Autonomous Technology

Too Poignant

I could take any one of the concepts found in this book and write an entire substack post about how it has manifested in today’s society. And I did, with the concept of reverse adaptation, a concept I find to be quite relevant, especially as a model of how technology and science drive progress and social relations.

I’m surprised this book isn’t talked about more, to be honest.

I was first introduced to Winner through his article, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” which is kind of a running joke in STS studies about how professors never stop assigning it. The article talks about how culture manifests in artifacts we usually decide are impartial or devoid of political values. This book is basically that, but with the structure of the entire society as the artifact of analysis.

I don’t think we can really talk about this book without referencing its source material. There’s Marx, Marcuse, Mumford, Arendt, but the most direct project that this book builds on is the work of Jacques Ellul. There is a lot to say about Jacques Ellul and his conception of a totalizing societal technique which we’ve all become subservient to. In a lot of ways, the less said the better. But on the other hand, he keeps popping up in interesting places. For instance, I just read when I was doing a brief refresher for the anarchy piece that he was a Christian anarchist.

A Brief on Ellul

Ellul posits the notion of a totalizing societal technique which we’ve all been subsumed into. He says we are beset by a certain conception of the scientific management of our relations and industries. This conception (which isn’t just a concept as such, but rather a rigid form of practice) privileges a kind of rationality which invades every part of our lives. Ellul’s “technique” is the one best means working towards the achievement of a given end and the covenant we have with all of the institutions that contribute to technological development is the achievement of this one best means.

The idea is that if we invest our energy into technology, it will make our lives more efficient, easier.

This narrative manifests itself on different levels of social relations. For the consumer, there is consumer technology like the washing machine. For the manufacturer, there is the tayloristic management of labor, offshoring, and centralization. For the stakeholders, it is consolidation- mergers and acquisitions. For the state, it is facilitating the taxes and zoning laws which smooths all of this over and maintains the current propertied regime. The issue, among many issues (outlined in Winner’s book) is that the means becomes the end that we are trying to achieve. In the process of striving towards this technique, our social contract with technology becomes all subsuming and harder and harder to break out of. Instead of technology working for us, we end up fastened to a large-scale technological system. Technique.

Ellul is part of a French contingent who continuously tried to out theorize one another. His era of postmodern philosophy was one in which the most totalizing and complete theory of all social relations was the talk of the town. Foucault is a prime example of this with his biopolitics, Marcuse with his synthesis of Freud and Marx, Camus and the existentialists who said it was all about suicide, Lacan, and so on.

These kinds of totalizing theories are a part of a larger stylistic convention of the time. Do they have bearing on reality? Can we say they are accurate reflections of our social relations? What’s interesting is they come to define reality. They come to be a roadmap for the young philosopher, the young entrepreneur, the youth in general. Ellul’s technique and the theories like it (Lacan’s “real”) are read as roadmaps, and then reproduce themselves like they are some kind of script. They start out as descriptive, but in the vacuum of clear alternatives, they become prescriptive.

This is, in my opinion, a hallmark of postmodernism. Postmodernism posits, “Hey, I don’t think that large, collective histories or theories of being can really apply to everyone everywhere, but by the way, here is a large collective historical theory that applies to everyone everywhere.” It is a very interesting contradiction that resolves itself in the concretization of the canon and the reproduction of a social script. Baudrillard talks about this in Simulation, and we can observe the effect of this kind of social theory on society in a pretty direct way. This is a metaphysical issue due to the limitations of our minds and the constraints of language.

So, what Ellul’s theory does, in this context, is he takes technological determinism to its logical end. He observes the effects of scientific management on society, placing the individual as a cog in a larger social machine engineered for efficiency at any cost. This may seem dangerous if people are, as I say, using it as a script for recreating society. And it is. But it would be more dangerous to say, “Oh, all our means are the best for our quality of life, we have engineered the perfect human experience in our supply chains, etc.” Theory is, after all, based on an observation of society. By positing a harsh technological determinism, Ellul illuminates the loss of agency in the world as a result of our large-scale technological systems, and challenges the reader to carve out alternative structures or else conform to the technological order.

These things can be read as a guide, from the bourgeoisie figuring out the best way to psychologically ensnare others, or they can be read in critical opposition by the activist, theorist, or worker trying to gain a grasp of the larger structural issues she faces. Winner addresses both possible perspectives, stating direct opposition and issuing a warning, while also in some respects sacralizing these large scale systems through appeals to the technological sublime.

Now that some base concepts are laid out, onto the review.

Autonomous Technology

I: Autonomy and Mastery

Winner starts the book by outlining a concept of technological animism. Winner says we have to start by looking at technology as an extension of human life, which is a part of all life generally. He uses the myth of Prometheus and the creation story from Genesis to illustrate this point. Just as we are in some way extensions of God, vehicles of knowledge and experience for some higher power, so too we become little gods of our little technological worlds. Except, while nothing is taken from God and He remains through this process of creation, the extension of our agency into these objects results in a creation gone amok to where it becomes unrecognizable.

“If one asks, where did this strange life come from? What is its real origin? The answer is clear: it is human life transferred into the artifice. Men export their own vital powers-the ability to move, to experience, to work, and to think-into the devices of their making.” (34)

Winner addresses the fact that we transfer our energy into this artifice for several reasons. Winner never denies that there are different perspectives on these systems. For the corporate boardroom, the goal is higher manifestations of power and control, a flattening of our lives into a readily manageable populace. This is also a form of statecraft. The new realm of power isn’t on the battlefield or through traditional political maneuvering, but is contested through the creation of technological infrastructure in which a select group (the “center”) can manage a societal outcome. He illustrates this with a Francis Bacon quote:

“For these three [printing press, gunpowder, and the magnet] have changed the whole face and state of things around the world. .. insofar as no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.” (22)

This points to the paradigm that would continue to develop after Bacon’s time, and one that had been in motion for a while. We can analyze the impact of these inventions through their capacity to transfer energy and information.

We can also see how we displace certain human functions into these “mechanical discoveries”. For the magnet, we don’t need to use the sun or the stars to navigate the open ocean. The printing press represents a greater level of democratized information and a literate society, displacing oral narratives and localized mythology. And gunpowder represents an automated way to kill.

To put our current condition into perspective, the printing press came into wide use in the 1500s. Things have accelerated since that point and Winner points to this acceleration as a source of strangeness in our experience of these technologies.

“They then experience this life as something removed and alien, something that comes back at them from another direction.” (34)

While Winner isn’t denying the human agency at the center facilitating these relations, his framework of technological animism describes how technology seems to take (and in fact, really does) on a separate life of its own both removed from human interest yet firmly entwined with it, dictating it.

II: Engines of Change

So, we place aspects of our organized society, our productive and creative capacities, into these tools and their impact goes out and takes on a trajectory that seems alien to the original intent or creator. They get added to, augmented, and there is a participation with them that contributes to the autonomous nature of their existence. These mechanical displacements of our energy are not completely beyond our control, but the way we talk about them and the way they exist alongside us get tied up in our progress narratives and our basic forms of life.

“There is a tendency to speak as if industrialization, modernization, and the other -izations as similar to such physical processes as ionization in the sense that once underway, they continue on their own with a kind of in-built necessity or inertia.” (50)

The technological determinism is reflected in our language. We view these large-scale processes as an inevitable process, the rational thing to do. It is also interesting to note that “rationalization” is also one of these words. These things require a set of conditions in order for them to take place, but once underway, become automatic, a matter of course.

We are forced into rationalizations when we face our reality and have to make sense of it. In the same way, we are forced into industrialization once a number of technical implements are in place. We then become beset by the techniques responsible for their operation, with the idea that technical efficiency is the highest goal attainable.

There are a number of social conditions that lend itself to these processes. Prerequisites, if you will. There has to be a willing populous, a collective mindset attached to a particular trajectory of development (think yellow journalism, the megaprojects of the Soviet Union, and consumer technology of the twentieth century). Since you can’t just implement a wide-scale technological implement at will, there also has to be a logistical system in place and a social precedent for it (think: mass media, authoritarian communism, and a military-industrial economy). For these -ization processes to unfold, there also has to be a technical infrastructure for the dissemination and evolution of these technological forms (think: television, a collectivized workforce, and the factory system and supply chain). All these conditions allow for a seemingly self-sustaining development of more and more technological forms which come to feed back on itself and iteratively evolve.

There is a center and a periphery, as Winner talks about later. There are variegated levels of interaction with the complete apparatus. An apparatus that can seem all encompassing, with its harsh economic rationality and its control over our lives.

Winner points to this process as universal, and cites the aesthetic analysis of George Kubler towards this end. Analyzing artifacts and how they are reflections of larger cultural trends is at the heart of qualitative STS analysis. It is a valid move to apply a general history of things to a political study of autonomous technology. The qualitative, symbolic analysis of art can serve as a microcosmic reflection of the culture, which can be applied generally to the technical forms that we implement. Kubler says,

“When a specific temperament aligns with a favourable position… the fortunate individual can extract from their situation a wealth of unimagined consequences. This achievement may be denied to other persons as well as to the same person at a different time. Thus every birth can be imagined as set into play on two wheels of fortune, one governing the allotment of its temperament, and the other ruling its entrance into sequence.” (Kubler, 7)

Thus, Kubler describes the conditions of technological development through the microcosm of the artist and their body of work as it represents a progression of forms. The output of the artist and their innovative contributions are contingent on a set of social conditions, as well as the cultural forms they are immersed in. The same applies to technology on a large scale. Innovation happens through a specific set of conditions that open itself up to the individual creator. To not go through with it would mean foreclosing on your life’s work, what some may see as destiny. Thus, the individual inventor, researcher, or entrepreneur becomes a kind of slave to the circumstances they are born into. Winner quotes Werner Heisenburg:

“The pioneer has simply been placed in the right spot by history, and has done no more than perform the task he has been set.” (70)

Thus, the individual becomes a passive part of the whole, filling in the system where they are meant to, without always considering the large-scale implementations of their work. This is accentuated by informational compartmentalization and specialization, something that Winner delves into later. Scientists and those who produce knowledge are seemingly the most active agents of change in this socio-technical paradigm, and yet they are removed from the impacts of their work. Their focus is myopically trained on their stipend, their funding, and the continuation of their livelihood. Work which is then projected out into the technical sphere and used without a tacit directional trajectory.

It is important to note that in a chapter called “agents of change” the agents that Winner refers to aren’t human actors, but concepts, imperatives, and the larger social context we find ourselves immersed in. Winner is outlining a framework for relating to these agents in order for us to put our hand in the current and direct the flow. The narratives of development and progressive forms that Winner outlines can be used to situate ourselves within the larger treadmill of production. The issues we face here are inherent to expression. Once we speak, build, or write, the artifact becomes separate from us and takes on a life of its own. Kubler again:

‘The forms of communication are easily separable from any meaningful transmission. In linguistics the forms are speech sounds {phonemes) and grammatical units {morphemes). In music they are notes and intervals; in architecture and sculpture they are solids and voids; in painting they are tones and areas.” (Kubler, i)

So, basically, that idea, but on a large-scale socio-technical stasis. This is why slowing down progress, declaring a moratorium, or any such thing is seen for the most part as censoring speech or expression and seemingly runs counter to human values of liberty and development.

This does not mean that we should foreclose on our health, psyche, or the lived environment in which we exist. In fact, the oppositional forces that these things concern are part of the larger process of technical development as well, and that is a part of the issue.

III: The Flaw and Its Origins

Unfortunately, as things fall, we see that the organization and responsibility for the natural environment, the health effects, and other things of human importance fall within the purview of the center. The bourgeoisie, the boardroom, the administrators and entrepreneurs. This is part of the privilege that comes with the construction of this infrastructure. Not construction ex nihilo, of course, but according to the progression of forms outlined in the previous chapter.

This is unfortunate because the center has goals and motivations that run counter to the periphery, and even the apparatus itself. Take Nestle’s crusade against all spring water, or the immutable and guarded intellectual property of Apple and other tech corporations. The goals of profit, control, and maintenance of a particular technological infrastructure preclude hopes at social innovation and environmental responsibility.

“For Ellul, the most active carriers and first beneficiaries of the technical movement were the bourgeoisie. The very identity of this class, he believes, depends on this attachment… the bourgeoisie first developed financial and commercial techniques and went on to originate the factory system, the rational administration of the state, technical schools, and so forth.” (125)

So, the center becomes invested and a particular rational outlook of the way things are becomes embedded into our social relations based on a technical administration. Thus, the techno-industrial state comes into being, informing our practices and giving way to technique. This process feeds back on itself and becomes a part of our mimetic social values. Technique, the one best means, eats its own tail and becomes an autonomous force that directs the flow of energy in our society.

Winner cites our view of nature as separate from humankind as one of the things that cements these structures into place. When we conceive of ourselves as within a vacuum removed from the adverse effects of our technology, these adverse effects get ignored or misunderstood. Winner offers the perspective of John Passmore in this regard, arguing for a theocentric point of view which employs values based on the glorification of the divine and the discernment of the profane.

Also in the purview of consideration are those that Winner calls the “noble losers”. He points to Rousseau’s vision of civilization.

“[Rousseau hoped for] the creation of relatively small, self-sufficient communities of free and equal citizens in which considerations of public good would reign supreme. Needless to say, this was not a dream destined to be realized in historical practice.” (126)

It is important to note that multiple worlds can exist, despite the large-scale technical forms that pervade our lives. We can still read and discern, and even implement Rousseau’s vision, his idealism, if we can sufficiently divest our lives from the pervasive effects of “technique”. Rousseau’s ideas, along with “Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Bakunin, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Ned Ludd and his army, William Morris, John Ruskin, the aesthetic movement, the dadaists, the situationists, and the surrealists” are all out there to be listened to and engaged with, despite their status as “losers”.

The problem is that the fringe is the fringe and the center is the center. But at the same time, if the fringe wasn’t the fringe, then it wouldn’t be the fringe. Such is the unfolding of our technological phenomenon. Later, Winner points to the issues with this kind of analysis, the truisms and tautological nature of his theorizing:

“The theory of technological politics itself, even when it hones its critical edge, usually ends up being little more than an elaborate description. In the end, the best “theory” for a world of this kind might well be a series of aerial photographs showing a gradual expansion of the technological grid.” (278

Still, the illumination of these things helps situate us in our context and allows for the individual to gain a higher level of consciousness as it pertains to our technological condition. We still need the counterculture, the fringe, the idealists, but they are, unfortunately, a piece of the whole which usually gets tossed to the wayside. The wayside is still a place though, if that offers any hope.

IV: Technocracy

Technocracy is a form of government focused on the impartial administration of the apparati it is beset by. A technocratic administration is not affiliated with a particular interest or party, they are not necessarily vying for power or control, but have the sole task of maintaining the status quo and the logistical flow and regulation of goods and enterprises.

Winner employs a historical view of what he refers to in our present day and age as a technocracy. He says the scientific revolution had a set of effects on the government that flattened distinctions of private and public, increased the complexity of our everyday affairs, and rendered our system of checks and balances relatively moot. This is due in large part to the maintenance of the technological paradigm previously described and the importance that it has on our formations of power. This makes the innovative wings of the governing apparatus as integral to the development of society (if not more so) as, say, the congress. The government in its popular conception becomes subservient to the progression of technological forms, because it needs them to maintain its own power.

“HL Nieburg, Seymour Melman, Ralph Lapp, Richard Barnett, and others identify a general condition in which the four estates- that is, congressional committees, government administrators, corporation managers, scientists and engineers in and out of government, and others in the strata [Don] Price describes- work together to channel billions of tax dollars to military and aerospace research, development, and implementation which smack of narrow self interest, self-perpetuation, and waste.” (161)

In this paradigm of technical subservience to higher forms of power in order to maintain a particular position, there are many actors involved. Winner and Ellul say that everyone is involved. The structure of our relations and how those relations have shaped our environment and our relationship to it have become inescapable to a grave degree. There exists various degrees of influence and control that individuals and individuals within larger institutions can exercise. Based on our place within a larger network, we participate in, or at least are in some way subservient to, the technocracy and it’s ongoing imperatives.

Winner cites John Kenneth Galbraith when he says that the university has to become a key actor in shifting this paradigm into one that evaluates the productive output of society and shifts the trajectory of these trends towards a more humanistic idealism.

“Unlike members of the technostructure, the educational scientific estate is not handicapped in political action by being accustomed to function only as a part of an organization. It gains power in a socially complex society by its capacity for social invention. No intellectual, no artist, no educator, no scientist can allow for himself the convenience of doubting his responsibility. For the goals that are now important, there are no other saviors.” (168)

V: Artifice and Order

A brief refresher on Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra is in order here. As things get reproduced iteratively and re-iteratively, they become removed from their original intent or purpose. The map (idealized tayloristic production that favors efficiency at any cost) becomes the territory. It does this through taking the world apart and recreating it according to the means/ends- the result is a complete disruption of the natural world, a complete subservience to technique.

These systems require hierarchy as a matter of their day-to-day functioning. The worker, the manager, the regional manager, the district manager, the CEO, the market conditions, the flow of capital, and so on. The center alone has true agentive input into these systems, and even the center’s location and motives are vague and beholden to “market conditions”. While a world with many centers is possible, in what Galbraith and Winner describe as “collegial decentralization”, there is little precedent for such a system and the large multinational conglomerates and the series of Manhattan projects (think the apollo program, the new deal, operation warp speed, etc) offer the readiest examples of productive output.

These hierarchical structures reproduce themselves over and over again, not just through a harsh physical movement of earth and resources, but through the psychical pressures that train us into these structures. This happens through a dependence on technological implements, and a lack of alternatives presented to the individual in society.

“Technical artifice as an aggregate phenomenon dwarfs human consciousness and makes unintelligible the systems that people supposedly manipulate and control; by this tendency to exceed human grasp and yet to operate successfully according to its own internal makeup, technology is a totalizing phenomenon which constitutes a “second nature” far exceeding any desires or expectations for the particular components.” (190)

We are shaped by these systems, projects, imperatives, and techniques down to our very concepts of rationality. The institutions we use for meeting basic human needs becomes enveloped into an economic order that renders other possibilities far out or completely moot.

“Abstract general ends- health, safety, comfort, nutrition, shelter, mobility, happiness, and so forth- have become highly instrument specific. The desire to move about becomes the desire to possess an automobile; the need to communicate becomes the necessity for having a telephone service; the need to eat becomes the the need for a refrigerator, stove, and convenient supermarket. Implied here also is the requirement that the whole chain of techniques and instruments which satisfies each need is well constructed and maintained.” (234)

And so, what else are we but what we eat, how we get around, and how we communicate? These technological implements and their complementary “chain of techniques and implements” come to make up who we are. The “economic man” is as much a component of these systems as the hardware of the systems themselves, and the whole comes to make up a large scale, globalized system that treats the human components as a mere part of a larger sociotechnical system. These processes get tied up in the social sphere with individual dignity and participation in society. The mimetic economic actor is treated with a greater amount of rights and privileges than someone who chooses alternative technological implements.

Our social systems are technological. Part of Winner’s project here is the socialization of the technology we inhabit and that inhabits us.

VI: Technological Politics

"The nation may not need a particular new fighter plane, transport bomber, or missile system. But the aerospace firms certainly need the contracts.” (245)

Even if we get the people we want in office, if they say the right things, promise good stuff, it is still within the framing that the “megatechnical structure” provides. The chancellor who has a background in public health has still inherited an engineering school heavily involved with the military. The leftist Shia mayor with a background in civil rights activism still inherits Wall Street.

There is no uprooting of the existing social order through the existing social order. Just look at political science. It offers no alternatives to our present-day systems, it merely takes a look at the way things are and educates its students on how to reproduce it.

We are beset by political realism reverse adapted to the scientific development of larger and more consumptive technological forms. “The way things are” becomes increasingly cemented and removed from possibilities of the way things could be.

This becomes ever more complicated by the traditional view of politics and technology, which holds that people do have agency, that technology works for us. This is where technological animism comes back into play as a throughline throughout the book. Technological forms have agency, we are unfortunately in some sense bound to reproduce them because of their possibility. And because we reproduce them, we have to keep reproducing them because the infrastructure is in place. This is the covenant with technique.

I remember in high school I had a physics professor who had made a lot of money in the oil business. When confronted on the issue along the lines of extraction and climate change, his rationale was that someone was bound to find the oil. We see the same arguments today in the AI arms race. We are forced to race to the finish line (whatever it is, really) because if we don’t, someone else will, whether it is China or another company. We might accuse these competitors of being in cahoots, of churning up a simulated race for the stimulation of the GDP and the reproduction of capitalistic structures. But Winner doesn’t say this, there is little evidence for that, and it borders on conspiracy. Still, from the perspective of conflict theory, it remains a possibility.

VII: Complexity and the Loss of Agency

Things grow and evolve, and with this growth and evolution comes informational compartmentalization. We might picture each of your individual cells beset by a kind of consciousness. Yet, you have no real embodied grasp of their individuality. Similarly, the individual cell couldn’t possibly account for the totality of decision-making processes that are underway in the total body. Same thing with the large-scale technological systems we inhabit.

The gut bacterium has little direct say in what you eat, but its happiness and health inform the happiness and health of the body. As our technological systems grow, they require more and more specialization, with various degrees of complexity. This contributes to the alienation of the labor force from the overall goal of the labor. You could have someone on the political left working for Fox News. You could have a biologist unknowingly working on the next bioweapon. Or you could send a well-meaning anthropologist to find data on an indigenous tribe which ends up in the hands of a pharmaceutical company looking around for more intellectual property.

And as above, so below, right? The same specialization that makes up the entire whole contributes is reproduced in our everyday lives, our organelles if you will.

“The objects of his daily use- in a word, the environment in which he lives.. is impersonal and possessive… he lives isolated in an artificial environment.. because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work- of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to the universal order… by being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian.” (283)

Such it is when we unquestioningly inhabit our world without acknowledging the network of relations that go into its production, without accounting for the health of the whole. The system is laid out before us, and we inhabit it. It is displacing, a myopic compartmentalization of our lives that offers us little choice.

But we do have choice. We are, after all, not gut bacteria. While the sphere of our everyday comprehension of the world is limited and our ability to act compassionately seemingly limited, we can still think globally about the systems we inhabit. This is actually Ellul’s final call to action, how he enjoins us to relate to things. We must think globally, and act locally. Our locality is someone else’s global problem.

VIII: Frankenstein’s Problem

In the last chapter of this book, Winner discusses Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at length. This novel is a great way to think about modern science and technology. A rogue monster, learning from its surroundings, looking desperately for a purpose. In the process, this results in a few dead bodies and many a soliloquy. It is important to note the subtitle to the novel, ‘The Modern Prometheus’. Shelley’s novel is an iterative take on an ancient archetypal story, and so too are our problems to a certain extent. We are always in the process of adapting to new forms, whether technical, biological or even ideological.

Shelley’s novel shows us the many different human reactions to this phenomenon. We may feel like little gods, we may run away scared, we may hunt down our rogue creations and force them into some semblance of order. All of these responses are captured in this book, and accurately enough in society. This is the nature of development, along any frontier.

“Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.”

Frankenstein, Chapter 4

We are always pushing the boundaries due in part to the never-ending progression of time. We are placed in a context and forced to participate in the dance, regardless of our willingness to do so. What Winner offers in this book is an individual framework of how our consciousness is displaced by, or placed into, these large-scale systems.

“I have tried to suggest that the technologies of concern are actually forms of life- patterns of human consciousness and behavior adapted to a rational, productive design.” (331)

What else would they be, other than alive? Winner helps us to realize how we might grasp the large-scale through individual patterns of recognition and relationship, no different from how we relate to each other or the natural world. The food we consume is a part of a larger, earth-wide ecosystem, just like the technology we use. Now outside of human interest, the whole industrial system of accumulation has subsumed us into its own imperative for reproduction and development, along “rational”, perpendicular lines. Meanwhile, our trajectory is one in perennial crisis, our only teleological destination destruction, apocalypse.

Winner ends his book with an appeal to the luddites as an epistemology for evaluating our technological existence. He posits two questions as evaluative criteria:

Does the new device enhance the quality of the product being manufactured?

Does the machine improve the quality of work?

Interestingly, these are both qualitative evaluations. Qualitative evaluations of the products we consume or use and the process for how they come to be. Our ability to address the phenomenology of our lives within embodied technology is something that has fallen by the wayside in our modern lives.

We are beset by purely quantitative evaluations of our existence, and we are overfed with excess and waste. This ‘luddite’ system of evaluation helps us to orient ourselves to a higher quality of life and evaluate our existence along lines of human values and use, rather than a top-down adherence to a so-called scientific rationality.

Conclusion

We find here a description of a giant cybernetic superorganism. A global overmind that links us all together within a system of supply and demand. Our states are progenitors of it, impartial technocrats maintaining the status quo. Our social theory doesn’t look for what could be, it is a description of the world we inhabit and a script to the entrepreneur. The inner workings of our consumer technologies are lost to the average person, and thus, we become like animals in an automated farm, believing and acting according to whatever information we’ve been programmed with.

Written in the eighties, it is interesting just how poignant this book is. I started reading, like most theoretical treatises on large scale concepts, skeptically. But we see here a description of trends which in our modern world have grown well beyond individual human interest. Instead, the system we inhabit has maximized the feeding of our base desires, it has staked its economy on the manifestation of artificial intelligence, and it has created a system of consumer technologies that surveil and program us with its algorithms.

At the same time, the technological sublime is still there, and it is still worth listening to and evaluating. We are interconnected in ways that we have never been before. We have the cloud, a democratization of information (to a large, yet flawed, extent), and we have immense potential to achieve a high standard of living for everyone in the world.

What it will take, though, is the evaluation of the quality of our lives and the expansion of individual human agency. What this book gives us is the tools from which to expand this agency, forge a path forward, and evaluate the agendas and programs at play.

Among the solutions; a luddite epistemology, a collegial decentralization, and a view of our implements as active displacements of human ability. We also find an animist lens through which to view our implements as living and removed from human agency, given over to the ideology of technique.

With these multiple overlapping perspectives, we must update the traditional discourse on technology and how we use it, as well as what we conceive of as alive. Whether this happens on a mainstream level or underground, it doesn’t matter, so long as action is being taken.

“We build more and more freeways, larger and larger suburban developments, greater and greater systems of centralized water supply, power, sewers, and police, all in a frantic effort to sustain order and minimal comfort in a sprawling urban complex. Perhaps a better alternative would be to let the dying artifice die. One might then begin the serious search, not for something superficially “better”, but for totally new forms of sociotechnical existence.” (333)