Cameron Summers: 'Technology is not the protagonist of history'

Cameron Summers writes for Broken Hands (What is Technology? (Contraslop, Part 1), June 19, 2024):

"Now, students, like most people, mean something very particular when they talk about technology: they always mean, specifically, digital, technology, and usually mean technologies that have been popularized in the last 5-10 years. Maybe they stretch it a bit older and include social media, but usually it’s a very limited slice of time.

My standard move here is to point out that things such as cars, washing machines, printing presses, and usable fire are all forms of technology and request that they refer to the category that they’re talking about as digital technology."

Why?

"This is actually a fairly important thing for me: I believe that discussing this is key to teaching students how to live in the world. One must not treat technology as a special category that only deals with the latest 0.003% of human existence."

Think:

"Here's a question, "broadly: if it offers no benefit, and no path to anything that clearly offers benefit, why are we spending time on it?

Technological determinism – the idea that there is some solid, continuous thing called technology and that this force, this entity, is the protagonist of our historical drama and the mainspring behind other kinds of change – is a false idea.

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This isn’t to say that technology can’t drive change, simply that it doesn’t do that as a primary effect. It’s brought in to do one thing, and then it achieves something else as a side effect because it can extend its function in an interesting and novel way."

"My point is this: technology is not the protagonist of history, especially when we narrowly define it. It is, instead, the inventory of solutions that we have to our problems. Oftentimes they create a new set of problems, and require further solutions to keep using them, though if an alternate solution that lacks the new problems crops up and its own externalities are less pernicious, then people will switch over to the second technology."

It's a long article, and I recommend it.

Everything is futile, resist the machines

In early industrialization, workers' sabotage of machines was treated as a serious crime.

"On March 5, [1812,] two days after Childe Harold was published, the Frame Work Bill passed both hosues of Parliament.
Anyone convicted of dismantling a machine could now be put to death."
— Brian Merchant. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Little Brown and Company, 2023.

It maks me think that, if you were to ask a political scientist today: Terrorism is ideologically motivated violence against what or whom? they'd likely answer: Civilians. But 200 years ago, there was a different prevailing view: Terrorism was workers' intentional destruction of a rich man's property.

The Luddites weren’t necessarily protesting machines, Merchant explains, but “the social costs of technological ‘progress’” forced upon them, according to Ruha Benjamin in Race after Technology. Imani Perry says that they were resisting “the conversion of oneself into a machine,” especially for the purpose of making someone else rich.

“It is deemed only rational to surrender and rejoice in new conveniences and harmonies, to wrap ourselves in the first text and embrace a violent ignorance of its shadow.”<
— Shoshana Zuboff. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 2020.

"The thin line between flourishing and failure is also a theme of the [Sukkot] holiday’s scripture. In synagogue, Jews traditionally read the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, a ponderous and often pessimistic tract that opens with the famous words: 'Futility of futilities, everything is futile.' But the original Hebrew holds a secret that is not readily apparent in translation. The Hebrew word for 'futility' is havel or הבל. The word for 'everything' is hakol or הכל. As you can see from the lettering, the difference between the two words is a single stroke of the scribe’s pen. That’s all it takes to turn 'everything' into nothing, utility into futility. Observing this point, the Oxford scholar John Jarick wrote, 'we might say that [Ecclesiastes] has crafted the most compact form of parallelism to be found in the Hebrew Bible.' It is as though the biblical author wanted to illustrate how the slightest shift in a life story can completely change its contents."
— Yair Rosenberg. When You’re Not in Control of Your Life This week’s Jewish holiday reminds us that the line between our success and failure is thinner and more fragile than we like to think. The Atlantic, Oct 4, 2023.

Quotes: Reflections on machines

1920s and 1930s

"Now we cannot abolish machinery, because machinery lies in the very essence of life and we ourselves are machines. But, as the largest part of history shows, there is no need whatever for man to become the slave of machinery, or even for machinery to injure the quality of his own work; rightly used it may improve it. The greatest task before civilisation at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men; and if civilisation fails at the task, then without doubt it and its makers will go down to a common destruction."
— Havelock Ellis. On Life and Sex: Essays of Love and Virtue. Two Volumes in One. New York: Garden City Publishing Company, Inc. 1937. (Formerly Little Essays of Love and Virtue, 1921, and More Essays of Love and Virtue, 1931.) Vol 1., p. 177.

1960s and 1970s

"...we should tailor our intelligent opportunist advances to our basic behavioural requirements. We must somehow improve in quality rather than in sheer quantity. If we can do this, we can continue to progress technologically in a dramatic and exciting way without denying our evolutionary inheritance. If we do not, then our suppressed biological urges will build up and up until the dam bursts and the whole of our elaborate existence is swept away in the flood."
— Desmond Morris. The Naked Ape. New York: Dell, 1967. p 197.

"It isn't the machine that dehumanizes, it is the system that tends to enslave man."
— William A. Spurner. Natural Law and the Ethics of Love: A New Synthesis. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1974. p 141.

1990s

"[Samuel] Butler conceded that machines were still governed by their makers, but, surveying the marvels of nineteenth-century technology, he wondered if that would always be true: 'We are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race.' ... 'There is nothing which our infatuated race would desire more," he quipped, "than to see a fertile union between two steam engines.'"
— Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan. Microcosmos. California: University of California Press, 1986, 1997. p. 257.

"[In an automated world,] human artists will become the most valued and irreplaceable of professionals."
— "The Creators," Bran Ferren, The New York Times Magazine, September 19, 1999, p 54.

2000s

"Between 1840 and 1879 alone, these [innovations] included the electric telegraph, the telephone, the lightbulb, the transcontinental railroad, and the passenger elevator. Tasks that had been taken for granted since the dawn of civilization were suddenly no longer required, or were performed in utterly new ways. Tasks that had always been performed by human flesh were taken over by machines. Motion and light and time and space and talk, and thus reality itself, morphed radically within a single generation..."
— Anneli Rufus. Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto. Da Capo Press, 2003. p. 98.

2010s

"John Henry was a steel-driving railroad worker in the South in the 1800s whose story has become legend. … When the steel-driving machine arrived to replace Henry and the other steel-drivers he battled the machine, carrying with him his pride and the honor of humankind. … Henry surely pushed his heart and lungs well past their potential because he won the battle against the steel-driving machine and then he collapsed, dead of a stroke or a heart attack.
In modern psychology John Henryism is the idea that exposure to social discrimination can lead some Blacks to put in extraordinary effort in pursuit of success and a repudiation of racism, resulting in a steep physiological cost. Blacks who have extra human reasons why they need to win — to prove that they have been wrongly judged and the stereotype against Blacks is wrong and that the expectation of failure is undeserved — may find themselves working incredibly hard and straining the edge of their physical, mental, and human capabilities as John Henry did."
— Touré, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What it Means to Be Black Now. New York: Free Press, 2011.

2020s

"The notion that textile workers like Ben Bamforth and George Mellor would discuss the prospect of losing their agency to machines in the early 1800s, when the machinery in question was a wooden, water-powered loom, may strike us as implausible. Our twenty-first-century visions of displacement by machines, after all, concern omniscient artificial intelligences and sleek autonomous robotics. But George and Ben's argument was colored by deeper anxieties, too — what is the value of human labor, they wondered, or even human life, in a world where technologies seem constantly poised to replace us? In fact, it's remarkably similar to debates we're still having two hundred years later, in books like Rise of the Robots, film franchises like Terminator, and cable news segments about the looming AI takeover."
— Brian Merchant. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Little Brown and Company, 2023.

Scammers have gobbled up U.S. telephone numbers and call them frequently, such that most people won't answer an unknown number.

FEMA just put out a press release reminding disaster victims to answer the phone even if the number is unfamiliar. We really allowed a major communications tool to just rot away with scams when this is where we’re at.

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— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) October 18, 2024 at 3:51 PM

General Motors streetcar conspiracy (Wikipedia)

Zen and the art of flying: Planes and bikes in Saint-Exupéry and Pirsig

See the full story here (paywalled)

This continues:

Both writers argued that value is relative to the individual.

Saint-Exupéry: "If orange-trees are hardy and rich in fruit in this bit of soil and not that, then this bit of soil is what is truth for orange-trees."

Similarly, Pirsig: "One geometry [such as Euclidian or Riemann] can not be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous." Therefore, "quality" may be "just what you like." People tend to counterargue that you oughtn't do "just what you like" given that you oughtn't commit crimes, but these people, Pirsig comments wrily, are "making some remarkable presumptions as to what is likable."

Saint-Exupéry complains about the overreliance on logic to prove points. Any ideology can be defended logically; this performance does not help us choose what to believe and value. Ideologies contradict each other, and people fight each other to the death for them. "Truth," by contrast, "is the language that expresses universality…Truth is not that which is demonstrable but that which is ineluctable," he writes. That which is unavoidable, unpreventable, fated.

People have "identical yearnings," he claims, and therefore "we must never set one man's truth against another's. All beliefs are demonstrably true. All men are demonstrably in the right. Anything can be demonstrated by logic." The important mission seems to be not proving the validity of a person's existential values, but respecting those values. Because of this, a man ought to "share with other men a common and disinterested ideal" and men must be "looking outward together in the same direction." It is only "methods" and "reasoning" that drive people apart, not their ultimate and deepest goals.

Similarly, Pirsig identified one of his central questions as whether a man "accepts or rejects the mythos in which he lives. And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos...is 'insane.' To go outside the mythos is to become insane..." Mythos, here, refers to a cultural narrative architecture that defines one's place in the world. For an individual to declare that he sees the world differently than he has been taught to see it is always, by definition, to go against the current. He will have to use different stories, methods and reasoning to arrive at the same shared, universal human goals and values.

Originally posted to Helium Network on Dec. 25, 2013.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

'Change your thoughts': On the law of attraction

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Relatedly:

For a college class c. 2000, we were assigned to read:

From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the therapeutic roots of the consumer culture, 1880-1930 by T. J. Jackson Lears. Printed in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980. Ed. by Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears. (New York: Pantheon, 1983.

For some reason — whether for a class assignment or for personal reasons — I wrote this summary and just came across it.

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Also, this book criticized the self-help industry in part for "push[ing] people away from proven medical treatments by persuading them that they can cure themselves through sheer application of will."

Also, Jared Yates Sexton has this book about how certain American myths/illusions/inspirational metaphors have become cultish.

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Before the 20th century, USAmericans believed that spiritual salvation came through self-denial, hard work, and temperance. But as the industrial and communications revolutions changed their world, they increasingly felt that the fragmented, impersonal capitalist society was "unreal," and they sought salvation through "reality" and "real life." This value shift rang truer to their experience. It manifested itself through religion — but advertisements also reflected it.

Lears calls the new value structure the "therapeutic ethos." People felt dissolved in masses of humanity. They felt stifled, shriveled, as if they had no self at all. Hence the popularity of an ethos that made the healing of the self its top priority. The cultivation of a healthy personality was every person's highest goal. If one lacked vitality, one wasn't enjoying "real life." The self could be healed by following an exercise regimen, eating proper foods, permitting oneself hedonistic self-expression, and buying the right products.

Advertisers seized upon the belief that fulfillment of deep yearnings was just around the corner. The public accepted the explanation that they bore the responsibility for their own depression, exhaustion, and demoralization because they had failed to buy the correct combination of elixirs. They were willing to take more consumer advice and to act on it.

Advertisers didn't merely respond to customer demands but also shaped those demands. They attributed the customer's vague unhappiness to specific consumer complaints which they could remedy. Consumers adopted those claims and used them to shape their own wishes.

Before the 20th century, the dominant Western worldview instructed each person to consider themselves a creature of pure reason and unfettered freewill. Of course, every person has a sense of emptiness, but according to this worldview, it was an obstacle in one's ability to redefine oneself — so if you admit to feeling any emptiness, you admit to a character flaw. Freud's late-19th-century theory of the subconscious allowed each man to relinquish some of that responsibility for his psychological and physical weaknesses. Advertisers happily took on the responsibility for the solution.

The Industrial Revolution was a stressful time in human history, and USAmericans expressed their sense of spiritual emptiness by buying products advertised to them. Dissatisfaction and depression appear in every age, but this explanation and proposed solution was unique to this period, as was the economic ability of the United States to produce and consume enough so that people could live out this "therapeutic ethos." The maxim was economic as well as spiritual.

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Photo by Quick PS on Unsplash

"There is a form of social and political control implemented by medicine, a way to sever an unpopular minority [trans people] from their own bodies and then sell back limited access to their bodies if they will submit to a set of trials to prove they can be good people, or at least made better. The people opposed to that kind of medicalization simply think that trans people enjoy no right to their bodies at all, under any circumstances."

— Detransition is a Mythology, Jules Gill-Peterson, Sad Brown Girl (Substack), Feb 6, 2024

Believing everything is fine should be based in reality; it's the reality-base that elevates belief to thought. B. Lorraine Smith discusses it.

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I have moral expectations of myself and others. It's fair to have them, and we need to set mutual expectations so that we can co-create a livable society. Moral expectations are not quite the same thing as "law of attraction."

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JD Vance

Alissa Quart writes:

"Welcome to the Art of the Deal of the Hillbilly.

Trump for much of his career was alternately mocked, admired and amplified by New York’s liberal media. Like Vance, he also peddled what I think of as crappy prosperity populism. (Here we might ask whether all prosperity populism is crappy!) Crappy prosperity populism is the claim that all success is the result of an individual’s gifts and efforts, and anyone who tries hard can make it. It’s also the faith that this achievement is best measured by dollars and the ability to enter the highest reaches of society.

Finally, it's a contempt for the poor — in Vance's case, his own family members, who he blames for their condition. As Vance wrote in Hillbilly Elegy, of those he had left behind in Ohio, they were simply spending their 'way into the poorhouse.' 'People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown,' he sniped. 'You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.'"

— Alissa Quart, "JD Vance is the Toxic Byproduct of America’s Obsession with Bootstrap Narratives," LitHub, July 18, 2024

Here's another idea

Diane Aoki discusses the idea of "ontological design," meaning a focus on designing the real, shared space you inhabit, not only your inner world. Some people believe "that unless you change your self, and deal with the issues that are thwarting your emotional health, you will take your problems with you wherever you go. That is what ontological design argues against. It argues that your outside does affect your inside, so be intentional about the world in which you reside. Curate it."

The illusory truth effect

See this article: "Why do we believe misinformation more easily when it’s repeated many times?: The Illusory Truth Effect, explained." Decision Lab.

Agreed. Really starting to feel like rats hitting the cocaine button. It was productive for a while because it was helping cement the perception of him as a weird sex pest (100% true). But we’ve wrung the last bit of the illusory truth effect out of it at this point.

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— Aunt Sylvia’s Home for Wayward Women and Lurid Tulips (@socialistboghag.bsky.social) Jul 28, 2024 at 9:22 AM

Never admit error

Roy Cohn taught that to Donald Trump.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.