Key passages and thoughts on them:
Feenburg’s “instrumentalization theory”:
(47) “To judge an action as more or less efficient is already to have determined it to be tech- nical and therefore an appropriate object of such a judgment.”
(48) “This is the practical significance of embodiment. As a consequence, every one of our interventions returns to us in some form as feedback from our objects. This is obvious in everyday communication where anger usually evokes anger, kindness, and so on.”***I wonder if this speaks to William’s perception of computer “languages” as not really languages.
(48) “We call an action “technical” when the actor’s impact on the object is out of all proportion to the return feedback affecting the actor. We hurtle two tons of metal down the freeway while sitting in comfort listening to Mozart or the Beatles…But the reciprocity of finite action is dissipated or deferred in such a way as to create the space of a necessary illusion of transcendence.”
(48)”According to Heidegger’s history of being, the modern “revealing” is biased by a tendency to take every object as a potential raw material for technical action.”
(48) “Technology can be and is configured in such a way as to reproduce the rule of the few over the many. This is a possibility inscribed in the very structure of technical action which establishes a one way direction of cause and effect.”
I am always deeply suspicious of these “two-sided” views of things. Always something left out, I think: (49) “Technology is a two-sided phenomenon: on the one hand the operator, on the other the object. Where both operator and object are human beings, technical action is an exercise of power. Where, further, society is organized around technology, technological power is the principle form of power in the society. It is realized through designs which narrow the range of interests and concerns that can be represented by the normal functioning of the technology and the institutions which depend on it. This narrowing distorts the structure of experience and causes human suffering and damage to the natural environ- ment.”
Exigency: (49) “Opening up technology to a wider range of interests and concerns could lead to its redesign for greater compatibility with the human and natural limits on technical action. A democratic transformation from below can short- en the feedback loops from damaged human lives and nature and guide a rad- ical reform of the technical sphere.”
Another dichotomy: “Most essentialist philosophy of technology is crit- ical of modernity, even anti-modern, while most empirical research on tech- nologies ignores the larger issue of modernity and thus appears uncritical, even conformist, to social critics.” (49)
(50) “Instrumentalization theory holds that technology must be analyzed at two levels, the level of our original functional relation to reality and the level of design and implementation.” First, we “de-world” humans, decontextualize them, make them part if a “machine” in order to “manage” them.
“At the first level, we seek and find affordances that can be mobilized in devices and systems by decontextualizing the objects of experience and reducing them to their useful properties.”
“At the second level, we introduce designs that can be integrated with other already existing devices and systems and with various social constraints such as ethical and aesthetic principles.”
(51)”Instead, I attempt to integrate its methodological insights to a more broadly conceived theory of modernity.” ***Offers a “blending” or gray area solution to a perceived false dichotomy.
[social] CONSTRUCTIVISTS: “Constructivists show that many possible configurations of resources can yield a working device capable of efficiently fulfilling its function…Constructivists show that many possible configurations of resources can yield a working device capable of efficiently fulfilling its function.”
(51-52) “Technology is not ‘rational’ in the old positivist sense of the term but socially relative; the outcome of technical choices is a world that supports the way of life of one or another influential social group.”
(52) “On these terms the technocratic tendencies of modern societies could be interpreted as an effect of limiting the groups intervening in design to technical experts and the corporate and political elites they serve.” ***This is Nelson’s perception of the attitudes and communication (or lack thereof) coming from programmers in the 70’s 80’s.
“A technical code is the realization of an interest or ideology in a technically coherent solution to a problem.”
“…a technical code is a criterion that selects between alternative feasible technical designs in terms of a social goal. “Feasible” here means technically workable. Goals are “coded” in the sense of ranking items as ethically permitted or forbidden, or aesthetically better or worse. or more or less socially desirable.”***The term “code” seems unfortunate here. Confusing when we think of digital platforms.
(53)”In Marx the capitalist is ultimately distinguished not so much by ownership of wealth as by control of the conditions of labor.” (worthwhile paragraph here) “Management acts technically on persons, extending the hierarchy of technical subject and object into human relations in pursuit of efficiency. Eventually professional managers represent and in some sense replace owners in control of the new industrial organizations. Marx calls this the impersonal domination inherent in capitalism in contradistinction to the personal domination of earlier social formations. It is a domination embodied in the design of tools and the organization of production.”
“The whole life environment of society comes under the rule of technique. In this form the essence of the capitalist system can be transferred to socialist regimes built on the model of the Soviet Union.” ***I wonder if this speaks to hierarchies of wealth/power in other communist regimes such as China.
“The entire development of modern societies is thus marked by the para- digm of unqualified control over the labor process on which capitalist indus- trialism rests. It is this control which orients technical development toward disempowering workers and the massification of the public. I call this control “operational autonomy,” the freedom of the owner or his representative to make independent decisions about how to carry on the business of the organi- zation, regardless of the views or interests of subordinate actors and the sur- rounding community.”
“The operational autonomy of management and adminis- tration positions them in a technical relation to the world, safe from the con- sequences of their own actions.” ***”perceived” safety. Like the driver of the car….
TECHNOCRACY: (53-54) “Technocracy is an extension of such a system to society as a whole in response to the spread of technology and management to every sector of social life. Technocracy armors itself against public pressures, sacrifices values, and ignores needs incompatible with its own reproduction and the perpet- uation of its technical traditions.”** This really illuminates the DuPont/W.Virginia story situation. I always wonder how big companies–and the people who run them–can kill people so callously.
(55)”Only the democratization of technology can help.”**Hmm… again the dichotomy. And the absolute. Ok…
“But this implies restoring the agency of those treated as objects of management in the dominant technical code. How to understand this transfor- mation? It will not work to simply multiply the number of managers. Subordinate actors must intervene in a different way from dominant ones.”**This also reminds me of the DuPont article. The workers refused to transform “the code” of which they were a part.
(56) “An adequate understanding of the substance of our common life cannot ignore technology. How we configure and design cities, transportation sys- tems, communication media, agriculture and industrial production is a political matter.”
(58)”But the division between what appears as a condition of technical efficiency and what appears as a value external to the technical process is itself a function of social and political decisions biased by unequal power.” **This seems obvious.
***But what social pressures will have to come to bear for the powerful to design their tech to appreciate social values? What incentive?
(59)”Most recently the debate over computeriza- tion has touched higher education, where proposals for automated online learning have met determined faculty resistance in the name of human values.”***I think de-worlding does happen.!
(60) “But such posthumanism is ultimately complicit with the humanistic cri- tique of computerization it pretends to transcend in that it accepts a similar definition of the limits of online interaction.”
“To make sense of this history, the competing visions of designers and users must be introduced as a significant shaping force. The contests between control and communication, humanism and posthumanism must be the focus of the study of innovations such as the Internet.”
(62)”I believe that critical theory of technology offers a platform for reconciling many appar- ently conflicting strands of reflection on technology.”**I think “critical theory” means something different in this context…?
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