Randy Connolly Blog

Below I’ve included some snippets from my lecture on the Instrumental Theory of Technology from my course COMP 3309 - Computers and Society.

Last lecture we discussed the “Substantive critique of technology,” the view that technology creates a frame of mind, a way of thinking about the world, that displaces any other way of thinking. More so than other ways of thinking, the technological way sweeps all before it. According to these critiques, the technological frame insists that it is the best (and hence it insists on being the only) way of thinking about the world. Technology thus becomes an end in itself rather than as a means to other, more substantive ends.

This type of critique of technology—as a frame of mind that is colonizing all aspects of life—still has its adherents. Albert Borgmann, for instance, in his Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, maintains this tradition of technology critique. Technology “is the rule today in constituting the inconspicuous pattern by which we normally orient ourselves.”  To break free of technology as end-in-itself, Borgmann claims we need to reorient ourselves to “focal things and practices,” such as music, enjoying the wilderness, gardening, gourmet meals with friends and family, the arts of conversation, running, and all other activities which pertain to history or which engage the body and mind in non-technological ways.

If technology induces a technological frame-of-mind by which we interpret all of reality according to its dictates, then the computer seems a most dangerous thing indeed. The computer thus appears to be the logical culmination of Gestell or of Zweckrationalitat. As Andrew Feenburg observed, “The computer’s structure bears an ominous resemblance to mechanistic rationalization,”  a fact that also worried the earlier generation of technology critics.  In order to use the computer, we are forced into a way of thinking; we are forced to “think like the computer.” That is, in order to effectively use it, we must break down problems into discrete smaller problems.

I once had a job interview with Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, an event that made this aspect of computer usage quite real to me. Rather than asking me the usual interview questions about my education and work experience, the interviewer gave me a pad of paper and asked me to quickly write out in natural language the steps necessary to solve various problems (e.g., describe the five steps you would take to sort a series of numbers in reverse order, describe a six-step algorithm to separate an odd-sized block from a pile of similar-sized blocks). My character or history was totally irrelevant; what counted was my ability to quickly solve problems using a linear, dicotomizing methodology. (By the way, I did not get the job).

Using the computer does require a certain mental discipline, a way of thinking about the world that does seem to resemble mechanistic rationalism. Why, to return to the question of this dissertation, is there then such optimism about the computer? Has the one-dimensional society feared by Marcuse and others colonized us so completely that we are unable to recognize the chains that bind us? Is computer utopianism merely then the ideological message fed to us by the masters of the one-dimensional society? Unfortunately, this approach to computer utopianism does leaves a puzzling problem unanswered. Why is computer utopianism predominately an American phenomenon? Perhaps the United States has been more thoroughly transformed into the one-dimensional society. Perhaps. Or perhaps there is something a bit too totalizing about the substantive critique …

Let’s instead turn now to an alternative way of thinking about technology which we shall call the instrumental theory of technology. This view might also be called the “common sense” approach since it more closely matches the way most people view technology. In this view, technology is neutral. That is, any given technology is simply a tool without any normative content (i.e., it doesn’t imply any type of political or economic or moral system).

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”

“The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used.”

Is this true then for all technologies? …

Courses, History, Technology

Below I’ve included some snippets from my lecture on the Substantive Critique of Technology from my course COMP 3309 - Computers and Society.

We finished the last lecture with a discussion of Max Weber and his pessimistic vision of a modern world locked in a conceptual “iron cage” in which we can only see the world through the narrow perspective of instrumental rationality. The selection from Weber articulates what we might call the substantive theory of technology. In this view, technology requires on the part of its users and developers a way of thinking about the world that precludes other alternative ways of thinking. In particular, what is lost for both Weber and the thinkers we will look at in this lecture, is a way of reasoning about ends.

German Critical Theory (also called the Frankfurt School) refers to a number of related philosophers, economists, sociologists, and other thinkers initially associated with (or later influenced by) the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in the early 1930s. These thinkers were all dissident Marxists who attempted to reformulate Marx’s ideas in light of Freud’s and Weber’s ideas as well as in light of the political and economic developments of the 1930s and 1940s. Perhaps the most key members of this group were Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse.

In Horkheimer and Adorno’s most famous work, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, they argued that the instrumental success of technology in managing the external world leads to the use of this way of thinking for all spheres of life. It leads to a world in which instrumental success and efficiency become the only way of judging things. Since religion and myth no longer successfully order and make predictive sense of the world, the modern age is left with only one criteria for judging actions/outcomes: instrumentality (i.e., finding the most efficient means to an end). As such, the world loses its ability to judge the ends themselves.

In our reading from Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, we can see a similar argument. Marcuse argues that the rationality required to create better and better technology pushes discussion on ends and values out of the realm of rational discourse, preventing criticism of our way of life.

Thus, technology ends up “indoctrinating and manipulating” and “promotes a false consciousness which is immune to its falsehood.”

In their critique of technology, the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School adopted Max Weber’s iron cage thesis. The rationalization of the world—that is, the institutionalization of the pursuit of interests set in accord with achievable values through the regulated employment of means measurable through the criterion of efficacy—has created a cage from which the hope for an escape can only be a “hopeless hope.”  This modern instrumental rationality (what Weber called Zweckrationality) is the supreme prison because it eliminates the possibility of distinguishing between truth and power, between truth and ideology, and as such, thinking loses the ability to critique the status quo, to envisage change, or to think about the “ought.” In a world dominated by instrumental reason, we cannot imagine a world outside its prison. Thus we have been colonized by technology; as such, we now identify political and personal freedom with technological use and consumption. 

Other thinkers not associated with the Frankfurt School have criticized technology in a similar way. In our reading from Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society (1964), he claims that “technique has become … independent of the machine” and has a result technique “transforms everything it touches into a machine.” By using the word technique, Ellul makes it clear that he is not talking about the things but a way of thinking.

For Ellul, technique is “finding the one best means” to an end “on the basis of numeric calculation.” That is, technique is the “search for greater efficiency.”

It should not be all that surprising that this understanding of technology developed in the 1920s to 1950s. It was during these decades that the problematics associated with modernization—rapid full-scale industrialization throughout all sectors of society and its concomitant displacements of traditional ways of life, as well as the disenchantment of traditional worldviews via science—were being especially felt. This relatively rapid birth of the modern world brought forth a great deal of introspection on the part of intellectuals on the “meaning” of this change. As well, the lack of the great expected change—the Communist Revolution—also led social thinkers to reassess the modern world and its defining feature, its technology. The final focusing event was the Second World War, a war in which monstrous tools seemed to dwarf man as tool-user. The atomic mushroom cloud almost blocked, but not completely, the image of bulldozers piling emaciated corpses into mass graves.

It was during the eerie new dawn that followed this Götterdammerung that Martin Heidegger and others began to reassess the problem of technology. In his post-war essays on technology—in particular, “The Question Concerning Technology” (”Die Frage nach der Technik”) and “The Age of the World Picture” (”Die Zeit des Weltbildes”)—Heidegger emphasized that technologies are not just instruments but are a general way of perceiving the world.

In fact, to see technology merely as a neutral means to an end is to be “delivered over to it in the worst possible way.”  We will “remain unfree and chained to technology” if we continue to think of technology as a neutral instrument.

To prevent such a surrender, Heidegger claims, we must endeavor to discover the essence or being of technology. What then is this essence?

“Technology,” Heidegger asserts, “is a way of revealing.”  It is a way of trying to make Being present itself as truth. But technology is more than a “trying”—it is a “challenging,” a “demanding” by humans that Being present itself to humans as “standing-reserves.”

That is, technology is a way of seeing the world; it sees the world as a supply house of raw material to be used as a means of expressing power. This way of seeing the world, Heidegger called Gestell. The danger for man in this way of seeing the world is that it becomes “destiny,” in that he becomes unable to see the world in any way but in the technological way. And since humans are also part of the world, it inevitably follows that the technological way of seeing will eventually see humans as mere raw material as well. Thus the degradation of workers in factories, the genocide of gas-ovens, and the instant holocaust of nuclear war, is not the result of capitalism, totalitarianism, or the technology itself for Heidegger, but the result of how Gestell becomes destiny. That is, seeing things as raw material for power is so instrumentally successful that it prevents us from seeing the world in any other way; we thus become powerless to stop it, and technology as world view becomes our destiny.

Courses, History, Technology

Below I’ve included some snippets from my lecture on Technological Rationality from my course COMP 3309 - Computers and Society.

Last class we discussed the essay “Can Technology Replace Social Engineering” and then finished off with perhaps the most well-known dissenting voice towards technology, the Luddites of the early 19th Century. There were of course other dissenting voices towards technological progress throughout that century. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (1816), or the modern equivalence, the movie Jurassic Park, was essentally a fable about an out-of-control technology. Shelly’s story is an early warning against something that Lewis Mumford in the 1960s called the Technological Imperative: i.e., if it is technologically possible to make something, then it should be made.

In America there were also dissenting voices. In Melville’s Moby Dick, captain Ahab is often described in mechanistic/technological language. Ahab says “All my means are sane, my motives and my object is made.” Ahab is a story about a man who has become a machine working against a white whale that represents a pre-technological Nature. Melvilles’s work is an early example of a growing unease amongst a minority of thinkers towards the rapidly changing world of the late 19th Century. Perhaps two of the most insightful of these turn of the century dissenters were Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen.

Veblen was an American sociologist and economist whose writings focused on the social development of American-style capitalism. In our reading from The Theory of Business Enterprise, Veblen argues that the “technological character of the machine process” has an impact outside of the factory or office. Technology and its processes has a “disciplinary effect” on the people using it; it “compels the adaption of the worker to his work.”

The “discipline of the machine industry inculcates in its workers … regularity of sequence and mechanical precision.” That is, it “inculcates thinking in terms of cause and effect to the neglect of those norms of validity that rest on usage.”

Thus, for Veblen, efficiency has become the ruling evaluative/normative framework of life inside and outside of the office.

Weber was a German sociologist and economist whose writings focussed on the development and eventual triumph of modern rationality. I’ve given you a selection from the conclusion of his most important and well-read book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This book is still available, is still being read, and is still debated, unlike perhaps Veblen.

In the earlier part of the book, Weber argues that modern capitalism (and thus the modern world) requires a certain way of thinking, a certain way of looking at the world. Weber’s thesis was that this way of thinking developed as a result of the early Protestant/Calvinist/Puritan ethic of predestination. This gloomy theological doctrine insists that since God is all-knowing, He knows and has chosen in advance who will be saved and who will be damned. The somewhat surprising result of the early protestant embrace of presdestination is that it instilled a type of individualism, since believers could gain some self-assurance of their salvation through tireless labour in their profession. According to Weber, Catholics performed good works when needed to assage guilt, Protestants systematically laboured. This ascetic ethic thus favoured the rational pursuit of economic gain (not riches but investments) by these Protestants.

In our reading, Weber concludes his book by noting that with the religious basis of capitalism long gone, all that is left is the machinery of modern capitalism and its way of thinking.

The “modern economic order … is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determines the lives of all individuals who are born into this mechanism … with irresistable force.” It will “determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.”

What does Veblen and Weber have to say to us today? Recall our definition of technology: that it is not just the things, but the processes, and their system, meaning roughly the type of thinking that technology requires. These two writers are focusing not on the things but on the way of thinking that modern technology requires. Both these writers see humans locked into a way of being as a result of their technology. Both see technology imposing a way of thinking.

Courses, History, Technology

Below I’ve included some snippets from my lecture on American Progress from my course COMP 3309 - Computers and Society.

As mentioned in a previous class, one of the ways that I am organizing the section on “Thinking About Technology” is by categorizing it into four subsections that describe four common narratives on technology. They are: progress, convenience, determinism, and control.

Today, I want to talk about progress. In western culture (and especially in the United States), technology = progress, and vice versa in that someone who opposes a technology is often characterized as being opposed to progress in general.

But what is progress? At its simplest it refers to moving forward. More specifically for us, it is a belief that something improves over time.

However, this is by no means the only way to think about time. Some (older) cultures see time cyclically or if they do envisage time linearly, they might see time as a descent.

Prior to the Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries), it was much more common to think of time as a descent in quality from the ancient world. Alternately, it was/is also common to think of time as a series of rise and falls. This latter belief is wonderfully encapsulated by Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire series of paintings, which show the rise and fall of a civilization.

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But throughout the Enlightenment (which refers to a phase in western philosophy and culture life in which reason and science became progressively prioritized over tradition and religion as arbitrar of truth or knowledge), progress in science and knowledge was gradually believed to be main means to achieving social progress. This belief is wonderfully captured in Joseph Wright’s painting Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery, in which the light of science actually illuminates/enlightens the children (the future), the bourgeoisie, and the working class/servants.

Joseph Wright , Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery

By the 19th century, the idea that history was a progression to a higher state had become one of the key ideas of western culture. Comte, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and Spencer were some of the key intellectual figures in this movement.

This belief in progress was an absolutely vital aspect of American culture from the 1850s to 1950s. In particular, the type of progress that was valorized during this time period in America was technological progress. This can be seen quite clearly in the popular art of this time, such as Currier and Ives lithograph Across the Continent or John Gast’s American Progress painting. In these works, technological progress (the train, the telegraph) are moving westward, bringing civilized settlements and education, as well as banishing unruly nature and natives to a past of the setting sun.

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The newly emergent capitalist class were especially drawn to the belief that progress is equal to social progress. Why?

Recall that from the 1780s-1890s, the USA and Western Europe experienced dramatic growth in economic individualism and an expansion of an urban-based workforce. The new 19th Century middle and upper class were not rich from owning land but from their control over new technologies. These technologies made available new material goods; their message to the public at this time was that these new goods were in fact the definition of progress.

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By the turn of the 20th Century, technological progress had become an end in itself.

Courses, History, Presentations