Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry

by Albert Borgmann

  It is less easy to suggest that technology has the conceptual tools to deal with the physical limits to its growth since the evidence for the voraciousness and blindness of technology is so massive.12 The relationship of technology to the natural environment will concern us again in Chapter 22; let me here simply outline the technological solution to the environmental crisis. To uncover it we must remember that the promise of technology is one of liberation from burdens and constraints in the principled, i.e., forceful and reliable approach that is based on scientific insight. To act on the promise is to construct a technological machinery which has a tendency not only toward instantaneity and ubiquity of procurement but toward ease and safety as well. It is undisputed that in this way technology has established areas of security as regards health, shelter, warmth, clothing, and food. But these successes sprang, we might say, from local concerns and efforts which responded to challenges that were confronted here and there and separately. But now that the device paradigm through its local applications is beginning to envelop the globe and indeed is reaching into outer space, a global application of the device pattern becomes necessary. And, we might ruefully say on behalf of the proponent of technology, we have been slow in so extending the pattern. In the final extension of the paradigm, the globe itself must be seen and treated as one technological device. This has already informally been done when the earth is taken as a spaceship. Occasionally this concept is explicitly used to urge an extension of the technological paradigm as in the following remarks of R. Buckminster Fuller’s:

  One of the interesting things to me about our spaceship is that it is a mechanical vehicle, just as is an automobile. If you own an automobile, you realize that you must put oil and gas into it, and you must put water in the radiator and take care of the car as a whole. You know that you’re either going to have to keep your machine in good order or it’s going to be in trouble and fail to function. We have not been seeing our Spaceship Earth as an integrally-designed machine which to be persistently successful must be comprehended and serviced in total.13

  Christopher D. Stone has noted the force with which the term “spaceship earth” has “captured the popular imagination.”14 He believes this to be the hopeful sign of a rising planetary consciousness and respect, a change of consciousness that Laurence H. Tribe similarly believes to have been advanced by the vision from outer space of “the earth as a dramatically finite and surprisingly delicate blue-green globe.”15 Respect of the earth of course shades off easily into enlightened self-interest. When a global perspective is more than a hope and is articulated as a framework for analysis and proposals as in the report of the Club of Rome, it is evident at once that the device paradigm delimits the dimensions of concern. The apprehensions regard the fuel supply and the carrying capacity of spaceship earth for humans, not the level of respect for all forms of life that mother earth has brought forth. The study of The Limits to Growth explicitly urges the extension of our concerns to “a global perspective.”16 Such a perspective is concerned with human population, resources, industrial production, and pollution. It formalizes global developments in terms of feedback systems and urges the attainment of an equilibrium through a negative feedback system whose obvious illustration is a technological device, a heating system with a thermostat.17

  Thus the device paradigm provides the conceptual framework that makes it possible to deal technologically with the physical limits to growth, and it provides the rhetoric to make the technological solutions widely understandable and acceptable. It is able to exact a measure of restraint and patience from the broad middle class of the advanced industrial countries on whose loyalty it depends. Or, to avoid the appearance of a substantive view of technology, the class of people who have both embraced and most benefited from technology are able to maintain their allegiance to technology in the face of severe physical constraints by extending to the global scale the pattern of technology with which they are locally and intimately familiar. Within little more than a decade a seemingly total obliviousness to limits of growth and resources has given way to a high level of ecological consciousness in politics and the mass media. Such a rapid and relatively smooth change would have been impossible if it had required the establishment of a new paradigm rather than the extension of an existing one. To be sure, there is still much inertia and wrongheadedness in the reigning environmental policies. But the global ecological situation is more promising socially and physically than most critics had dared to hope a decade ago.

  Environmental stability under the rule of technology requires us then to take a global and long-term view, and within that perspective the machinery of technology needs to be modified. This much is understood by everyone. But the technical details, since they pertain to the machinery, are typically and mostly hidden by ignorance and indolence from the citizen of the technological society. Indolence conceals the fact that the powerless both within and especially outside the advanced industrial countries are carrying the main burden of reform through poverty, disease, famine, and death. Regarding the more strictly technical, i.e., physical, aspects of adapting the technological machinery to physical scarcity, there are still hopes that a technological breakthrough of some sort will disburden us from all constraints and once more open up an era of limitless growth. But it is becoming clear that stability and eventually moderate growth are being achieved incrementally through engineering ingenuity applied in a thousand and one places and by exploiting wasteful practices, past and present.18

  If the rule of the technological paradigm remains unchallenged, we can predict a global future that tends toward a physically homeostatic equilibrium, first for the technologically developed nations and then, after long and bitter misery, for all people on earth. Culturally there will be an appearance of growth and progress since within the physical limits there will be scientific discoveries and technological innovations which will allow for the refinement, variation, and dissemination of devices and commodities. And the latter can be varied nearly ad infinitum by resorting to the resource of traditional culture as pointed out in the preceding chapter.

  To a proponent of technology this prognosis will appear positive but not positive enough: positive because it acknowledges the stability of technology, not positive enough because it takes a negative view of the creative and revolutionary potential of technology. Is not that view, the proponent will say, due to a lack of information or a failure of imagination? Are we not poised at the threshold of another technological revolution, namely, the microelectronic revolution? A look at that phenomenon will help to test and illustrate once more what has been said about the stability of technology and about its character generally; and such a consideration will provide a fitting conclusion to this part of the philosophy of technology.

  How serious are we to take the microelectronic revolution? It is of epochal significance; so at least we are told in cover stories of Newsweek and Time and by representatives of science and industry.19 According to the National Academy of Sciences, “the modern era of electronics has ushered in a second industrial revolution. . . . Its impact on society could be even greater than that of the original industrial revolution.”20 And Newsweek tells us that as “the industry likes to picture the future, the new technology offers potential solutions to humanity’s most intractable problems—the allocation of energy resources, food enough for all and the worldwide improvement of health care, to name just a few.”21 To these pronouncements we should add those quoted in Chapters 17 and 18 which predicted that robots and automation would lead to a radical improvement of the work world and of the quality of life.

  Are the developments in this field truly of revolutionary significance? To answer, let us consider a digital watch and compare it with a spring-driven one. The latter kind of clock was first built in the early sixteenth century. Thus it was thoroughly familiar a century later to men such as Bacon and Descartes. In the late seventeenth century, Newton provided the scientific insight that provided a precise and genera
l explanation of its workings. There have been many refinements in the construction of mechanical watches within the following three centuries, but they would all be readily intelligible to a Bacon, Descartes, or Newton. But what would they say when shown a digital watch? Even if we gave them hundreds of watches to dissect and examine, their inner workings would remain impenetrable to them. To understand a digital watch at the level at which they comprehended mechanical ones, they would have to recapitulate 300 years of revolutionary science or do graduate studies in modern logic, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and engineering. When it comes to the structure and working, i.e., the machinery, of a digital watch, it is surely no exaggeration to say that it is separated by a revolutionary gap from the machinery of the spring-driven watches that were current only ten years ago.

  But in another sense the digital watch is not revolutionary at all. This becomes apparent when we ask how difficult it would be to teach someone like Newton not how to comprehend but how to use a digital watch. And it is clear that it would take only a few minutes.22 In fact it is easier than teaching someone how to read the dial and hands of a traditional watch. Thus what a digital watch procures, namely, time indication, is familiar and accessible. Of course it procures it much more commodiously, i.e., in digits, with more precision, more variety, greater completeness, and with less bulk, without the need to wind it up, to turn it past 31 November, or to take account of leap years. But such a gain has a negligible effect on the quality of our lives.

  Still, could it not be that the productivity gains in the machinery of technology will, as an earlier quotation has suggested, bring about a world where food is universally adequate, diseases conquered, and literacy accomplished everywhere? And could it not also be that the enrichment with more advanced commodities, each of which is locally negligible, will have a profoundly new global effect? As regards the first possibility, the belief that rising affluence in the industrial countries will bring relief to the Third World rests on the assumption that our failure to help the starving peoples overcome famine is due to presently insufficient wealth on our part. But this is doubtful at best. In 1950 the standard of living in this country was incomparably higher than that in the developing countries. By 1973 average real family income had more than doubled.23 During the same time foreign aid as a share of the federal budget has declined by a factor greater than 5 and now hovers between 1 and 2 percent.24 Effective foreign aid is difficult to achieve. But clearly our determination to achieve it has not grown as a function of rising affluence. There is of course a possibility, as mentioned above, that high technology will by its own dynamics come to pervade the entire world and so extinguish famine and disease. But it would do so slowly and over the graves of millions who have died of hunger and illness.

  What about the possibility that the unprecedented character and the eventually all-pervasive presence of microelectronic devices will profoundly change the quality of our lives, including our leisure? This clearly is the implication in the lead paragraph of the Newsweek article on microelectronics. It says:

  A revolution is under way. Most Americans are already well aware of the gee-whiz gadgetry that is emerging, in rapidly accelerating bursts, from the world’s high-technology laboratories. But most of us perceive only dimly how pervasive and profound the changes of the next twenty years will be. We are at the dawn of the era of the smart machine—an “information age” that will change forever the way an entire nation works, plays, travels and even thinks. Just as the industrial revolution dramatically expanded the strength of man’s muscles and the reach of his hand, so the smart-machine revolution will magnify the power of his brain.25

  Such pronouncements, however, are simply promissory notes that yield little insight into the flavor and texture of the new microelectronic world. But here too Newsweek has intrepidly pressed ahead and given us a glimpse of the microelectronic everyday. It is the preamble to the article where a microelectronic citizen speaks to us as follows:

  Welcome! Always glad to show someone from the early ’80s around the place. The biggest change, of course, is the smart machines—they’re all around us. No need to be alarmed, they’re very friendly. Can’t imagine how you lived without them. The telephone, dear old thing, is giving a steady busy signal to a bill collector I’m avoiding. Unless he starts calling from a new number my phone doesn’t know, he’ll never get through, TURN OFF! Excuse me for shouting—almost forgot the bedroom television was on. Let’s see, anything else before we go? The oven already knows the menu for tonight and the kitchen robot will mix us a mean Martini. Guess we’re ready. Oh, no, you won’t need a key. We’ll just program the lock to recognize your voice and let you in whenever you want.26

  The sketch is short of course and may seem shallow and glib. But in its essentials it is like the more studied scenarios in the New York Times or like the sweeping and breathless account one finds in Toffler’s The Third Wave.27 What does the picture tell us? Let us look at the individual features. (1) The smart machines will be “friendly,” i.e., easy to use. (2) We will consider them indispensable. (3) They will allow us to do the following: (a) We will be able to be evasive or rude on the telephone by way of electronics rather than through our children or personally. (b) We will be able to turn off appliances at a distance so saving ourselves the trouble of having to traverse entire rooms, (c) We will be disburdened from having to plan our menus and from having to mix drinks for guests with our own hands. (d) We will be spared the possibility of losing the house key or of having it stolen.

  It is clear that the further technological liberation from the duress of daily life is only leading to more disengagement from skilled and bodily commerce with reality. Perhaps the account above fails to do justice to the riches of information, entertainment, and games that the new electronics will present us with. But these too will be consumed, i.e., they will not make demands of commitment, discipline, or skill.28 They will be more diverting due to greater variety and closer fit with our individual tastes. Since they will fail to center and illuminate our lives, however, their diversion will more and more lead to distraction, the scattering of our attention and the atrophy of our capacities. It is already apparent that the new video technology is not used by people as the crucial aid that finally allows them to develop into the historians, critics, musicians, sculptors, or athletes that they have always wanted to be. Rather the main consequence of this technological development appears to be the spread of pornography.29

  The distinction between machinery and commodity in the pattern of the technological device is important to the recognition that in one crucial regard the microelectronic revolution is eminently traditional and predictable. But the distinction must be properly drawn. There is both a split and a necessary connection between machinery and commodity; a split in the way in which we as consumers are familiar and in touch with the commodity on the one side, and ignorant and incompetent with regard to the particulars of the machinery on the other side; a necessary connection because it is possible only on the basis of discrete and prohibitively complex machineries to enjoy totally unencumbered and supremely refined commodities. If the distinction is not made in this way, the import of the microelectronic revolution will remain cloudy, and there is then a temptation to see once more, if not the effulgence, at least a few rays of the promise of technology behind those clouds. To illustrate this point let me turn to remarks of Daniel Bell. I want to consider these also to meet the charge that my appraisal of the microelectronic revolution has picked an easy target, the pronouncements of overly enthusiastic or popular authors, and has failed to take note of the kind of scholarly, circumspective, and qualified investigations Bell has put forward.

  Already in his book on The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Bell has drawn a distinction between social structure and culture which in important regards parallels that between machinery and commodity. The realm of the social structure consists of the economy, technology (in his narrower sense), and occupational structure and
is governed by the principles of functional rationality and efficiency. The realm of culture is that of the symbolic expression of meanings, the expressive ways in which we conceive of ourselves, treat one another, deal with nature, and consider matters of ultimate concern. These two realms or forces follow their own principles and rhythms.30 In the nineteenth century, culture was consonant with the modern social structure. A spirit of devotion to hard work, frugality, and sobriety pervaded advanced industrial capitalism. But that spirit, through its success in promoting mass production and consumption, made possible its own suffocation and was superseded by a spirit of hedonism which now constitutes a challenge to the survival of the liberal democracies.

  It is obvious from my remarks on the rule of technology in Chapter 15 and on Hirsch in Chapter 18 what in general my reservations are on Bell’s view. Here I am concerned to show how his lack of incisiveness veils the bearing that the microelectronic revolution has on society. It must be stressed that when Bell considers this subject, he looks almost exclusively at the effect of microelectronic devices on the social or technoeconomic structure, not on culture—about which he has serious reservations. But the social structure is after all in the service of culture whose dominance Bell stresses elsewhere, and inevitably cultural concerns are implied or surface at crucial junctures.31 When he calls the computer the “thing” in which postindustrial society comes to be symbolized, the significance of that society comes to rest on the machinery side of the technological device, and the dubious but decisive character of the commodity side is thereby obscured.32 That obscurity is deepened when Bell (following Fritz Machlup and Marc Porat) lumps together under the heading of information final commodities as well as machineries, i.e., television programs, music, and games as well as banking transactions and records, scientific papers, marketing services, and the like.33 The failure to distinguish here allows an uncritical transfer of the astounding and admirable features in the development of the machinery to the entire technological condition.