a review of Judy Wajcman, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism (Chicago, 2014)
by Zachary Loeb
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Patience seems anachronistic in an age of high speed downloads, same day deliveries, and on-demand assistants who can be summoned by tapping a button. Though some waiting may still occur the amount of time spent in anticipation seems to be constantly diminishing, and every day a new bevy of upgrades and devices promise that tomorrow things will be even faster. Such speed is comforting for those who feel that they do not have a moment to waste. Patience becomes a luxury for which we do not have time, even as the technologies that claimed they would free us wind up weighing us down.
Yet it is far too simplistic to heap the blame for this situation on technology, as such. True, contemporary technologies may be prominent characters in the drama in which we are embroiled, but as Judy Wajcman argues in her book Pressed for Time, we should not approach technology as though it exists separately from the social, economic, and political factors that shape contemporary society. Indeed, to understand technology today it is necessary to recognize that “temporal demands are not inherent to technology. They are built into our devices by all-too-human schemes and desires” (3). In Wajcman’s view, technology is not the true culprit, nor is it an out-of-control menace. It is instead a convenient distraction from the real forces that make it seem as though there is never enough time.
Wajcman sets a course that refuses to uncritically celebrate technology, whilst simultaneously disavowing the damning of modern machines. She prefers to draw upon “a social shaping approach to technology” (4) which emphasizes that the shape technology takes in a society is influenced by many factors. If current technologies leave us feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and unsatisfied it is to our society we must look for causes and solutions – not to the machine.
The vast array of Internet-connected devices give rise to a sense that everything is happening faster, that things are accelerating, and that compared to previous epochs things are changing faster. This is the kind of seemingly uncontroversial belief that Wajcman seeks to counter. While there is a present predilection for speed, the ideas of speed and acceleration remain murky, which may not be purely accidental when one considers “the extent to which the agenda for discussing the future of technology is set by the promoters of new technological products” (14). Rapid technological and societal shifts may herald the emergence of a “acceleration society” wherein speed increases even as individuals experience a decrease of available time. Though some would describe today’s world (at least in affluent nations) as being a synecdoche of the “acceleration society,” it would be a mistake to believe this to be a wholly new invention.
Nevertheless the instantaneous potential of information technologies may seem to signal a break with the past – as the sort of “timeless time” which “emerged in financial markets…is spreading to every realm” (19). Some may revel in this speed even as others put out somber calls for a slow-down, but either approach risks being reductionist. Wajcman pushes back against the technological determinism lurking in the thoughts of those who revel and those who rebel, noting “that all technologies are inherently social in that they are designed, produced, used and governed by people” (27).
Both today and yesterday “we live our lives surrounded by things, but we tend to think about only some of them as being technologies” (29). The impacts of given technologies depend upon the ways in which they are actually used, and Wajcman emphasizes that people often have a great deal of freedom in altering “the meanings and deployment of technologies” (33).
Over time certain technologies recede into the background, but the history of technology is of a litany of devices that made profound impacts in determining experiences of time and speed. After all, the clock is itself a piece of technology, and thus we assess our very lack of time by looking to a device designed to measure its passage. The measurement of time was a technique used to standardize – and often exploit – labor, and the ability to carefully keep track of time gave rise to an ideology in which time came to be interchangeable with money. As a result speed came to be associated with profit even as slowness became associated with sloth. The speed of change became tied up in notions of improvement and progress, and thus “the speed of change becomes a self-evident good” (44). The speed promised by inventions are therefore seen as part of the march of progress, though a certain irony emerges as widespread speed leads to new forms of slowness – the mass diffusion of cars leading to traffic jams, And what was fast yesterday is often deemed slow today. As Wajcman shows, the experience of time compression that occurs tied to “our valorization of a busy lifestyle, as well as our profound ambivalence toward it” (58), has roots that go far back.
Time takes on an odd quality – to have it is a luxury, even as constant busyness becomes a sign of status. A certain dissonance emerges wherein individuals feel that they have less time even as studies show that people are not necessarily working more hours. For Wajcman much of the explanation is related to “real increases in the combined work commitments of family members as it is about changes in the working time of individuals” with such “time poverty” being experienced particularly acutely “among working mothers, who juggle work, family, and leisure” (66). To understand time pressure it is essential to consider the degree to which people are free to use their time as they see fit.
Societal pressures on the time of men and women differ, and though the hours spent doing paid labor may not have shifted dramatically, the hours parents (particularly mothers) spend performing unpaid labor remains high. Furthermore, “despite dramatic improvements in domestic technology, the amount of time spent on household tasks has not actually shown any corresponding dramatic decline” (68). Though household responsibilities can be shared equitably between partners, much of the onus still falls on women. As a busy event-filled life becomes a marker of status for adults so too may they attempt to bestow such busyness on the whole family, but busy parents needing to chaperone and supervise busy children only creates a further crunch on time. As Wajcman notes “perhaps we should be giving as much attention to the intensification of parenting as to the intensification of work” (82).
Yet the story of domestic, unpaid and unrecognized, labor is a particularly strong example of a space wherein the promises of time-saving technological fixes have fallen short. Instead, “devices allegedly designed to save labor time fail to do so, and in some cases actually increase the time needed for the task” (111). The variety of technologies marketed for the household are often advertised as time savers, yet altering household work is not the same as eliminating it – even as certain tasks continually demand a significant investment of real time.
Many of the technologies that have become mainstays of modern households – such as the microwave – were not originally marketed as such, and thus the household represents an important example of the way in which technologies “are both socially constructed and society shaping” (122). Of further significance is the way in which changing labor relations have also lead to shifts in the sphere of domestic work, wherein those who can afford it are able to buy themselves time through purchasing food from restaurants or by employing others for tasks such as child care and cleaning. Though the image of “the home of the future,” courtesy of the Internet of Things, may promise an automated abode, Wajcman highlights that those making and selling such technologies replicate society’s dominant blind spot for the true tasks of domestic labor. Indeed, the Internet of Things tends to “celebrate technology and its transformative power at the expense of home as a lived practice.” (130) Thus, domestic technologies present an important example of the way in which those designing and marketing technologies instill their own biases into the devices they build.
Beyond the household, information communications technologies (ICTs) allow people to carry their office in their pocket as e-mails and messages ping them long after the official work day has ended. However, the idea “of the technologically tethered worker with no control over their own time…fails to convey the complex entanglement of contemporary work practices, working time, and the materiality of technical artifacts” (88). Thus, the problem is not that an individual can receive e-mail when they are off the clock, the problem is the employer’s expectation that this worker should be responding to work related e-mails while off the clock – the issue is not technological, it is societal. Furthermore, Wajcman argues, communications technologies permit workers to better judge whether or not something is particularly time sensitive. Though technology has often been used by employers to control employees, approaching communications technologies from an STS position “casts doubt on the determinist view that ICTs, per se, are driving the intensification of work” (107). Indeed some workers may turn to such devices to help manage this intensification.
Technologies offer many more potentialities than those that are presented in advertisements. Though the ubiquity of communications devices may “mean that more and more of our social relationships are machine-mediated” (138), the focus should be as much on the word “social” as on the word “machine.” Much has been written about the way that individuals use modern technologies and the ways in which they can give rise to families wherein parents and children alike are permanently staring at a screen, but Wajcman argues that these technologies should “be regarded as another node in the flows of affect that create and bind intimacy” (150). It is not that these devices are truly stealing people’s time, but that they are changing the ways in which people spend the time they have – allowing harried individuals to create new forms of being together which “needs to be understood as adding a dimension to temporal experience” (158) which blurs boundaries between work and leisure.
The notion that the pace of life has been accelerated by technological change is a belief that often goes unchallenged; however, Wajcman emphasizes that “major shifts in the nature of work, the composition of families, ideas about parenting, and patterns of consumption have all contributed to our sense that the world is moving faster than hitherto” (164). The experience of acceleration can be intoxicating, and the belief in a culture of improvement wrought by technological change may be a rare glimmer of positivity amidst gloomy news reports. However, “rapid technological change can actually be conservative, maintaining or solidifying existing social arrangements” (180). At moments when so much emphasis is placed upon the speed of technologically sired change the first step may not be to slow-down but to insist that people consider the ways in which these machines have been socially constructed, how they have shaped society – and if we fear that we are speeding towards a catastrophe than it becomes necessary to consider how they can be socially constructed to avoid such a collision.
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It is common, amongst current books assessing the societal impacts of technology, for authors to present themselves as critical while simultaneously wanting to hold to an unshakable faith in technology. This often leaves such texts in an odd position: they want to advance a radical critique but their argument remains loyal to a conservative ideology. With Pressed for Time, Judy Wajcman, has demonstrated how to successfully achieve the balance between technological optimism and pessimism. It is a great feat, and Pressed for Time executes this task skillfully. When Wajcman writes, towards the end of the book, that she wants “to embrace the emancipatory potential of technoscience to create new meanings and new worlds while at the same time being its chief critic” (164) she is not writing of a goal but is affirming what she has achieved with Pressed for Time (a similar success can be attributed to Wajcman’s earlier books TechnoFeminism (Polity, 2004) and the essential Feminism Confronts Technology (Penn State, 1991).
By holding to the framework of the social shaping of technology, Pressed for Time provides an investigation of time and speed that is grounded in a nuanced understanding of technology. It would have been easy for Wajcman to focus strictly on contemporary ICTs, but what her argument makes clear is that to do so would have been to ignore the facts that make contemporary technology understandable. A great success of Pressed for Time is the way in which Wajcman shows that the current sensation of being pressed for time is not a modern invention. Instead, the emphasis on speed as being a hallmark of progress and improvement is a belief that has been at work for decades. Wajcman avoids the stumbling block of technological determinism and carefully points out that falling for such beliefs leads to critiques being directed incorrectly. Written in a thoroughly engaging style, Pressed for Time is an academic book that can serve as an excellent introduction to the terminology and style of STS scholarship.
Throughout Pressed for Time, Wajcman repeatedly notes the ways in which the meanings of technologies transcend what a device may have been narrowly intended to do. For Wajcman people’s agency is paramount as people have the ability to construct meaning for technology even as such devices wind up shaping society. Yet an area in which one could push back against Wajcman’s views would be to ask if communications technologies have shaped society to such an extent that it is becoming increasingly difficult to construct new meanings for them. Perhaps the “slow movement,” which Wajcman describes as unrealistic for “we cannot in fact choose between fast and slow, technology and nature” (176), is best perceived as a manifestation of the sense that much of technology’s “emancipatory potential” has gone awry – that some technologies offer little in the way of liberating potential. After all, the constantly connected individual may always feel rushed – but they may also feel as though they are under constant surveillance, that their every online move is carefully tracked, and that through the rise of wearable technology and the Internet of Things that all of their actions will soon be easily tracked. Wajcman makes an excellent and important point by noting that humans have always lived surrounded by technologies – but the technologies that surrounded an individual in 1952 were not sending every bit of minutiae to large corporations (and governments). Hanging in the background of the discussion of speed are also the questions of planned obsolescence and the mountains of toxic technological trash that wind up flowing from affluent nations to developing ones. The technological speed experienced in one country is the “slow violence” experienced in another. Though to make these critiques is to in no way to seriously diminish Wajcman’s argument, especially as many of these concerns simply speak to the economic and political forces that have shaped today’s technology.
Pressed for Time is a Rosetta stone for decoding life in high speed, high tech societies. Wajcman deftly demonstrates that the problems facing technologically-addled individuals today are not as new as they appear, and that the solutions on offer are similarly not as wildly inventive as they may seem. Through analyzing studies and history, Wajcman shows the impacts of technologies, while making clear why it is still imperative to approach technology with a consideration of class and gender in mind. With Pressed for Time, Wajcman champions the position that the social shaping of technology framework still provides a robust way of understanding technology. As Wajcman makes clear the way technologies “are interpreted and used depends on the tapestry of social relations woven by age, gender, race, class, and other axes of inequality” (183).
It is an extremely timely argument.
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Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently working towards an MA in the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ethical implications of technology, infrastructure and e-waste, as well as the intersection of library science with the STS field. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian,” Loeb writes at the blog Librarian Shipwreck and is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.
“We hate the people who make us form the connections we do not want to form.” – Simone Weil
1. Repairing Our Common Home
When confronted with the unsettling reality of the world it is easy to feel overwhelmed and insignificant. This feeling of powerlessness may give rise to a temptation to retreat – or to simply shrug – and though people may suspect that they bear some responsibility for the state of affairs in which they are embroiled the scale of the problems makes individuals doubtful that they can make a difference. In this context, the refrain “well, it could always be worse” becomes a sort of inured coping strategy, though this dark prophecy has a tendency to prove itself true week after week and year after year. Just saying that things could be worse than they presently are does nothing to prevent things from deteriorating further. It can be rather liberating to decide that one is powerless, to conclude that one’s actions do not truly matter, to imagine that one will be long dead by the time the bill comes due – for taking such positions enables one to avoid doing something difficult: changing.
A change is coming. Indeed, the change is already here. The question is whether people are willing to consciously change to meet this challenge or if they will only change when they truly have no other option.
The matter of change is at the core of Pope Francis’s recent encyclical Laudato Si’ (“Praise be to You”). Much of the discussion around Laudato Si’ has characterized the document as being narrowly focused on climate change and the environment. Though Laudato Si’ has much to say about the environment, and the threat climate change poses, it is rather reductive to cast Laudato Si’ as “the Pope’s encyclical about the environment.” Granted, that many are describing the encyclical in such terms is understandable as framing it in that manner makes it appear quaint – and may lead to many concluding that they do not need to spend the time reading through the encyclical’s 245 sections (roughly 200 pages). True, Pope Francis is interested in climate change, but in the encyclical he proves far more interested in the shifts in the social, economic, and political climate that have allowed climate change to advance. The importance of Laudato Si’ is precisely that it is less about climate change than it is about the need for humanity to change, as Pope Francis writes:
“we cannot adequately combat environmental degradation unless we attend to causes related to human and social degradation.” (Francis, no. 48)
And though the encyclical is filled with numerous pithy aphorisms it is a text that is worth engaging in its entirety.
Lest there be any doubt, Laudato Si’ is a difficult text to read. Not because it is written in archaic prose, or because it assumes the reader is learned in theology, but because it is discomforting. Laudato Si’ does not tell the reader that they are responsible for the world, instead it reminds them that they have always been responsible for the world, and then points to some of the reasons why this obligation may have been forgotten. The encyclical calls on those with their heads in the clouds (or head in “the cloud”) to see they are trampling the poor and the planet underfoot. Pope Francis has the audacity to suggest, despite what the magazine covers and advertisements tell us, that there is no easy solution, and that if we are honest with ourselves we are not fulfilled by consumerism. What Laudato Si’ represents is an unabashed ethical assault on high-tech/high-consumption life in affluent nations. Yet it is not an angry diatribe. Insofar as the encyclical represents a hammer it is not as a blunt instrument with which one bludgeons foes into submission, but is instead a useful tool one might take up to pull out the rusted old nails in order to build again, as Pope Francis writes:
“Humanity still has the ability to work together in building our common home.” (Francis, no. 13)
Laudato Si’ is a work of intense, even radical, social criticism in the fine raiment of a papal encyclical. The text contains an impassioned critique of technology, an ethically rooted castigation of capitalism, a defense of the environment that emphasizes that humans are part of that same environment, and a demand that people accept responsibility. There is much in Laudato Si’ that those well versed in activism, organizing, environmentalism, critical theory, the critique of technology, radical political economy (and so forth) will find familiar – and it is a document that those bearing an interest in the aforementioned areas would do well to consider. While the encyclical (it was written by the Pope, after all) contains numerous references to Jesus, God, the Church, and the saints – it is clear that Pope Francis intends the document for a wide (not exclusively Catholic, or even Christian) readership. Indeed, those versed in other religious traditions will likely find much in the encyclical that echoes their own beliefs – and the same can likely be said of those interested in ethics with our without the presence of God. While many sections of Laudato Si’ speak to the religious obligation of believers, Pope Francis makes a point of being inclusive to those of different faiths (and no faith) – an inclusion which speaks to his recognition that the problems facing humanity can only be solved by all of humanity. After all:
“we need only take a frank look at the facts to see that our common home is falling into serious disrepair.” (Francis, no. 61)
The term “common home” refers to the planet and all those – regardless of their faith – who dwell there.
Nevertheless, there are several sections in Laudato Si’ that will serve to remind the reader that Pope Francis is the male head of a patriarchal organization. Pope Francis stands firm in his commitment to the poor, and makes numerous comments about the rights of indigenous communities – but he does not have particularly much to say about women. While women certainly number amongst the poor and indigenous, Laudato Si’ does not devote attention to the ways in which the theologies and ideologies of dominance that have wreaked havoc on the planet have also oppressed women. It is perhaps unsurprising that the only woman Laudato Si’ focuses on at any length is Mary, and that throughout the encyclical Pope Francis continually feminizes nature whilst referring to God with terms such as “Father.” The importance of equality is a theme which is revisited numerous times in Laudato Si’ and though Pope Francis addresses his readers as “sisters and brothers” it is worth wondering whether or not this entails true equality between all people – regardless of gender. It is vital to recognize this shortcoming of Laudato Si’ – as it is a flaw that undermines much of the ethical heft of the argument.
In the encyclical Pope Francis laments the lack of concern being shown to those – who are largely poor – already struggling against the rising tide of climate change, noting:
“Our lack of response to these tragedies involving our brothers and sisters points to the loss of that sense of responsibility to our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded.” (Francis, no. 25)
Yet it is worth pushing on this “sense of responsibility to our fellow men and women” – and doing so involves a recognition that too often throughout history (and still today) “civil society” has been founded on an emphasis on “fellow men” and not necessarily upon women. In considering responsibilities towards other people Simone Weil wrote:
“The object of any obligation, in the realm of human affairs, is always the human being as such. There exists an obligation towards every human being for the sole reason that he or she is a human being, without any other condition requiring to be fulfilled, and even without any recognition of such obligation on the part of the individual concerned.” (Weil, 5 – The Need for Roots)
To recognize that the obligation is due to “the human being as such” – which seems to be something Pope Francis is claiming – necessitates acknowledging that “the human being” is still often defined as male. And this is a bias that can easily be replicated, even in encyclicals that tout the importance of equality.
There are aspects of Laudato Si’ that will give readers cause to furrow their brows; however, it would be unfortunate if the shortcomings of the encyclical led people to dismiss it completely. After all, Laudato Si’ is not a document that one reads, it is a text with which one wrestles. And, as befits a piece written by a former nightclub bouncer, Laudato Si’ proves to be a challenging and scrappy combatant. Granted, the easiest way to emerge victorious from a bout is to refuse to engage in it in the first place – which is the tactic that many seem to be taking towards Laudato Si’. Yet it should be noted that those whose responses are variations of “the Pope should stick to religion” are largely revealing that they have not seriously engaged with the encyclical. Laudato Si’ does not claim to be a scientific document, but instead recognizes – in understated terms – that:
“A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climate system.” (Francis, no. 23)
And that,
“Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day. Its worst impact will probably be felt by developing countries in the coming decades.” (Francis, no. 25)
However, when those who make a habit of paying no heed to scientists themselves make derisive comments that the Pope is not a scientist they are primarily delivering a television-news-bite-ready-quip which ignores that the climate Pope Francis is mainly concerned with today’s social, economic and political climate.
As has been previously noted, Laudato Si’ is as much a work of stinging social criticism as it is a theological document. It is a text which benefits from the particular analysis of people – be they workers, theologians, activists, scholars, and the list could go on – with knowledge in the particular fields the encyclical touches upon. And yet, one of the most striking aspects of the encyclical – that which poses a particular challenge to the status quo – is way in which the document engages with technology.
For, it may well be that Laudato Si’ will change the tone of current discussions around technology and its role in our lives.
At least one might hope that it will do so.
Image source: Photo of Pope Francis, Christoph Wagener via Wikipedia, with further modifications by the author of this piece.
“refer to a system that has necessarily to do with a concept of God or with idols or even to a system perceived as religion, but to any group-shared system of thought and action that offers the individual a frame of orientation and an object of devotion.” (Fromm, 135 – italics in original)
Though the author of Laudato Si’, obviously, ascribes to a belief system that has a heck-of-a-lot to do “with a concept of God” – the main position of the encyclical is staked out in opposition to the rise of a “group-shared system of thought” which has come to offer many people both “a frame of orientation and an object of devotion.” Pope Francis warns his readers against giving fealty and adoration to false gods – gods which are as appealing to atheists as they are to old-time-believers. And while Laudato Si’ is not a document that seeks (not significantly, at least) to draw people into the Catholic church, it is a document that warns people against the religion of technology. After all, we cannot return to the Garden of Eden by biting into an Apple product.
It is worth recognizing, that there are many reasons why the religion of technology so easily wins converts. The world is a mess and the news reports are filled with a steady flow of horrors – the dangers of environmental degradation seem to grow starker by the day, as scientists issue increasingly dire predictions that we may have already passed the point at which we needed to act. Yet, one of the few areas that continually operates as a site of unbounded optimism is the missives fired off by the technology sector and its boosters. Wearable technology, self-driving cars, the Internet of Things, delivery drones, artificial intelligence, virtual reality – technology provides a vision of the future that is not fixated on rising sea levels and extinction. Indeed, against the backdrop of extinction some even predict that through the power of techno-science humans may not be far off from being able to bring back species that had previously gone extinct.
Technology has become a site of millions of minor miracles that have drawn legions of adherents to the technological god and its sainted corporations – and while technology has been a force present with humans for nearly as long as there have been humans, technology today seems increasingly to be presented in a way that encourages people to bask in its uncanny glow. Contemporary technology – especially of the Internet connected variety – promises individuals that they will never be alone, that they will never be bored, that they will never get lost, and that they will never have a question for which they cannot execute a web search and find an answer. If older religions spoke of a god who was always watching, and always with the believer, than the smart phone replicates and reifies these beliefs – for it is always watching, and it is always with the believer. To return to Fromm’s description of religion it should be fairly apparent that technology today provides people with “a frame of orientation and an object of devotion.” It is thus not simply that technology comes to be presented as a solution to present problems, but that technology comes to be presented as a form of salvation from all problems. Why pray if “there’s an app for that”?
In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis warns against this new religion by observing:
“Life gradually becomes a surrender to situations conditioned by technology, itself viewed as the principle key to the meaning of existence.” (Francis, no. 110)
Granted, the question should be asked as to what is “the meaning of existence” supplied by contemporary technology? The various denominations of the religion of technology are skilled at offering appealing answers to this question filled with carefully tested slogans about making the world “more open and connected.” What the religion of technology continually offers is not so much a way of being in the world as a way of escaping from the world. Without mincing words, the world described in Laudato Si’ is rather distressing: it is a world of vast economic inequality, rising sea levels, misery, existential uncertainty, mountains of filth discarded by affluent nations (including e-waste), and the prospects are grim. By comparison the religion of technology provides a shiny vision of the future, with the promise of escape from earthly concerns through virtual reality, delivery on demand, and the truly transcendent dream of becoming one with machines. The religion of technology is not concerned with the next life, or with the lives of future generations, it is about constructing a new Eden in the now, for those who can afford the right toys. Even if constructing this heaven consigns much of the world’s population to hell. People may not be bending their necks in prayer, but they’re certainly bending their necks to glance at their smart phones. As David Noble wrote:
“A thousand years in the making, the religion of technology has become the common enchantment, not only of the designers of technology but also of those caught up in, and undone by, their godly designs. The expectation of ultimate salvation through technology, whatever the immediate human and social costs, has become the unspoken orthodoxy, reinforced by a market-induced enthusiasm for novelty and sanctioned by millenarian yearnings for new beginnings. This popular faith, subliminally indulged and intensified by corporate, government, and media pitchmen, inspires an awed deference to the practitioners and their promises of deliverance while diverting attention from more urgent concerns.” (Noble, 207)
Against this religious embrace of technology, and the elevation of its evangels, Laudato Si’ puts forth a reminder that one can, and should, appreciate the tools which have been invented – but one should not worship them. To return to Erich Fromm:
“The question is not one of religion or not? but of which kind of religion? – whether it is one that furthers human development, the unfolding of specifically human powers, or one that paralyzes human growth…our religious character may be considered an aspect of our character structure, for we are what we are devoted to, and what we are devoted to is what motivates our conduct. Often, however, individuals are not even aware of the real objects of their personal devotion and mistake their ‘official’ beliefs for their real, though secret religion.” (Fromm, 135-136)
It is evident that Pope Francis considers the worship of technology to be a significant barrier to further “human development” as it “paralyzes human growth.” Technology is not the only false religion against which the encyclical warns – the cult of self worship, unbridled capitalism, the glorification of violence, and the revival tent of consumerism are all considered as false faiths. They draw adherents in by proffering salvation and prescribing a simple course of action – but instead of allowing their faithful true transcendence they instead warp their followers into sycophants.
Yet the particularly nefarious aspect of the religion of technology, in line with the quotation from Fromm, is the way in which it is a faith to which many subscribe without their necessarily being aware of it. This is particularly significant in the way that it links to the encyclical’s larger concern with the environment and with the poor. Those in affluent nations who enjoy the pleasures of high-tech lifestyles – the faithful in the religion of technology – are largely spared the serious downsides of high-technology. Sure, individuals may complain of aching necks, sore thumbs, difficulty sleeping, and a creeping sense of dissatisfaction – but such issues do not tell of the true cost of technology. What often goes unseen by those enjoying their smart phones are the exploitative regimes of mineral extraction, the harsh labor conditions where devices are assembled, and the toxic wreckage of e-waste dumps. Furthermore, insofar as high-tech devices (and the cloud) require large amounts of energy it is worth considering the degree to which high-tech lifestyles contribute to the voracious energy consumption that helps drive climate change. Granted, those who suffer from these technological downsides are generally not the people enjoying the technological devices.
And though Laudato Si’ may have a particular view of salvation – one need not subscribe to that religion to recognize that the religion of technology is not the faith of the solution.
But the faith of the problem.
3. Laudato Si’ as Critique of Technology
Relatively early in the encyclical, Pope Francis decries how, against the background of “media and the digital world”:
“the great sages of the past run the risk of going unheard amid the noise and distractions of an information overload.” (Frances, no. 47)
Reading through Laudato Si’ it becomes fairly apparent who Pope Francis considers many of these “great sages” to be. For the most part Pope Francis cites the encyclicals of his predecessors, declarations from Bishops’ conferences, the bible, and theologians who are safely ensconced in the Church’s wheelhouse. While such citations certainly help to establish that the ideas being put forth in Laudato Si’ have been circulating in the Catholic Church for some time – Pope Francis’s invocation of “great sages of the past…going unheard” raises a larger question. How much of the encyclical is truly new and how much is a reiteration of older ideas that have gone “unheard?” In fairness, the social critique being advanced by Laudato Si’ may strike many people as novel – particularly in terms of its ethically combative willingness to take on technology – but it may be that the significant thing about Laudato Si’ is not that the message is new, but that the messenger is new. Without wanting to decry or denigrate Laudato Si’ it is worth noting that much of the argument being presented in the document could previously be found in works by thinkers associated with the critique of technology, notably Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul. Indeed, the following statement, from Lewis Mumford’s Art and Technics, could have appeared in Laudato Si’ without seeming out of place:
“We overvalue the technical instrument: the machine has become our main source of magic, and it has given us a false sense of possessing godlike powers. An age that has devaluated all its symbols has turned the machine itself into a universal symbol: a god to be worshiped.” (Mumford, 138 – Art and Technics)
The critique of technology does not represent a cohesive school of thought – rather it is a tendency within several fields (history and philosophy of technology, STS, media ecology, critical theory) that places particular emphasis on the negative impacts of technology. What many of these thinkers emphasized was the way in which the choices of certain technologies over others winds up having profound impacts upon the shape of a society. Thus, within the critique of technology, it is not a matter of anything so ridiculously reductive as “technology is bad” but of considering what alternative forms technology could take: “democratic technics” (Mumford), “convivial tools” (Illich), “appropriate technology” (Schumacher), “liberatory technology” (Bookchin), and so forth. Yet what is particularly important is the fact that the serious critique of technology was directly tied to a critique of the broader society. And thus, Mumford also wrote extensively about urban planning, architecture and cities – while Ellul wrote as much (perhaps more) about theological issues (Ellul was a devout individual who described himself as a Christian anarchist).
With the rise of ever more powerful and potentially catastrophic technological systems, many thinkers associated with the critique of technology began issuing dire warnings about the techno-science wrought danger in which humanity had placed itself. With the appearance of the atomic bomb, humanity had invented the way to potentially bring an end to the whole of the human project. Galled by the way in which technology seemed to be drawing ever more power to itself, Ellul warned of the ascendance of “technique” while Mumford cautioned of the emergence of “the megamachine” with such terms being used to denote not simply technology and machinery but the fusion of techno-science with social, economic and political power – though Pope Francis seems to prefer to use the term “technological paradigm” or “technocratic paradigm” instead of “megamachine.” When Pope Francis writes:
“The technological paradigm has become so dominant that it would be difficult to do without its resources and even more difficult to utilize them without being dominated by their internal logic.” (Francis, no. 108)
Or:
“the new power structures based on the techno-economic paradigm may overwhelm not only our politics but also freedom and justice.” (Francis, no. 53)
Or:
“The alliance between the economy and technology ends up sidelining anything unrelated to its immediate interests.” (Francis, no. 54)
These are comments that are squarely in line with Ellul’s comment that:
“Technical civilization means that our civilization is constructed by technique (makes a part of civilization only that which belongs to technique), for technique (in that everything in this civilization must serve a technical end), and is exclusively technique (in that it excludes whatever is not technique or reduces it to technical forms).” (Ellul, 128 – italics in original)
A particular sign of the growing dominance of technology, and the techno-utopian thinking that everywhere evangelizes for technology, is the belief that to every problem there is a technological solution. Such wishful thinking about technology as the universal panacea was a tendency highly criticized by thinkers like Mumford and Ellul. Pope Francis chastises the prevalence of this belief at several points, writing:
“Obstructionist attitudes, even on the part of believers, can range from denial of the problem to indifference, nonchalant resignation or blind confidence in technical solutions.” (Francis, no. 14)
And the encyclical returns to this, decrying:
“Technology, which, linked to business interests, is presented as the only way of solving these problems,” (Francis, no. 20)
There is more than a passing similarity between the above two quotations from Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical and the following quotation from Lewis Mumford’s book Technics and Civilization (first published in 1934):
“But the belief that the social dilemmas created by the machine can be solved merely by inventing more machines is today a sign of half-baked thinking which verges close to quackery.” (Mumford, 367)
At the very least this juxtaposition should help establish that there is nothing new about those in power proclaiming that technology will solve everything, but just the same there is nothing particularly new about forcefully criticizing this unblinking faith in technological solutions. If one wanted to do so it would not be an overly difficult task to comb through Laudato Si’ – particularly “Chapter Three: The Human Roots of the Ecological Crisis” – and find a couple of paragraphs by Mumford, Ellul or another prominent critic of technology in which precisely the same thing is being said. After all, if one were to try to capture the essence of the critique of technology in two sentences, one could do significantly worse than the following lines from Laudato Si’:
“We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build.” (Francis, no. 107)
Granted, the line “technological products are not neutral” may have come as something of a disquieting statement to some readers of Laudato Si’ even if it has long been understood by historians of technology. Nevertheless, it is the emphasis placed on the matter of “the kind of society we want to build” that is of particular importance. For the encyclical does not simply lament the state of the technological world, it advances an alternative vision of technology – one which recognizes the tremendous potential of technological advances but sees how this potential goes unfulfilled. Laudato Si’ is a document which is skeptical of the belief that smart phones have made people happier, and it is a text which shows a clear unwillingness to believe that large tech companies are driven by much other than their own interests. The encyclical bears the mark of a writer who believes in a powerful God and that deity’s prophets, but has little time for would-be all powerful corporations and their lust for profits. One of the themes that ran continuously throughout Lewis Mumford’s work was his belief that the “good life” had been overshadowed by the pursuit of the “goods life” – and a similar theme runs through Laudato Si’ wherein the analysis of climate change, the environment, and what is owed to the poor, is couched in a call to reinvigorate the “good life” while recognizing that the “goods life” is a farce. Despite the power of the “technological paradigm,” Pope Francis remains hopeful regarding the power of people, writing:
“We have the freedom needed to limit and direct technology; we can put it at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, more integral. Liberation from the dominant technocratic paradigm does in fact happen sometimes, for example, when cooperatives of small producers adopt less polluting methods of production, and opt for a non-consumerist model of life, recreation and community. Or when technology is directed primarily to resolving people’s concrete problems, truly helping them live with more dignity and less suffering.” (Francis, no. 112)
In the above quotation, what Pope Francis is arguing for is the need for, to use Mumford’s terminology, “democratic technics” to replace “authoritarian technics.” Or, to use Ivan Illich’s terms (and Illich was himself a Catholic priest) the emergence of a “convivial society” centered around “convivial tools.” Granted, as is perhaps not particularly surprising for a call to action, Pope Francis tends to be rather optimistic about the prospects individuals have for limiting and directing technology. For, one of the great fears shared amongst numerous critics of technology was the belief that the concentration of power in “technique” or “the megamachine” or the “technological paradigm” gradually eliminated the freedom to limit or direct it. That potential alternatives emerged was clear, but such paths were quickly incorporated back into the “technological paradigm.” As Ellul observed:
“To be in technical equilibrium, man cannot live by any but the technical reality, and he cannot escape from the social aspect of things which technique designs for him. And the more his needs are accounted for, the more he is integrated into the technical matrix.” (Ellul, 224)
In other words, “technique” gradually eliminates the alternatives to itself. To live in a society shaped by such forces requires an individual to submit to those forces as well. What Laudato Si’ almost desperately seeks to claim, to the contrary, is that it is not too late, that people still have the ability “to limit and direct technology” provided they tear themselves away from their high-tech hallucinations. And this earnest belief is the hopeful core of the encyclical.
Ethically impassioned books and articles decrying what a high consumption lifestyle wreaks upon the planet and which exhort people to think of those who do not share in the thrill of technological decadence are not difficult to come by. And thus, the aspect of Laudato Si’ which may be the most radical and the most striking are the sections devoted to technology. For what the encyclical does so impressively is that it expressly links environmental destruction and the neglect of the poor with the religious allegiance to high-tech devices. Numerous books and articles appear on a regular basis lamenting the current state of the technological world – and yet too often the authors of such texts seem terrified of being labeled “anti-technology.” Therefore, the authors tie themselves in knots trying to stake out a position that is not evangelizing for technology but at the same time they refuse to become heretics to the religion of technology – and as a result they easily become the permitted voices of dissent who only seem to empower the evangels as they conduct the debate on the terms of technological society. They try to reform the religion of technology instead of recognizing that it is a faith premised upon worshiping a false god. After all, one is permitted to say that Google is getting too big, that the Apple Watch is unnecessary, and that Internet should be called “the surveillance mall” – but to say:
“There is a growing awareness that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere.” (Francis, no. 113)
Well…one rarely hears such arguments today, precisely because the dominant ideology of our day places ample faith in equating “scientific and technological progress” with progress, as such. Granted, that was the type of argument being made by the likes of Mumford and Ellul – though the present predicament makes it woefully evident that too few heeded their warnings. Indeed a leitmotif that can be detected amongst the works of many critics of technology is a desire to be proved wrong, as Mumford wrote:
“I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, ‘This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!’ Yes: then I could die happy.” (Mumford, 528 – My Works and Days)
Yet to read over Mumford’s predictions in the present day is to understand why those words are not carved into his tombstone – for Mumford was not an “absolute fool,” he was acutely prescient. Though, alas, the likes of Mumford and Ellul too easily number amongst the ranks of “the great sages of the past” who, in Pope Francis’s words, “run the risk of going unheard amid the noise and distractions of an information overload.”
Despite the issues that various individuals will certainly have with Laudato Si’ – ranging from its stance towards women to its religious tonality – the element that is likely to disquiet the largest group is its serious critique of technology. Thus, it is somewhat amusing to consider the number of articles that have been penned about the encyclical which focus on the warnings about climate change but say little about Pope Francis’s comments about the danger of the “technological paradigm.” For the encyclical commits a profound act of heresy against the contemporary religion of technology – it dares to suggest that we have fallen for the PR spin about the devices in our pockets, it asks us to consider if these devices are truly filling an existential void or if they are simply distracting us from having to think about this absence, and the encyclical reminds us that we need not be passive consumers of technology. These arguments about technology are not new, and it is not new to make them in ethically rich or religiously loaded language; however, these are arguments which are verboten in contemporary discourse about technology. Alas, those who make such claims are regularly derided as “Luddites” or “NIMBYs” and banished to the fringes. And yet the historic Luddites were simply workers who felt they had the freedom “to limit and direct technology,” and as anybody who knows about e-waste can attest when people in affluent nations say “Not In My Back Yard” the toxic refuse simply winds up in somebody else’s back yard. Pope Francis writes that today:
“It has become countercultural to choose a lifestyle whose goals are even partly independent of technology, of its costs and its power to globalize and make us all the same.” (Francis, no. 108)
And yet, what Laudato Si’ may represent is an important turning point in discussions around technology, and a vital opportunity for a serious critique of technology to reemerge. For what Laudato Si’ does is advocate for a new cultural paradigm based upon harnessing technology as a tool instead of as an absolute. Furthermore, the inclusion of such a serious critique of technology in a widely discussed (and hopefully widely read) encyclical represents a point at which rigorously critiquing technology may be able to become less “countercultural.” Laudato Si’ is a profoundly pro-culture document insofar as it seeks to preserve human culture from being destroyed by the greed that is ruining the planet. It is a rare text that has the audacity to state: “you do not need that, and your desire for it is bad for you and bad for the planet.”
Laudato Si’ is a piece of fierce social criticism, and like numerous works from the critique of technology, it is a text that recognizes that one cannot truly claim to critique a society without being willing to turn an equally critical gaze towards the way that society creates and uses technology. The critique of technology is not new, but it has been sorely underrepresented in contemporary thinking around technology. It has been cast as the province of outdated doom mongers, but as Pope Francis demonstrates, the critique of technology remains as vital and timely as ever.
Too often of late discussions about technology are conducted through rose colored glasses, or worse virtual reality headsets – Laudato Si’ dares to actually look at technology.
And to demand that others do the same.
4. The Bright Mountain
The end of the world is easy.
All it requires of us is that we do nothing, and what can be simpler than doing nothing? Besides, popular culture has made us quite comfortable with the imagery of dystopian states and collapsing cities. And yet the question to ask of every piece of dystopian fiction is “what did the world that paved the way for this terrible one look like?” To which the follow up question should be: “did it look just like ours?” And to this, yet another follow up question needs to be asked: “why didn’t people do something?” In a book bearing the uplifting title The Collapse of Western Civilization Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway analyze present inaction as if from the future, and write:
“the people of Western civilization knew what was happening to them but were unable to stop it. Indeed, the most startling aspect of this story is just how much these people knew, and how unable they were to act upon what they knew.” (Oreskes and Conway, 1-2)
This speaks to the fatalistic belief that despite what we know, things are not going to change, or that if change comes it will already be too late. One of the most interesting texts to emerge in recent years in the context of continually ignored environmental warnings is a slim volume titled Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto. It is the foundational text of a group of writers, artists, activists, and others that dares to take seriously the notion that we are not going to change in time. As the manifesto’s authors write:
“Secretly, we all think we are doomed: even the politicians think this; even the environmentalists. Some of us deal with it by going shopping. Some deal with it by hoping it is true. Some give up in despair. Some work frantically to try and fend off the coming storm.” (Hine and Kingsnorth, 9)
But the point is that change is coming – whether we believe it or not, and whether we want it or not. But what is one to do? The desire to retreat from the cacophony of modern society is nothing new and can easily sow the fields in which reactionary ideologies can grow. Particularly problematic is that the rejection of the modern world often entails a sleight of hand whereby those in affluent nations are able to shirk their responsibility to the world’s poor even as they walk somberly, flagellating themselves into the foothills. Apocalyptic romanticism, whether it be of the accelerationist or primitivist variety, paints an evocative image of the world of today collapsing so that a new world can emerge – but what Laudato Si’ counters with is a morally impassioned cry to think of the billions of people who will suffer and die. Think of those for whom fleeing to the foothills is not an option. We do not need to take up residence in the woods like latter day hermetic acolytes of Francis of Assisi, rather we need to take that spirit and live it wherever we find ourselves.
True, the easy retort to the claim “secretly, we all think we are doomed” is to retort “I do not think we are doomed, secretly or openly” – but to read climatologists predictions and then to watch politicians grouse, whilst mining companies seek to extract even more fossil fuels is to hear that “secret” voice grow louder. People have always been predicting the end of the world, and here we still are, which leads many to simply shrug off dire concerns. Furthermore, many worry that putting too much emphasis on woebegone premonitions overwhelms people and leaves them unable and unwilling to act. Perhaps this is why Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth concludes not by telling people they must be willing to fundamentally alter their high-tech/high-consumption lifestyles but instead simply tells them to recycle. In Laudato Si’ Pope Francis writes:
“Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth.” (Francis, no. 161)
Those lines, particularly the first of the two, should be the twenty-first century replacement for “Keep Calm and Carry On.” For what Laudato Si’ makes clear is that now is not the time to “Keep Calm” but to get very busy, and it is a text that knows that if we “Carry On” than we are skipping aimlessly towards the cliff’s edge. And yet one of the elements of the encyclical that needs to be highlighted is that it is a document that does not look hopefully towards a coming apocalypse. In the encyclical, environmental collapse is not seen as evidence that biblical preconditions for Armageddon are being fulfilled. The sorry state of the planet is not the result of God’s plan but is instead the result of humanity’s inability to plan. The problem is not evil, for as Simone Weil wrote:
“It is not good which evil violates, for good is inviolate: only a degraded good can be violated.” (Weil, 70 – Gravity and Grace)
It is that the good of which people are capable is rarely the good which people achieve. Even as possible tools for building the good life – such as technology – are degraded and mistaken for the good life. And thus the good is wasted, though it has not been destroyed.
Throughout Laudato Si’, Pope Francis praises the merits of an ascetic life. And though the encyclical features numerous references to Saint Francis of Assisi, the argument is not that we must all abandon our homes to seek out new sanctuary in nature, instead the need is to learn from the sense of love and wonder with which Saint Francis approached nature. Complete withdrawal is not an option, to do so would be to shirk our responsibility – we live in this world and we bear responsibility for it and for other people. In the encyclical’s estimation, those living in affluent nations cannot seek to quietly slip from the scene, nor can they claim they are doing enough by bringing their own bags to the grocery store. Rather, responsibility entails recognizing that the lifestyles of affluent nations have helped sow misery in many parts of the world – it is unethical for us to try to save our own cities without realizing the part we have played in ruining the cities of others.
Pope Francis writes – and here an entire section shall be quoted:
“Many things have to change course, but it is we human beings above all who need to change. We lack an awareness of our common origin, of our mutual belonging, and of a future to be shared with everyone. This basic awareness would enable the development of new conviction, attitudes and forms of life. A great cultural, spiritual and educational challenge stands before us, and it will demand that we set out on the long path of renewal.” (Francis, no. 202)
Laudato Si’ does not suggest that we can escape from our problems, that we can withdraw, or that we can “keep calm and carry on.” And though the encyclical is not a manifesto, if it were one it could possibly be called “The Bright Mountain Manifesto.” For what Laudato Si’ reminds its readers time and time again is that even though we face great challenges it remains within our power to address them, though we must act soon and decisively if we are to effect a change. We do not need to wander towards a mystery shrouded mountain in the distance, but work to make the peaks near us glisten – it is not a matter of retreating from the world but of rebuilding it in a way that provides for all. Nobody needs to go hungry, our cities can be beautiful, our lifestyles can be fulfilling, our tools can be made to serve us as opposed to our being made to serve tools, people can recognize the immense debt they owe to each other – and working together we can make this a better world.
Doing so will be difficult. It will require significant changes.
But Laudato Si’ is a document that believes people can still accomplish this.
In the end Laudato Si’ is less about having faith in god, than it is about having faith in people.
_____
Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently working towards an MA in the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ethical implications of technology, infrastructure and e-waste, as well as the intersection of library science with the STS field. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian,” Loeb writes at the blog Librarian Shipwreck, on which an earlier version of this post first appeared. He is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.
Science fiction is a genre of literature in which artifacts and techniques humans devise as exemplary expressions of our intelligence result in problems that perplex our intelligence or even bring it into existential crisis. It is scarcely surprising that a genre so preoccupied with the status and scope of intelligence would provide endless variations on the conceits of either the construction of artificial intelligences or contact with alien intelligences.
Of course, both the making of artificial intelligence and making contact with alien intelligence are organized efforts to which many humans are actually devoted, and not simply imaginative sites in which writers spin their allegories and exhibit their symptoms. It is interesting that after generations of failure the practical efforts to construct artificial intelligence or contact alien intelligence have often shunted their adherents to the margins of scientific consensus and invested these efforts with the coloration of scientific subcultures: While computer science and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence both remain legitimate fields of research, both AI and aliens also attract subcultural enthusiasms and resonate with cultic theology, each attracts its consumer fandoms and public Cons, each has its True Believers and even its UFO cults and Robot cults at the extremities.
Champions of artificial intelligence in particular have coped in many ways with the serial failure of their project to achieve its desired end (which is not to deny that the project has borne fruit) whatever the confidence with which generation after generation of these champions have insisted that desired end is near. Some have turned to more modest computational ambitions, making useful software or mischievous algorithms in which sad vestiges of the older dreams can still be seen to cling. Some are simply stubborn dead-enders for Good Old Fashioned AI‘s expected eventual and even imminent vindication, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. And still others have doubled down, distracting attention from the failures and problems bedeviling AI discourse simply by raising its pitch and stakes, no longer promising that artificial intelligence is around the corner but warning that artificial super-intelligence is coming soon to end human history.
Another strategy for coping with the failure of artificial intelligence on its conventional terms has assumed a higher profile among its champions lately, drawing support for the real plausibility of one science-fictional conceit — construction of artificial intelligence — by appealing to another science-fictional conceit, contact with alien intelligence. This rhetorical gambit has often been conjoined to the compensation of failed AI with its hyperbolic amplification into super-AI which I have already mentioned, and it is in that context that I have written about it before myself. But in a piece published a few days ago in The New York Times, “Outing A.I.: Beyond the Turing Test,” Benjamin Bratton, a professor of visual arts at U.C. San Diego and Director of a design think-tank, has elaborated a comparatively sophisticated case for treating artificial intelligence as alien intelligence with which we can productively grapple. Near the conclusion of his piece Bratton declares that “Musk, Gates and Hawking made headlines by speaking to the dangers that A.I. may pose. Their points are important, but I fear were largely misunderstood by many readers.” Of course these figures made their headlines by making the arguments about super-intelligence I have already rejected, and mentioning them seems to indicate Bratton’s sympathy with their gambit and even suggests that his argument aims to help us to understand them better on their own terms. Nevertheless, I take Bratton’s argument seriously not because of but in spite of this connection. Ultimately, Bratton makes a case for understanding AI as alien that does not depend on the deranging hyperbole and marketing of robocalypse or robo-rapture for its force.
In the piece, Bratton claims “Our popular conception of artificial intelligence is distorted by an anthropocentric fallacy.” The point is, of course, well taken, and the litany he rehearses to illustrate it is enormously familiar by now as he proceeds to survey popular images from Kubrick’s HAL to Jonze’s Her and to document public deliberation about the significance of computation articulated through such imagery as the “rise of the machines” in the Terminator franchise or the need for Asimov’s famous fictional “Three Laws of Robotics.” It is easy — and may nonetheless be quite important — to agree with Bratton’s observation that our computational/media devices lack cruel intentions and are not susceptible to Asimovian consciences, and hence thinking about the threats and promises and meanings of these devices through such frames and figures is not particularly helpful to us even though we habitually recur to them by now. As I say, it would be easy and important to agree with such a claim, but Bratton’s proposal is in fact somewhat a different one:
[A] mature A.I. is not necessarily a humanlike intelligence, or one that is at our disposal. If we look for A.I. in the wrong ways, it may emerge in forms that are needlessly difficult to recognize, amplifying its risks and retarding its benefits. This is not just a concern for the future. A.I. is already out of the lab and deep into the fabric of things. “Soft A.I.,” such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon recommendation engines, along with infrastructural A.I., such as high-speed algorithmic trading, smart vehicles and industrial robotics, are increasingly a part of everyday life.
Here the serial failure of the program of artificial intelligence is redeemed simply by declaring victory. Bratton demonstrates that crying uncle does not preclude one from still crying wolf. It’s not that Siri is some sickly premonition of the AI-daydream still endlessly deferred, but that it represents the real rise of what robot cultist Hans Moravec once promised would be our “mind children” but here and now as elfen aliens with an intelligence unto themselves. It’s not that calling a dumb car a “smart” car is simply a hilarious bit of obvious marketing hyperbole, but represents the recognition of a new order of intelligent machines among us. Rather than criticize the way we may be “amplifying its risks and retarding its benefits” by reading computation through the inapt lens of intelligence at all, he proposes that we should resist holding machine intelligence to the standards that have hitherto defined it for fear of making its recognition “too difficult.”
The kernel of legitimacy in Bratton’s inquiry is its recognition that “intelligence is notoriously difficult to define and human intelligence simply can’t exhaust the possibilities.” To deny these modest reminders is to indulge in what he calls “the pretentious folklore” of anthropocentrism. I agree that anthropocentrism in our attributions of intelligence has facilitated great violence and exploitation in the world, denying the dignity and standing of Cetaceans and Great Apes, but has also facilitated racist, sexist, xenophobic travesties by denigrating humans as beastly and unintelligent objects at the disposal of “intelligent” masters. “Some philosophers write about the possible ethical ‘rights’ of A.I. as sentient entities, but,” Bratton is quick to insist, “that’s not my point here.” Given his insistence that the “advent of robust inhuman A.I.” will force a “reality-based” “disenchantment” to “abolish the false centrality and absolute specialness of human thought and species-being” which he blames in his concluding paragraph with providing “theological and legislative comfort to chattel slavery” it is not entirely clear to me that emancipating artificial aliens is not finally among the stakes that move his argument whatever his protestations to the contrary. But one can forgive him for not dwelling on such concerns: the denial of an intelligence and sensitivity provoking responsiveness and demanding responsibilities in us all to women, people of color, foreigners, children, the different, the suffering, nonhuman animals compels defensive and evasive circumlocutions that are simply not needed to deny intelligence and standing to an abacus or a desk lamp. It is one thing to warn of the anthropocentric fallacy but another to indulge in the pathetic fallacy.
Bratton insists to the contrary that his primary concern is that anthropocentrism skews our assessment of real risks and benefits. “Unfortunately, the popular conception of A.I., at least as depicted in countless movies, games and books, still seems to assume that humanlike characteristics (anger, jealousy, confusion, avarice, pride, desire, not to mention cold alienation) are the most important ones to be on the lookout for.” And of course he is right. The champions of AI have been more than complicit in this popular conception, eager to attract attention and funds for their project among technoscientific illiterates drawn to such dramatic narratives. But we are distracted from the real risks of computation so long as we expect risks to arise from a machinic malevolence that has never been on offer nor even in the offing. Writes Bratton: “Perhaps what we really fear, even more than a Big Machine that wants to kill us, is one that sees us as irrelevant. Worse than being seen as an enemy is not being seen at all.”
But surely the inevitable question posed by Bratton’s disenchanting expose at this point should be: Why, once we have set aside the pretentious folklore of machines with diabolical malevolence, do we not set aside as no less pretentiously folkloric the attribution of diabolical indifference to machines? Why, once we have set aside the delusive confusion of machine behavior with (actual or eventual) human intelligence, do we not set aside as no less delusive the confusion of machine behavior with intelligence altogether? There is no question were a gigantic bulldozer with an incapacitated driver to swerve from a construction site onto a crowded city thoroughfare this would represent a considerable threat, but however tempting it might be in the fraught moment or reflective aftermath poetically to invest that bulldozer with either agency or intellect it is clear that nothing would be gained in the practical comprehension of the threat it poses by so doing. It is no more helpful now in an epoch of Greenhouse storms than it was for pre-scientific storytellers to invest thunder and whirlwinds with intelligence. Although Bratton makes great play over the need to overcome folkloric anthropocentrism in our figuration of and deliberation over computation, mystifying agencies and mythical personages linger on in his accounting however he insists on the alienness of “their” intelligence.
Bratton warns us about the “infrastructural A.I.” of high-speed financial trading algorithms, Google and Amazon search algorithms, “smart” vehicles (and no doubt weaponized drones and autonomous weapons systems would count among these), and corporate-military profiling programs that oppress us with surveillance and harass us with targeted ads. I share all of these concerns, of course, but personally insist that our critical engagement with infrastructural coding is profoundly undermined when it is invested with insinuations of autonomous intelligence. In “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin pointed out that when philosophers talk about the historical force of art they do so with the prejudices of philosophers: they tend to write about those narrative and visual forms of art that might seem argumentative in allegorical and iconic forms that appear analogous to the concentrated modes of thought demanded by philosophy itself. Benjamin proposed that perhaps the more diffuse and distracted ways we are shaped in our assumptions and aspirations by the durable affordances and constraints of the made world of architecture and agriculture might turn out to drive history as much or even more than the pet artforms of philosophers do. Lawrence Lessig made much the same point when he declared at the turn of the millennium that “Code Is Law.”
It is well known that special interests with rich patrons shape the legislative process and sometimes even explicitly craft legislation word for word in ways that benefit them to the cost and risk of majorities. It is hard to see how our assessment of this ongoing crime and danger would be helped and not hindered by pretending legislation is an autonomous force exhibiting an alien intelligence, rather than a constellation of practices, norms, laws, institutions, ritual and material artifice, the legacy of the historical play of intelligent actors and the site for the ongoing contention of intelligent actors here and now. To figure legislation as a beast or alien with a will of its own would amount to a fetishistic displacement of intelligence away from the actual actors actually responsible for the forms that legislation actually takes. It is easy to see why such a displacement is attractive: it profitably abets the abuses of majorities by minorities while it absolves majorities from conscious complicity in the terms of their own exploitation by laws made, after all, in our names. But while these consoling fantasies have an obvious allure this hardly justifies our endorsement of them.
I have already written in the past about those who want to propose, as Bratton seems inclined to do in the present, that the collapse of global finance in 2008 represented the working of inscrutable artificial intelligences facilitating rapid transactions and supporting novel financial instruments of what was called by Long Boom digerati the “new economy.” I wrote:
It is not computers and programs and autonomous techno-agents who are the protagonists of the still unfolding crime of predatory plutocratic wealth-concentration and anti-democratizing austerity. The villains of this bloodsoaked epic are the bankers and auditors and captured-regulators and neoliberal ministers who employed these programs and instruments for parochial gain and who then exonerated and rationalized and still enable their crimes. Our financial markets are not so complex we no longer understand them. In fact everybody knows exactly what is going on. Everybody understands everything. Fraudsters [are] engaged in very conventional, very recognizable, very straightforward but unprecedentedly massive acts of fraud and theft under the cover of lies.
I have already written in the past about those who want to propose, as Bratton seems inclined to do in the present, that our discomfiture in the setting of ubiquitous algorithmic mediation results from an autonomous force over which humans intentions are secondary considerations. I wrote:
[W]hat imaginary scene is being conjured up in this exculpatory rhetoric in which inadvertent cruelty is ‘coming from code’ as opposed to coming from actual persons? Aren’t coders actual persons, for example? … [O]f course I know what [is] mean[t by the insistence…] that none of this was ‘a deliberate assault.’ But it occurs to me that it requires the least imaginable measure of thought on the part of those actually responsible for this code to recognize that the cruelty of [one user’s] confrontation with their algorithm was the inevitable at least occasional result for no small number of the human beings who use Facebook and who live lives that attest to suffering, defeat, humiliation, and loss as well as to parties and promotions and vacations… What if the conspicuousness of [this] experience of algorithmic cruelty indicates less an exceptional circumstance than the clarifying exposure of a more general failure, a more ubiquitous cruelty? … We all joke about the ridiculous substitutions performed by autocorrect functions, or the laughable recommendations that follow from the odd purchase of a book from Amazon or an outing from Groupon. We should joke, but don’t, when people treat a word cloud as an analysis of a speech or an essay. We don’t joke so much when a credit score substitutes for the judgment whether a citizen deserves the chance to become a homeowner or start a small business, or when a Big Data profile substitutes for the judgment whether a citizen should become a heat signature for a drone committing extrajudicial murder in all of our names. [An] experience of algorithmic cruelty [may be] extraordinary, but that does not mean it cannot also be a window onto an experience of algorithmic cruelty that is ordinary. The question whether we might still ‘opt out’ from the ordinary cruelty of algorithmic mediation is not a design question at all, but an urgent political one.
I have already written in the past about those who want to propose, as Bratton seems inclined to do in the present, that so-called Killer Robots are a threat that must be engaged by resisting or banning “them” in their alterity rather than by assigning moral and criminal responsibility on those who code, manufacture, fund, and deploy them. I wrote:
Well-meaning opponents of war atrocities and engines of war would do well to think how tech companies stand to benefit from military contracts for ‘smarter’ software and bleeding-edge gizmos when terrorized and technoscientifically illiterate majorities and public officials take SillyCon Valley’s warnings seriously about our ‘complacency’ in the face of truly autonomous weapons and artificial super-intelligence that do not exist. It is crucial that necessary regulation and even banning of dangerous ‘autonomous weapons’ proceeds in a way that does not abet the mis-attribution of agency, and hence accountability, to devices. Every ‘autonomous’ weapons system expresses and mediates decisions by responsible humans usually all too eager to disavow the blood on their hands. Every legitimate fear of ‘killer robots’ is best addressed by making their coders, designers, manufacturers, officials, and operators accountable for criminal and unethical tools and uses of tools… There simply is no such thing as a smart bomb. Every bomb is stupid. There is no such thing as an autonomous weapon. Every weapon is deployed. The only killer robots that actually exist are human beings waging and profiting from war.
“Arguably,” argues Bratton, “the Anthropocene itself is due less to technology run amok than to the humanist legacy that understands the world as having been given for our needs and created in our image. We hear this in the words of thought leaders who evangelize the superiority of a world where machines are subservient to the needs and wishes of humanity… This is the sentiment — this philosophy of technology exactly — that is the basic algorithm of the Anthropocenic predicament, and consenting to it would also foreclose adequate encounters with A.I.” The Anthropocene in this formulation names the emergence of environmental or planetary consciousness, an emergence sometimes coupled to the global circulation of the image of the fragility and interdependence of the whole earth as seen by humans from outer space. It is the recognition that the world in which we evolved to flourish might be impacted by our collective actions in ways that threaten us all. Notice, by the way, that multiculture and historical struggle are figured as just another “algorithm” here.
I do not agree that planetary catastrophe inevitably followed from the conception of the earth as a gift besetting us to sustain us, indeed this premise understood in terms of stewardship or commonwealth would go far in correcting and preventing such careless destruction in my opinion. It is the false and facile (indeed infantile) conception of a finite world somehow equal to infinite human desires that has landed us and keeps us delusive ignoramuses lodged in this genocidal and suicidal predicament. Certainly I agree with Bratton that it would be wrong to attribute the waste and pollution and depletion of our common resources by extractive-industrial-consumer societies indifferent to ecosystemic limits to “technology run amok.” The problem of so saying is not that to do so disrespects “technology” — as presumably in his view no longer treating machines as properly “subservient to the needs and wishes of humanity” would more wholesomely respect “technology,” whatever that is supposed to mean — since of course technology does not exist in this general or abstract way to be respected or disrespected.
The reality at hand is that humans are running amok in ways that are facilitated and mediated by certain technologies. What is demanded in this moment by our predicament is the clear-eyed assessment of the long-term costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific interventions into finite ecosystems to the actual diversity of their stakeholders and the distribution of these costs, risks, and benefits in an equitable way. Quite a lot of unsustainable extractive and industrial production as well as mass consumption and waste would be rendered unprofitable and unappealing were its costs and risks widely recognized and equitably distributed. Such an understanding suggests that what is wanted is to insist on the culpability and situation of actually intelligent human actors, mediated and facilitated as they are in enormously complicated and demanding ways by technique and artifice. The last thing we need to do is invest technology-in-general or environmental-forces with alien intelligence or agency apart from ourselves.
I am beginning to wonder whether the unavoidable and in many ways humbling recognition (unavoidable not least because of environmental catastrophe and global neoliberal precarization) that human agency emerges out of enormously complex and dynamic ensembles of interdependent/prostheticized actors gives rise to compensatory investments of some artifacts — especially digital networks, weapons of mass destruction, pandemic diseases, environmental forces — with the sovereign aspect of agency we no longer believe in for ourselves? It is strangely consoling to pretend our technologies in some fancied monolithic construal represent the rise of “alien intelligences,” even threatening ones, other than and apart from ourselves, not least because our own intelligence is an alienated one and prostheticized through and through. Consider the indispensability of pedagogical techniques of rote memorization, the metaphorization and narrativization of rhetoric in songs and stories and craft, the technique of the memory palace, the technologies of writing and reading, the articulation of metabolism and duration by timepieces, the shaping of both the body and its bearing by habit and by athletic training, the lifelong interplay of infrastructure and consciousness: all human intellect is already technique. All culture is prosthetic and all prostheses are culture.
Bratton wants to narrate as a kind of progressive enlightenment the mystification he recommends that would invest computation with alien intelligence and agency while at once divesting intelligent human actors, coders, funders, users of computation of responsibility for the violations and abuses of other humans enabled and mediated by that computation. This investment with intelligence and divestment of responsibility he likens to the Copernican Revolution in which humans sustained the momentary humiliation of realizing that they were not the center of the universe but received in exchange the eventual compensation of incredible powers of prediction and control. One might wonder whether the exchange of the faith that humanity was the apple of God’s eye for a new technoscientific faith in which we aspired toward godlike powers ourselves was really so much a humiliation as the exchange of one megalomania for another. But what I want to recall by way of conclusion instead is that the trope of a Copernican humiliation of the intelligent human subject is already quite a familiar one:
In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud notoriously proposed that
In the course of centuries the naive self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the center of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness. This is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus… The second blow fell when biological research destroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature. This revaluation has been accomplished in our own days by Darwin… though not without the most violent contemporary opposition. But human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in the mind.
However we may feel about psychoanalysis as a pseudo-scientific enterprise that did more therapeutic harm than good, Freud’s works considered instead as contributions to moral philosophy and cultural theory have few modern equals. The idea that human consciousness is split from the beginning as the very condition of its constitution, the creative if self-destructive result of an impulse of rational self-preservation beset by the overabundant irrationality of humanity and history, imposed a modesty incomparably more demanding than Bratton’s wan proposal in the same name. Indeed, to the extent that the irrational drives of the dynamic unconscious are often figured as a brute machinic automatism, one is tempted to suggest that Bratton’s modest proposal of alien artifactual intelligence is a fetishistic disavowal of the greater modesty demanded by the alienating recognition of the stratification of human intelligence by unconscious forces (and his moniker a symptomatic citation). What is striking about the language of psychoanalysis is the way it has been taken up to provide resources for imaginative empathy across the gulf of differences: whether in the extraordinary work of recent generations of feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholars re-orienting the project of the conspicuously sexist, heterosexist, cissexist, racist, imperialist, bourgeois thinker who was Freud to emancipatory ends, or in the stunning leaps in which Freud identified with neurotic others through psychoanalytic reading, going so far as to find in the paranoid system-building of the psychotic Dr. Schreber an exemplar of human science and civilization and a mirror in which he could see reflected both himself and psychoanalysis itself. Freud’s Copernican humiliation opened up new possibilities of responsiveness in difference out of which could be built urgently necessary responsibilities otherwise. I worry that Bratton’s Copernican modesty opens up new occasions for techno-fetishistic fables of history and disavowals of responsibility for its actual human protagonists.
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Dale Carrico is a member of the visiting faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute as well as a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley from which he received his PhD in 2005. His work focuses on the politics of science and technology, especially peer-to-peer formations and global development discourse and is informed by a commitment to democratic socialism (or social democracy, if that freaks you out less), environmental justice critique, and queer theory. He is a persistent critic of futurological discourses, especially on his Amor Mundi blog, on which an earlier version of this post first appeared.
a review of Judy Wajcman, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism (Chicago, 2014)
