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The Ontology of Technology
Do ‘technologies mediate power’? Are they neutral tools subject to social intention? Or something much more supra-social and autonomous dominating the social sphere via its ubiquitous powers? There are no simple answers here. One’s answer is directed entirely by one’s ontology of technology. These ontological questions are both epistemological and methodological. And, as the literature shows in this debate, different camps often implicitly or explicitly frame the analysis with their own theoretical and conceptual configurations (principles, themes, notions and orientations). We ought to concede that there is a relationality and presence of technology in application (you might want to call it the ‘geo-socio-politics’ of technology), then there is the philosophy of understanding technology (the ‘ontology of technology’). The former, represented by the signifier ‘mediate’, cannot be understood without a proper assessment of the latter which allow us to get to the question of what is ‘technology’ and, what is its relation to power. Put differently, the first point of contention is that a proper ontological analysis meets an epistemological and ultimately political complexity if not outright confusion or even conflict. Different epistemic approaches constitute the technological, its origin, boundaries, its form, and function differently. And these pathways and methods lead to different political and techno-social teleology and eschatology. The beginning formulation shapes the means and ends. Below we cover these three predominant ontological schools: neutralists, autonomists, and historical materialist theory of technology.
The ontology of technology from technological neutrality and autonomy to historical materialism.
Technological Neutrality
Key advocators of the technological neutrality school include M. Tiles and H. Oberdiek (1995), E. Schatzberg (2018), A. Feenberg (1999, 2002), M. Pollan (2003, 2013) J. Savulescue (2009, 2012). They conceive of technology as ‘the sum of rational means employed in a society’(Brey 2003). Meaning that technology is a neutral tool that can be used for either good or bad purposes’(Kaplan 2009, xiv), purposes which in turn change society. Technology in this theory is first subjected to the implementation and application of science, techne, technical discourses and knowhow. And science is conceived as mostly detached and independent from what Bruno Latour calls the ‘social system’ (Latour 1987) or the Fleckian ‘thought collectives’ and ‘thought-styles’. These latter cultural components shape technology secondary. Rather it is science which is primary. Science is regarded as divorced from societal norms and the matrix of practical strategies and cultural frameworks which could and does pollute technology—but that can be corrected.
For the neutralists scientific enterprise is neutral, abstract and universal, it is the very engine and fuel for technological advancement. As such, techno-scientific systems sit above the messy conflicts of social reality, and the antagonism and political interests of different social forces. Alike Comtean positivism, this process creates a linear transcendental rational system responsible for manufacturing the dispositif of technological research design, production, testing and deployment(Singer 2005, 3-43). Technology in this sense becomes a set of physical and intellectual tools with different forms and layers of sophistication. It is a rigid, all-in-one neutral instrument whose interaction with its non-other is reduced to mere utility. The technological = instrumental, a thing that is there for functional human use for the processing of subjects of labour (i.e., land, grains, steam engine, symbols, data-points, etc.). The neutralists like Feenberg, however, do concede that at some point the use and functionality of the technological artefact depends on the composition and structuring of social relations in different worlds. Because human relations are heterogenous, multivariate, and contextual then social complexity shapes the ontology of science and technology differently (Feen 1991).
In this way the technological neutralists are invariably historians, sociologists, or cultural theorists of some kind. Social systems, ‘human action’ and the values which flow between the scientific and cultural networks are examined in order to know the meaning and cultural signification and utility of artefacts. The tool is passive and reactive, society is the subjective-active force. Different social forces have distinct notions, interests, ideologies and cultural beliefs thereby impacting the application and functionality of the artefact differently. A plough, a steam turbine, a television-set, laptop, a plane or AI are neutral artifices with no inherent dependent values. They are neutral technical tools subject to human will and activities. The philosophical implication of this school is two-fold: first, there is a fundamental ontological divide between the social and the scientific, techne and technological. Secondly, the artefacts, devices and systems are cyclical. Technologies as tools become subservient to human choices, cultural and social systems. Technology, in its essence, is not directed or ideological but its telos is instrumentalism. It has no embedded political telos either. Tools are independent rational assemblages that can be used and fitted to all ideologies, by any social force, for any interest or purpose (Feen 1991).
Technological Autonomy
Technological autonomists posit that the social world is subject to technological imposition and colonisation. This view is held by thinkers like Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Henry Thoreau, Mark Twain, William Morris, Martin Heidegger, Marshal McLuhan, and Jacques Ellul Winner (Chandler 2020 ). These theorists argue that technology is a ‘largely external – “outside” of society, “supra-social” or “exogenous”’ power that cumulatively but surely devours and colonises the social world. Technology, in this vision, comes with its own lifeworld, gestalt, set of belief systems and desires and it reshapes social relations in that track.24 As such, in reverse to technological neutralists, for autonomists, societies and social groups are the passive reactive forces that are forced to respond, adapt or assimilate to this dominating yet universally present technical regime of power. The conjecture is that technology is ‘independent, self-controlling, self-determining, self-generating, self-propelling, self-perpetuating and self-expanding force’(Chandler 2020 ).
Jacques Ellul’s seminal text The Technological Society (1964) tackles this epistemological query by asking a basic empirical question(Ellul 1967). Namely, when has a social system, organisation or institution been able to ‘withdraw a technology once it has been introduced’ (Hanks and Hanks 2015, 462)? The answer by Ellul is a gloomy one. Technologies only ‘fade when superseded by one that does more or does it better’.27 This translates to a constant increase in proficiency and presence of technology. But it also means the emergence and expansion of new tech-artefacts which slowly take hold in environments where such technology was scarce before (Elul in Hanks and Kay Hanks, 2015: 462-463). Technical growth, efficiency and intensification is determined. This expansive determinacy on account of technical autonomy is the only telos in world history. Technological adaptation tends to ‘spawn more technology, creating a self-perpetuating system’(Hanks and Hanks 2015, 463). All social roads are led to technological domination and subjugation. Societies, users, and consumers not only have no choice but to be welded to and dominated by technology, but gradually all human senses, bodies, activities, spaces, relations, and interactions all become technicized.
This is because entrenched in instrumental technicization of life is a certain epistemological and cultural loophole that closes all social logic and forms of being. In the Technological Order (1962), Ellul establishes that this colonization by technicized apparatuses is due to the fact technological logic destroys historical singularity, individuality and authenticity.29 ‘All technological progress has a price(Jacques Ellul 1990, 40)’, for it takes hold of life ‘through the constant production of unanticipated problems created’ by the technology itself(Hanks and Hanks 2015, 463). Ellul calls this a tautological ‘technological bluff’ or simulated problems that consume the social and intellectual energy of society and redirect it to a technological dead-end.31 In fact, for Ellul, technology tends to destroy, control, create strife more than it solves issues. And the pathologies magnify to an end that these technicized issues and pathologies are beyond social horizon and imaginary. Heidegger seems to affirm this point. In his seminal work The Question Concerning Technology (1954), he demonstrates why this teleological intensification devours the social world. For him, ‘technology is by no means anything technological’(Heidegger 1977, 4). It is not just a tool, a device, or an instrument for an operational end.32 It is not even just a means of something technical, but rather technology is a way of ‘revealing’(Heidegger 1977, 12). It reveals a phenomenon that subtracts itself from man. A new ontological and metaphysical register of being, a nature of macro social orientation is born with technology. Hence technology as it expands, it becomes a set of undisclosed, uncovered determined conditions of existence. Modern technology, unlike ancient techne which was a mode of revealing that synthesises and accommodates with nature, is concerned with subjugating, regulating and the absolute dictation of social and natural forces. Giving industrial electricity, mining, large-scale agricultural technologies as examples he points out how modern technologies are conceived, fashioned and carried through by men. But they have no power to control what he calls the ‘unconcealment’ and ‘challenging-forth’ of technology. Being [Dasein] and nature is framed, made into ‘standing reserve’ [Bestand] (Heidegger 1977, 17) or raw material for the yoke of instrumental rationalisation and the technological machinic structure.
For Heidegger, like Ellul and other autonomists, technology then constitutes a crisis for it is not men but the essence of technology that rules. It is a crisis emerging apropos a new ontology and cultural system. A crisis engrained into the tech-frame that restructures the entire world as an object of its control. It is independent tectonic plates of existence that erodes all ‘essential’ and organic social traditions, consciousness, memories. Early in this process, men apropos technology become homo Deus, whose being is closer to God than Nietzsche’s beast, since he becomes world-forming. In juxtaposition to the animal, which is ‘poor in world’ and the stone, which is ‘worldless’, this technicized being is ‘endowed with the capacity to open up a range of possible variations, destined in their turn to retroactively impinge on our genetic makeup: the animal that is human [via technology] is programmed’(Esposito 2015, 117) now to change its being and nature. But this does not last long for sooner or later ‘the essence of modern metaphysics’ is made technological(Heidegger 1977, 116). And technology is metaphysics completed. In the tech-as-metaphysics then being-in-the-world becomes being-for-technology. The telos is this existential crisis, if not destruction of humans. The technological metaphysics hegemonizing its operations begins to drive the course of history, being, subjectivity and politics. In other words, the future is dead, and technology killed it. It is metaphysically ordained by the way technological apparatuses close subjective, cognitive, ideological and practical horizons. The reproduction of the future is now reduced to the self-replication of the technology. To know a social question then is to assess the tool, the device or the systemic configurations. And to know humans, then it is for the manipulator of data (the scientist, the expert) to know the data that encapsulates all that is being. ‘Dataism’, driven by a ‘cartesian abstraction’ announces the ‘real is that which can be measured’(Heidegger 1977, 169). This then is the epistemic basis of this framework. It announces that all human beings, all the natural world and everything in between ‘can be reduced to sources of continuous data flows with an all-pervasive technological apparatus which powers itself with its users’ lives’(Lecomte 2021).
The Marxist Theory of Technology
Unlike the neutralists, who reduce technology to a tool subjected to social groups’ whims and desires, and autonomists which meta-physicalize technology and place it outside the reach of the social relations, historical materialists theorise technology as an outcome of the systematic development of history, praxis, production and class. This materialist dialectical is an anthropological evolutionary account of society and history. It places technological advancement within the holistic evolutionary dialectics of what Bookchin would call first and second nature. This system is constituted of the ‘economic structure of society’ (infrastructure) and the legal, political, cultural discourses and frameworks (superstructure) (Marx and Engels 2004). Subjectivity, as social forces producing, consuming, and using technology for production, is subjected to ‘definite forms of social consciousness’ and life-words merging out of the infrastructure-superstructure dialectics(Marx 1859). As such, when Marx in the Preface to A critique of Political Economy (1859) famously declares it ‘is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness’(Marx 1859) he can be read as putting forward a theory of technology embedded in the mode of production. In this theory, it is not possible to assess technology without placing it within the dialectics of relations of production and productive forces, a theory of historical development of socio-political formations, and with it, the changing scientific and cultural discourses and forms of consciousness. Concretely, for the Marxists, technology is the pillar of the productive forces (instruments of production) that emerge out of the intersection and contradictions amongst the elements in the system(Marx 2013).
As such, the Marxist theory of technology rejects the neutralist conception. Technology is not just a tool dictated by an abstract societal domain with mechanical interests. Nor is it a domain that is reduced to intersubjective utility or consumption. Rather, technology is a socio-historical process, a set of techniques, skills, logical enterprises used for developing and expanding productive power. Andy Merrifield in Marx on Technology (2021) summarises this materialist developmental conception of technology that stems out of human needs and wants:
Marx’s desire is to cut through [the] ideological fog, to get at the “earthly kernel,” to displace “misty creations,” and develop a grounded and critical analysis of technology. Humans make machines… develop technology from bright ideas. Always have done, always will do. Bright ideas, however, don’t just spring from up above, from the heavens, but emerge out of prevailing material circumstances. Yet as soon as those bright ideas are realised materially, get embodied in new technology, in new machinery, they react back, help shape us in dramatically ambivalent ways. We make the technology; technology remakes us. Technology changes prevailing ideas, too, which then open further possibilities for the development of other new ideas, and other new technological advancements(Merrifield 2021).
The need to enhance productivity and manage to collective needs leads to systematic production of productive forces, this includes instruments of labour and technologies. And, as history develops, so do these technological processes and capacities.
For the Marxists, the intersubjective-domain is a site of conflict between labor-capital, non-owning exploited and exploiting owners of the means of production and private property. It is not use and consumption that is central in technological research, design, and application but production. The technological story is then part of the equation of capitalist accumulation: C1=C+V+S. Technology then is merely constant capital. It like Variable capital (human organs as labor-power) is organised for ramping up production of commodities. Commodities reduced to Exchange-Value, as opposed to Use-Value, is subjected to labor theory of value. Meaning that the owners manipulate technology (C) and labour (V) to extract Surplus-Value. If every technological innovation and advancement is oriented towards the increased efficiency of productivity and further extraction of surplus, then the autonomist are also wrong about the metaphysical control of techne over humanity. For the Marxists, machines and bodily organs (muscles, limbs and brain) are instruments of labour that correspond to a historically organised and unequal relations of production. Both practice (technological and physical activity) and knowledge (know-how, affect, logic, various stimuli) are tied to enhancing the efficiency and productivity of instruments of labour by the ruling social force (bourgeois class) that own the means of production(Marx 2013). As such, even tools, devices and artefacts designed for the secondary and tertiary processes of storage, trade and exchange, transport and communication are used for this very capitalist end. Simply, for Marx ‘technology is an extension of the productive organs of the human body,’ and it is used for the ideological, philosophical but most importantly the material interests of the owners.
It is the Marxist method then that allows us a proper scientific, materialist, and dialectical anthropological account of technology. It allows us to cognitively and intellectually map out the interrelation between the nomothetic and ideographic, the local and universal, the objective and subjective. We can now place technology in the different determinations and conjunctures that make the ‘totality’ of the global capitalist structure and its historicity. Under this paradigm technology ceases to be a neutral instrument, nor an autonomous metaphysical force but rather an outcome of interaction between states and interstate-system, geopolitical struggles, transnational corporate control, local and global production, marketing and financial circuits, information scientific advances, geographical development, social and cultural relations, consciousness, and ideological positions, amongst others.