I see that Paul Kingsnorth is publishing in book form his thoughts on The Machine. His writings on this subject have, I think, received more attention than anything else he has written, and yet I have not found them especially interesting or helpful — and I love some of Kingsnorth’s earlier work.
As I read him, he’s basically restating what I have called the SCT: the Standard Critique of Technology.
The basic argument of the SCT goes like this. We live in a technopoly, a society in which powerful technologies come to dominate the people they are supposed to serve, and reshape us in their image. These technologies, therefore, might be called prescriptive (to use Franklin’s term) or manipulatory (to use Illich’s). For example, social networks promise to forge connections — but they also encourage mob rule. Facial-recognition software helps to identify suspects — and to keep tabs on whole populations. Collectively, these technologies constitute the device paradigm (Borgmann), which in turn produces a culture of compliance (Franklin).
The proper response to this situation is not to shun technology itself, for human beings are intrinsically and necessarily users of tools. Rather, it is to find and use technologies that, instead of manipulating us, serve sound human ends and the focal practices (Borgmann) that embody those ends. A table becomes a center for family life; a musical instrument skillfully played enlivens those around it. Those healthier technologies might be referred to as holistic (Franklin) or convivial (Illich), because they fit within the human lifeworld and enhance our relations with one another. Our task, then, is to discern these tendencies or affordances of our technologies and, on both social and personal levels, choose the holistic, convivial ones.
“The Machine” is Kingsnorth’s term for what Neil Postman calls “Technopoly,” but I don’t think his actual views are significantly different than those of his predecessors. But I’ll probably read the book and hope to be surprised.
(It’s noteworthy, by the way, that almost every critic of technopoly, including me, looks for some way to capture the sense that it is an it — some unimaginably massive nonhuman thing with a nonhuman will of its own. There are multiple versions of this insight, or maybe it’s just a feeling, across cultural domains: for instance, when people talk about the core assumptions of the American national security establishment as The Blob, or when Eric Raymond contrasts the two forms of software development as the Cathedral and the Bazaar. Timothy Morton is groping towards a general account of this kind of idea in his concept of Hyperobjects, but his obfuscating writing style makes his account less than helpful.)
My own view continues to be that we really don’t need more diagnoses of our situation. We know what afflicts us. Caitlin Flanagan:
The internet did not arrive like a wave, allowing us to take time to think about our humanity before we put our toes in the water; it arrived like a flood, and we’ve been drowning in it for more than a quarter century. It keeps taking our souls away from us; every passing year, we’re less of who we were. Soon there won’t be much of us left at all. The only thing that can save us is a great unplugging. But we’ll never do that. We love it down here under the dark water.
This is correct. A fraction of one percent of us will be willing and able to choose something other and better. Those are the people I write for. We live in what, many years ago now, George Steiner called a “post-culture.” I used to call this blog Snakes and Ladders, because it documented the ups and downs of culture. Now I call The Homebound Symphony, after the Traveling Symphony in Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven, because I think we’re living in the aftermath of a slow-motion cultural and moral apocalypse. I really do. I’m trying to keep some beautiful things alive for the people who are willing to encounter them and maybe even to love them.
I believe we keep on re-diagnosing, and describing the same diagnosis in slightly different terms, because we don’t know what to do. Some people, of course, know what to do: they opt out. And that’s why we don’t hear from them: we remain in the places that they’ve opted out of. But I continue to believe that it’s possible to use the internet healthily, without unplugging altogether. I’m trying to practice that healthy use, and do so right here where my successes and failures can be seen and learned from.
In any event, we should, I think, be alarmed that our condition was properly and thoroughly diagnosed by a series of important thinkers half-a-century ago — and yet our malady has only progressed.
