Adam Smith would have liked. Technology comes to be viewed not only as a benign force, but it can even solve some of the problems generated by the market. The hidden hand of the market was the divine force that could solve mot human problems.

The market is a supply and demand economy where capitalists compete with one another to achieve profits. Through the self-interest of these rational economic actors, the wealth of the nation increased. That wealth was diffused to some extent to the entire population, but not without some problems. Industrialization, for example, involved a painful shift from a rural to an urban civilization. The division of labour resulted in an unprecedented degree of alienation on the part of the worker. The increasing rationalization of industry and society encouraged bureaucracy and made everyone feel more like a cog in a machine. Some consequences of market production, i.e. population growth and pollution, did serious damage to the environment or, as scholars prefer to call it, the eco system.

When market/industrial society was in its infancy, there was a high degree of market boosterism. Most of these boosters were determinists in so far as they believed that capitalism was inevitable. Some of them were what you and I would today call futurists who envisioned the creation of a utopia through the spread of capitalist market values. The actual experience of the rise of the market may have been generally positive, but it encouraged us to take a more sober and measured approach to progress as something that would be gradual and that required a great deal of social protection against the worst features of economic individualism. By 1850, it sounded rather hollow to picture capitalism as the answer to all human problems. Since then, there have been many changes to the capitalist market system in order to make it work better. At the very least, classical market philosophy came to be considered as only one of several ways of generating economic wealth.

The same kind of boosterism that formerly applied to the market gradually became transferred, however, to technology. Beginning in the 1950s, and certainly by the 1970s, technology was becoming a push factor in national economies, and was beginning to take on some of the characteristics of a deus ex machina. First, these divine attributes were attached to the new information and computer technologies (IT). By the 1990s, techno-boosterism had been enlarged to encompass both information and communication technologies, particularly the so-called information superhighway that would be made available on the World Wide Web. Some have gone so far as to argue that we are today experiencing an information revolution that will eclipse the earlier industrial revolution in economic and social significance.

The Reality of Technological Revolution

For thirty or so years, therefore, we have been subjected to an uncritical view of new technologies as not only potential saviours but also as inevitable and unstoppable forces. Robbins and Webster point out that the language used to describe these technologies is highly inflated, contradictory, and lacking any real historical context or content. Moreover, the arguments of technological futurists constantly shift their focus to avoid the obvious criticisms. For example, during the 1980s, many technology boosters suggested that computers would change our lives completely. All parts of our lives would become computerized with a dramatic improvement in our standard of living. What was once a fantasy in cartoons like the Jetsons would become a reality. A variety of labour saving devices would give us more free time. New gadgets would allow ordinary individuals to accomplish things that could only be dreamed of in the past.

The reality was much more prosaic. The so-called ‘smart devices’ were confined to a few simple areas, such as electronic banking and computer games that did not really improve our lives. The spread of personal computers actually increased the workload for many professional people by eliminating the need for secretaries. The increased number of specialty television channels certainly did not improve most people’s lives to any great extent, other than giving them more choices about content that was usually vacuous anyway. The new technologies made a few capitalists and shareholders a lot richer but, arguably, did not improve the quality of our lives in any significant way.

By the time that the first generation of information technology had played itself out, the futurists were on a new bandwagon heading for a futurist utopia. The new emphasis in the mid 1990s was on information and communication technologies (ICT). The junction of computers and digital communication would allow for the creation of a truly global society where individuals and groups could connect. Whereas the choices in an IT world seemed rather restricted in terms of practical applications, now the choices would be unlimited thanks to: 1) the convergence of digital technologies; 2) the potential for interactivity controlled by the individual; and, 3) the power of multimedia to enhance the newly communicating communities. The most powerful icons of all in this dramatic scenario were virtual reality and virtual communities.

On the face of it, the idea of virtual reality and a virtual community do seem revolutionary. The reality, however, is that people’s lives have not been impacted to anywhere near the extent that futurists believed. Just as electronic mail was the most revolutionary feature of the first wave of IT, so too the digital phone has become the ubiquitous symbol of ITC. The over hyped Net did not become anything close to the miracle channel and complex brain of the human beehive that the techno-boosters imagined. For everyone who embraces the Net, others retreat from a realm that offers so little in return for the time and cost involved in participation.

The inflated language of the fans of ITC needs to put under the spotlight. For the editor of Wired, it was the new Invisible Hand that “controlled without authority.” For Bill Gates, the head honcho of Microsoft, it was a network that would “draw the world together”. For Gates, we have only ourselves to blame if we don’t make use of this remarkable opportunity to create a global village. The future is in ourselves, if only we make the right choices. At a much higher level, Marshall McLuhan argued that a technological future was not only inevitable but that technology defined who and what we were as human beings. By embracing technology, by understanding that the “medium is the message,” we would speed up the progress to a global village and electronic sublime. It is surprising that so many academics and futurists continue to parrot these McLuhanesque doctrines despite the fact that no credible global village has emerged and electronic sublimity is not one whit closer.

Predicting the future is a hell of a lot easier if you ignore the past. Futurists like Alvin Toffler never feel the need to question their notion that technology is the “great engine” of our future because they constantly shift their predictions to the next technological wave. That wave is always “a powerful tide…surging across much of the world today, creating a new, often bizarre, environment in which to work, play, marry, raise children or retire.” The miraculous future nature of technology is always a constant that erases any failures or problems of the past. It is always technology that is moulding us, despite the fact that many of the technological innovations of the past did not change our lives so very much, and certainly not always in positive ways.

The negative aspects of technology have no hold on the techno-boosters, who have recently moved on to picture the brave new world of the twenty-first century. This is the age where technology completely eclipses what it means to be human as it allows us to manipulate the human genome, meld man and machine into cyborgs, and create a designer world. Since virtual reality did not pan out very well, it seems that we will have to transform reality into our visions.

Critiquing the Concept of Technology

The concept of technology among the futurists is notoriously hard to pin down. It can be neutral and deterministic or progressive and liberating. What is perhaps most interesting in the discourse on technology is the way that it appeals to our basic need to hope for an improvement our lives. That is where the concepts of spectacle and revolution come into play.

Commonly, the concept of technology involves an element of spectacle - the promise of utterly and dramatically changing our lives for the better. Whenever this emphasis on spectacle rises above a commonplace fetish for gadgets, what it really seems to indicate is that we need a mental release from the drabness and oppression of our lives. Technological thinking becomes something of an opiate for lives that are anything but spectacular. Another feature of the discussions of technology is the emphasis on revolution or, at least, a new renaissance. This promise of dramatic change and improvement to our lives also allows people to envision a future that is very different from the present, one where life might be more worth living.

The deus ex machina performed that function in seventeenth-century French drama. The idea of divine intervention might never have appeared but for the need people have to see mistakes cleared up, injustices fixed, goodness rewarded and a happy ever hereafter. To the extent that an asocial and divinely charged technology fulfills that need in modern society, it provides us with a harmless if fantastical vision of the future. In this respect, techno-boosterism resembles science fiction.

However, we should be reminded here of what Marx said about the nature and function of religion. He called religion the opiate of the masses. In other words, it was a way of making their drab lives more acceptable by providing the promise of an afterlife. But Marx argued that such opiates were not simply neutral or harmless emotional band-aids. They were part of an ideological apparatus that prevented people from criticizing a socio-economic system that was unjust. The rhetoric of techno-boosterism would be amusing if it were merely the raving of harmless futurists. It also is device for:

• justifying the status quo;
• eliminating dissent (i.e. as Luddite);
• distracting us from important social issues;
• exercising greater control over our lives;
• providing those who control the economy with considerable profits.

One of the most dangerous tendencies of futurism and technological fetishism is that “abolishes history”. When the focus is continually on the future, the past is rendered irrelevant or even made obsolete. Any problems or difficulties in the past become nothing more than speed bumps on the path to the future.

Futurists have two approaches to the past, both of which are ridiculously simplistic and dismissive. The first is materialistic. Futurists suggest that those who use the past to criticize the future fail to see that the world of the past (and in some places the present) is a world of poverty, inequality and oppression. The second is idealistic. Futurists present a vision of a technological utopia where human life and labour is transformed for the better.

Recapturing the Past in the World of the Future

In England, the country that experienced the first industrial revolution, one particular image has always galvanized those who, like the romantics, were critics of technological change. That image is the country, which is typically contrasted with the city. The countryside is beautiful; the city is ugly. Rural society was once a real community; urban men and women are isolated from one another. Rural society bred independence and ethical values, in sharp contrast with the alienation and bureaucracy of city life. Whatever the merits of this dichotomy, at least it allowed a platform to criticize the worst features of the industrialization and technologization of society.

This need to retain or recapture an image of pre-industrial Eden has recently been co-opted by some of the most prominent techno-boosters. For example, in The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler argues that the new information age will also be one of electronic salvation. With advances in information and communications technologies, the majority of people will no longer have to go to work in the cities. They can work from home and live in the countryside. When people move back into rural communities, there will be a need to produce goods and services for them at the local level. The new sophisticated telecommunication networks will allow many of the most progressive features of urban life without the crime and congestion. Market gardening, the rural lifestyle, and genuine communities will flourish in the ways that they did before the Industrial Revolution - but now without any of the poverty, inequality and injustice of the pre-industrial world.

This is the vision of the electronic cottage. One of its most captivating features is the ability on the part of the individual to control his or her own time and to work according to more natural rhythms than the clock. The entire thrust of this argument is that any critique of technology is not only simple minded, but will deny us of the miraculous benefits that will accrue to its speedier adoption. Ironically, the alien social invasion of industrialization/technologization will return us to Eden if only we give it enough time. The future is symbolized by the machine in the garden.

One wonders whether this image is supposed to convince the masses that technology is benign or to comfort those advocates of technology who might occasionally have doubts about the future. Ideology is always a battle over symbols. One of most effective ways to push one’s own vision of the world is to co-opt the symbols of one’s critics by interpreting/locating them within one’s own paradigm (conceptual framework). It is also a highly efficient way of depriving one’s critics of their history.

The working classes in Great Britain fought a practical and an ideological battle against industrialization and technologization by contrasting urban and rural life and elevating the latter. The history of the British working class was an attempt to propose alternative values to the ones offered by the middle classes and the governments who supported them. Their touchstone was the moral community of rural society; and their chief opposition was to those market forces and specialized systems that turned labour and labourers into commodities and that made alienation a feature of work. When even supposedly left-wing politicians like British Prime Minister Tony Blair view technology as inevitable, deterministic and progressive, the possibility of criticism is limited.

Symbolic Workers in the Information Era

Ideological manipulation limits symbolic freedom and choice. It is the nature of technological boosterism to limit people’s ability to criticize and to chose because: 1) it puts technology above society; 2) it equates technology with progress; 3) it renders technology inevitable deterministic; and 4) it negates or absorbs critical viewpoints. However, recent trends in technology have been used to argue the exact opposite. Writers like Toffler, politicians like Robert Reich (U.S.) and Tony Blair (UK), and management gurus like Peter Drucker argue that success in the Information Era requires a large number of symbolic analysts who are free, fluid, and flexible specialists.

The argument goes something like this. Our modern information society needs to make a significant sector of its workers more free and self-directed because it requires people who can make complex data and information intelligible and work effectively with an every changing information base to identify and solve problems, develop strategy, and transcend particular disciplines and specializations. These knowledge workers will not be employees in the typical sense, since they are self-directed, self-programmable, highly educated and lifelong learners. More important than having a specific body of knowledge to apply, these individuals are able to generate the knowledge they need and apply it to changing situations. In the advanced economic countries, these individuals could constitute anywhere between 20-30% of the modern workforce.

These people are not employees in any typical sense. The nature of their work makes them independent and creative. Presumably, they suffer little of the alienation of the traditional worker who has no power or freedom with respect to the mode of production or productive system. Little about their position is routine, since they are continually adapting and readapting within “a constantly changing situation.” As their percentage rises, the companies or institutions (including universities) for which they work become more flat, fluid and flexible. They are the new intellectual capital, in some ways more important than traditional capital.

Those who speak this language, like the management consultant Drucker, imply that we have entered a post-capitalist society. Instead of capital being the most important factor, now human beings are key players in the way technologically communicated information is processed and applied. Human beings have priority over machines because technology has finally brought us to the point where we can maximize intelligence and creativity. Mechanical and technological systems become feedback loops, where the feedback is used to continually change and improve systems.

A society that privileges knowledge workers is one that invests heavily in education. It needs to empower the highest levels of education, where individuals can process and manipulate information. The form of education cannot be too mechanical, or specific to a particular job, because it needs to involve creativity and transferable skills. The whole idea is to create a professional society, where the professionals are largely responsible for their own lifelong learning or professional upgrading.

When presented in these ways, the information age does seem to promote a certain amount of freedom and independence, at least in the most advanced countries. But we need to look at this argument more closely in order to see just how flawed it is.

i. knowledge workers

The first thing to note about these knowledge workers is that, at most, they constitute only 30% of society in one-third of the nations of the world. If they are a new, more independent elite, they still only constitute a small fraction of society. What we know about the creation of a new elite suggests that the education and jobs will go to a particular group who can afford to pay for an increasingly expensive kind of university education. This elite of clever people will likely reinforce any social inequalities that exist in society.

ii. relation to the forces of production

Even if this elite were more democratically selected, they still would not represent increasing freedom for society in general and, most of all, the economic marketplace would restrict their personal power. Arguably, the most proficient symbolic analysts in modern business work in advertising, where the pay is notoriously low and the hours expected from workers very long. University professors can obviously be categorized as symbolic analysts but they have experienced a continual assault on their wages and working conditions over the past 25 years. Some symbolic analysts, like actuaries, have considerably greater personal power than marketers or professors. But that has less to do with their actual competencies than with the ability of the profession to restrict the number of actuaries to the level where market demand is high. In other words, just because you are a proficient symbolic analyst doesn’t mean that you are going to be personally empowered.

iii. symbolic analysts in history

Even if you could be satisfied with 20-30% levels with a somewhat lower degree of personal empowerment, such a situation would not necessarily imply individual progress. Symbolic analysts are only the latest in a long line of professional workers that began around 1880 and continue into the present. The growth of democracy, combined the demand for university and college education, empowered large numbers of specialists, including university teachers, doctors and lawyers. The reason for mentioning university teachers is that, at one time, this group was highly respected, had small classes to teach, and had considerable freedom with respect to both their teaching and research. In recent decades, this has become a less respected or desirable profession.

As new professional groups emerge, others may be in decline. Overall, the numbers do not change very rapidly. There is nothing in the new information era that justifies the enormous emphasis on symbolic analysts or even human capital. In business, for example, the scientific management movement of the 1880s and 1890s emphasized brainpower in ways that are not so very different from the rise of symbolic analysts.

iv. the postindustrial age is nothing new

Outside of the language of the futurists and their evil twins, management gurus, the emphasis on a postindustrial society, human capital and the “intensified reflexivity of actors and institutions” have been developing for quite some time. It has been a feature of the modern era for at least half a century. At one time, the focus was on the new service industries rather than the dissemination of information. But the need to be open, fluid and flexible — and to understand and operate within much broader social processes - was fairly well developed. The information age is not really such a “novel epoch”.

In the universities, for example, the need for symbolic analysts was well understood by the 1960s, as the members of these institutions began to move away from an overly disciplinary and specialized focus towards more multidisciplinary, and even interdisciplinary foci.

The Primacy of Theory

Some of those who believe that we are moving into a completely new and progressive information epoch focus on the increasing importance of theoretical knowledge and systems. They also tend to emphasize the relationship between theory (i.e. abstract research) and innovation in the productive system. Thus, for example, scientific knowledge - with its complex codes, laws and procedures - is now key to innovation, whereas in the past innovation came largely from dealing directly with practical problems. In addition, the economic behaviour of our governments is driven by complex theoretical economic models such as Keynesianism or cost-benefit analysis require highly specialized knowledge and those symbolic analysts who know how to put these theories into action.

Evidence of the increasing importance of theoretical, codified information certainly is not hard to find. In characterizes training in many professional positions, such as law, social services, accounting etc. The education required in these professions today is much more theoretical than it was in the past, and it is changing so rapidly all the time that professionals need to continually upgrade their knowledge in classrooms rather than on the job. “Recourse to theoretical knowledge is no central to virtually everything that we do, from designing new technologies, producing everyday artifacts, to making sense of our own lives…”

This emphasis on the mastery of theory appears to be a more productive way of envisioning the information society than some of the more superficial statements about symbolic analysts. But before we could even begin to draw any serious conclusions about an information epoch or a second industrial revolution, we need to pay attention to the following points:

1. When we talk about theories, it is important to know exactly what theories we are discussing. Scientific theoretical frameworks are very different paradigms than theories or models that apply in the liberal arts and social sciences. Blurring these differences under the category of theories makes everyone look like a symbolic analyst. But they are very different people, with very different ways of approaching knowledge.
2. Theory can apply to many things, including research, codified systems, hypothetical models, etc. Only some of these activities, such as the application of scientific theories to technological innovation, fit neatly into the arguments for a distinctive information society.
3. Theoretical training has been used for a long time by educational institutions to certify individuals for jobs. In these cases, its purpose is not so much to reinforce the primacy of theory for the modern age, but to rank students in terms of their intelligence. The emphasis here is on certification rather than anything that might be construed as operating within an information age.

Only by blurring all of these distinctions is it possible for techno-boosters to argue that we live in an information age where symbolic analysts process knowledge in ways that are historically unprecedented.

Informational Capitalism

Robins and Webster clearly are not convinced that there is something new and unusual about the modern information era. They believe that this is a lot of smoke and mirrors conjured up by futurists to make us think that we are entering into a revolutionary new period in human history. But by looking more closely at human history, we can see that all of this is really just techno-boosterism in a new dress. The real issues that are obscured by futurism have been around for some time and include capitalist relationships that subordinate individuals and communities to the requirements of the marketplace and the current mode of production. The history of capitalism shows that, while the market is able to generate wealth for some, its claim to being progressive is highly problematic. For many people, while the mode of production has been much improved over the last century, their lives have not been improved accordingly.

Techno-boosterism obscures the hollowing out of progress by continually focusing on the promise of technology within a “technologically determinist view of history.” According to Robins and Webster, only when we come to appreciate the “social embeddedness of technological development” can we begin to deploy technology in humanly progressive ways. Informational capitalism is no different from other forms of capitalism. While it may be true that “theoretical knowledge may be more in evidence than hitherto,” the face of technological progress has not really changed. That face is not human.

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The notes presented here are for the AK NATS 1760.06 “Science, Technology and Society” course offered in the Fall/Winter Semester of 2001/2002 by the Atkinson College of York University, Toronto, Canada and taught by John Dwyer. The lectures are based on the following texts:

1. Martin Bridgstock et al, Science, Technology and Society: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1998), ISBN 0-521-58735-2
2. Kevin Robbins and Frank Webster, Times of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life (New York, Routledge, 1999), ISBN 0-415-16115-0
3. Albert H. Teich, Technology and the Future (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2000), ISBN 0-312-01885-1

For more about John Dwyer, visit: http://www.sayitagain.com/ivorytower/