[This is a talk I gave at the Society for Philosophy and Technology, Lisbon, July 2013. It has now been published in a Chinese Journal, Engineering Studies, but here's the English version.]
A Future for Philosophy of Technology -- Yes, But
On Which Planet?
By: Langdon Winner
Thomas Phelan Chair of Humanities and
Social Sciences
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy,
New York
It
is gratifying to see a once rather obscure topic of inquiry – philosophy of
technology – become the diverse and vibrant field of study it is today. Especially notable are several blends of
social science, history and philosophy that scholars are cultivating at
present. Since I am not eager to suggest new pathways
for those already at work on these interesting projects, I will simply point to
a couple avenues that seem especially interesting and urgent to me.
1. Democracy and security
Within
the domain of information technology and its relationship to the future of political
society there are a many theoretical and practical questions that are wide open
for study and speculation. During the
past several decades a steady flow predictions and practical programs have
sought to clarify about the horizons of networked computing, some of them
pointing to a new era of democratic participation.
A
common argument holds that inexpensive computing and communication in a variety
of novel forms empowers everyday people, enhancing their capacity for self-government. Over the years I have remained skeptical
about claims of this kind. Since the
early 19th century there has been long litany of proclamations in the
grand tradition of techno-utopianism about the politically redemptive power of
the steam engine, railroads, telegraph, centrally generated electrical power,
the automobile, radio, television, and other technologies. Ideas in this vein often feature an
underlying belief in a benevolent technological determinism accompanied by an unwillingness
to raise questions about the steps needed to prevent the rise of obnoxious
concentrations of economic and political power.
In
recent years, however, I have been encouraged by evidence of depth and
substance in writings about the information and networks that suggest a strong
possibility that ordinary citizens could actually be empowered by information
networks. Philosophical discussions of
the Internet and of social networks now sometime include imaginative, coherent,
well-argued, well-documented, and highly persuasive positions about the actual
promise that information technologies hold out for community, public
participation, democracy and social justice now and in the future. Some notable advocates for these hopes have
clearly moved beyond barefoot technological determinism and dreamy utopianism
to specify concretely what the possibilities are and how they might be fully
realized.
A
good example is the work of Yochai Benkler.
In The Wealth of Networks and his more recent book, The Penguin and the Leviathan, Benkler
observes that during the past 30 years or so the basic capital requirements of
an information economy have shifted.
“The declining price of computation, communication, and storage have
…placed the material means of information and cultural production in the hands
of a significant fraction of the world’s population.” Rapidly falling costs of technology support
the rise of a “networked information economy” increasingly characterized by
“cooperative and coordinate action carried out through radically distributed,
nonmarket mechanisms that do not depend on proprietary strategies.”[1]
Benkler builds upon this basic argument
to explore a variety of ways in which everyday people are using today’s
information networks to rediscover the power of a cooperative economy and to
fashion ways to revitalize participative democracy.
In
short, the recent contributions of Yochai Benkler, Lawrence Lessig, Robert
McChesney and other thinkers offer detailed, forward looking arguments about
possibilities the Net contains along with stern advice about what would
involved in struggles to draw upon information technologies to create a more
democratic future. Aware of patterns that might proliferate in a
networked society -- centralized, hierarchical, power oriented, ultimately
oppressive, corporate structures – writings that defend a more open, more
inclusive future have begun to offer alternatives to the well worn intellectual
furniture used to buttress the old industrial model. One
such contribution is the deconstruction and reconsideration of the threadbare
but still high venerated fictions known as “property” and “property rights,”
recently resurfaced as “intellectual property” for faster transit on the
information throughways of globalization. A fruitful alternative, the new writings
suggest, is to explore notions and practices of “the commons” in a world that
now combines pervasive electronic connections with familiar cultural, economic
and political institutions as well as humanity’s complex relationships to
nature. What is the status of things
that should rightfully be shared in common? Why must neoliberal obsessions with “property”
and the imaginary of “free markets” dominate policy discussions when there are
now robust alternatives?
At
the same time, and in stark contrast to work on these hopeful, speculative
themes, there have arisen new concerns about ominous patterns of corporate
power now commanded by information giants – Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft,
an others – especially the political character of their relationships to their everyday
users. The configuration of power and
authority that characterizes these organizations now is very far from
distributed democracy in which ordinary people are the beneficiaries of
computer power. Some Silicon Valley
experts who study the new regimes of computer system security argue that the
actual, emerging relationship in the era of “cloud computing” amounts to kind
of feudalism in which powerless individuals seek shelter in a world of large
information corporations that function as lords of the realm. Ordinary,
every computer users have no real power over firms that manage the data about
them, but must somehow find ways to trust these companies to behave
responsibly.[2] Of
course, the amount of data the large Internet firms have over one’s life and
communications, the capacities for surveillance they command, suggests that
such trust may not be justified at all In effect, everyday computer users are reduced
to the condition of techno-serfs, powerless participants in the Net who find
themselves fully subservient to the new lords of the realm.
The
situation is especially egregious in light on the military-security-industrial
complex that has expanded so quickly during the years following the terrorist attacks
in the U.S.A. of September 11, 2001. In
the spring of 2013 a wave of the stunning reports by Edward Snowden, former
employee of the National Security Agency and its corporate contractors,
revealed the extensive power of surveillance over US. citizens and elected
leaders in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere around the world. Backdoor channels that Google and other Internet
giants have crafted with the N.S.A. make the phone calls, web browsing, email,
and other Internet centered activities of everyone (not just suspected
terrorists) visible to government authorities with little if any limitation or
legal oversight. Laws that supposedly
protect the rights and liberties of citizens are regularly and secretly
breached when it suits the purposes of a matrix that now blends government and
corporate power.
Although
the relevant questions for philosophers are many and complicated, the basic
question comes down to this. Will the future be characterized by the open
informational society imagined by today’s internet visionaries, or the closed,
menacing information/security state that fills our newspaper headlines. What kinds of political order are likely to
emerge or ought to be crafted in ever advancing systems of information
technology? What kinds of limits should
be strongly installed against insidious threats to our freedom?
The
measures that legal scholar Alan Westin urged for privacy protection and recognition
of citizen rights at the dawn of “the information society” decades ago were
seldom if ever realized in practice. Alas,
his argument that people must insist upon a right to control the information
gathered about their lives and activities is an insight that now seems a mere
historical relic.
In
this light, my suggestion would be that philosophers vigorously renew their speculation
and argumentation about the political character of the networked society and
the qualities of public life it contains.
Edward Snowden’s reasons for leaking what he’d learned about N.S.A. and
corporate information systems are simple yet heart rending. “I don’t want to live in a world
where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every
expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. And that’s not
something I’m willing to support, it’s not something I’m willing to build, and
it’s not something I’m willing to live under. So I think anyone who opposes
that sort of world has an obligation to act in the way they can.”[3]
2.
Unthinkable changes
As
I looked over the program for the Summer 2013 meeting of the Society for
Philosophy and Technology I noted with great pleasure the range, diversity and
quality of the topics the various scholars would be discussing. But as
I read the titles of papers as well as of some of the abstracts and essays, a
gnawing question began to arise: Upon what
planet do today’s philosophers of technology think they are living?
And in what period of human history do they imagine themselves to be involved?
Trajectories
of development within prominent schools of thought and in policy deliberations
seemed familiar and yet strangely oblivious to some obvious emergencies that
have powerfully surfaced in our time and that will surely disrupt the agendas
of philosophical and social inquiry in the decades of the 21st
century. Much of philosophical thinking
still quietly presupposes and leaves unquestioned basic underlying conditions
of that have served as foundations for the rise and continuation of modern
industrial societies.
There
now at least two general conditions that philosophers, STS scholars and world
societies at large can no longer take for granted, ones that challenge us to
ponder the distinct possibility that the advanced technological societies in
which we live may soon be forced into paroxysms of drastic change. One vastly important situation is our
long-standing dependence upon the cheap, readily available petroleum that fuels
virtually every function of our technological civilization. Taking my own society as an example,
America’s factories, homes, cities, automobiles, trucks, airplanes, and the
rest all presuppose the primary condition of their creation, namely a steady
supply of oil at roughly $20 a barrel.
That price threshold vanished many years ago, replaced a $100 or more
price tag, a point at which the whole interconnected system begins to stall
out. No one likes to talk about it, but
since the financial crash of 2008 the U.S.A has been essentially a no growth
society. While there are many reasons
for this predicament, the price of petroleum is certainly a key
determinant. There is not much building
going on in America, while profuse evidence of deterioration in crucial
material and social systems, the nation’s infrastructure for example, is
everywhere to be seen.
In
my reading of the steady stream of reports on energy, economy and society, the
peak in extraction of conventional fossil fuels has already been passed. While there is now a modest boom in
“unconventional” fossil fuels – tar sands, “tight oil” and natural gas from
hydraulic fracturation (“fracking”) – the economic and environmental costs of
such alternatives are daunting and their long term prospects highly uncertain
at best. Equally important, there are no
cheap, easily installed replacements for the petroleum energy resources that
have served as the foundation for industrial societies during the past
century. What we see today is a frantic
stampede to grab what’s left of fossil fuel resources through deep sea
drilling, “fracking” and dead end technologies.
This means that our grossly overpowered civilization faces a period in
which it will be forced to power down rather soon and with astonishing rapidity.[4]
It
is possible that this transition could offer highly favorable possibilities for
human wellbeing – new ways of living more lightly on the earth, new forms of
community and human relationships superior ones that have characterized the materialistic
consumer society of recent decades.
Will philosophers have a role in exploring those possibilities? For the time being it appears that although they
are not in complete denial about the implications of the end of cheap fossil
fuels, the basic perspective of most philosophers of technology remains that of
business as usual, the expectation that our way of life will continue to chug
along basically unchanged from patterns of the past two century.
Along
with a frank recognition of the many-sided energy crisis ahead, a second,
closely related condition demands our attention. The most fundamental functioning of modern
technological societies depends upon the existence of a stable, favorable
climate. As most scholars surely
recognize by this time, conditions of climatological stability that have
favored the rise of world civilizations for the past 10,000 years or so are now
undergoing rapid change caused by the warming of the Earth as a consequence of
carbon gases released by human activity.
While estimates vary, the scientific consensus among a wide range of
disciplines now points to global warming of 2 to 4 degrees Celsius or more by
the end of this century, temperatures that bring monster storms, wicked
droughts, floods, melting ice caps, rising seas, and other calamities often
lumped together under the comforting term “climate change,” but better
identified by English writer George Mombiot’s label, “climate crash.”
The
science that supports such findings is truly impressive. A decade ago, researchers predicted that
melting ice in the arctic would shift weather patterns northward on the North
American continent. This would bring far
less rain in the western states of the U.S.A. with persistent droughts and
burning wild fires throughout the region.
Today that has become the new normal.
During
the past two decades both the weight of evidence and intensity of warnings from
climate scientists has increased. As the
research group Real Climate announced in 2009: “We feel compelled to note
that even a “moderate” warming of 2°C stands a strong chance of provoking
drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society, leading
potentially to the conflict and suffering that go with failed states and mass
migrations. Global warming of 2°C would leave the Earth warmer than it has been
in millions of years, a disruption of climate conditions that have been stable
for longer than the history of human agriculture.”[5]
In
short, both the impending energy crisis and climate crash will, with a high
degree of certainty, produce a lengthy period of disruption within humanity’s
most fundamental material, social, cultural, and political patterns. Many of the institutions, practices,
relationships, and beliefs that philosophers and social scientists are busily
studying and reporting in their conferences and journals will be placed under severe
stress (or worse).
To
dramatize their theories and speculations, philosophers sometimes talk about “ruptures”
in historical thinking that their inquiries seek to describe. Well, if you have a taste for rupture, there
are a great number of them on the near horizon.
They present us with a wide range of challenging questions of which I
can only mention a few.
What
kind of world will be or should be created in response to the extraordinary
conditions humanity will confront?
What
kinds of people and relationships will this world contain?
What
will its basic institutions and technologies be? What will become of the ideology of
limitless expansion and techno-triumphalism that has characterized the longings
of our political and economic elites in recent decades?
During
the decades ahead philosophies of technology must somehow come to terms with
extreme, ultimately physical ruptures for which we are now utterly unprepared. Once again, as Cold War intellectuals
advised, we must begin “thinking about the unthinkable.” Unlike the situation presented by the specter
of the atomic bomb, however, the world changing forces we must think about today
are not possibilities buried in covert weapons silos, but realities already
fully apparent to anyone who cares to notice.
[1] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and
Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) p. 3.
[2] Bruce Schneier, “You Have No Control Over
Security on the Feudal Internet,”
Harvard
Business Review, June 6, 2013 [https://www.schneier.com/essay-430.html]
[3] Edward Snowden, full transcript of interview
conducted by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, in the website “Mondoweis”
[
http://mondoweiss.net/2013/07/i-dont-want-to-live-in-a-world-where-every-expression-of-creativity-or-love-or-friendship-is-recorded-full-transcript-of-snowdens-latest-interview.html]
[4] A good survey of the situation in energy
can be found in the work of Richard Heinberg, especially his books
The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New
Economic Reality (
Gabriola
Island, BC Canada, 2011) and Snake Oil:
How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future (Santa Rosa, CA:
Post Carbon Institute, 2013).
[5] “Hit the brakes Hard,” editorial in the
website “Real Climate: Climate science from climate scientists,” April 29,
2009
[
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/04/hit-the-brakes-hard/
