Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [103]
The problem is this slippery slope: though we begin by using technology, we must quickly shift our focus toward controlling it. Or, to put it another way: humans, weak and fragile by nature, develop and adapt tools to help them get by. But these tools, in turn, make us dependent upon them, weaken us, require us to adapt to using them. (Think about the new afflictions that face our generation: “Nintendo thumb,” email-induced carpal-tunnel syndrome, and the twin curses of the MTV generation, ADD and ADHD). Few of us are not dependent on some kind of “iron lung” or another. “I’m not paranoid; I’m an android.”
As long as we think about technology as a means to an end, we never see the real problem. Thinking like this always leads us to believe that we are not trying hard enough, that we need to develop a better strategy to control technology, and so on. (Think about nuclear nonproliferation treaties; bio-ethics panels; modern-day morality plays like Terminator and The Matrix.) We need to look deeper, Heidegger says, at the real essence of modern technology: the very framework or world-view that makes developing technology possible in the first place. He calls this deeper essence of technology “Ge-stell,” a German word that roughly translates as “framework” or “skeleton” (to understand technology, “you’ve got to feel it in your bones,” we might say). Modern technology is set apart by the framework through which we see all of nature as a “standing reserve”; instead of simply “working on the earth,” the way more primitive societies did, for us technology comes first: the earth simply exists as a storehouse of resources. “The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. . . . Agriculture is not the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium . . . uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be unleashed either for destructive or for peaceful purposes” (p. 320). But it doesn’t even stop there: for Heidegger (as, I think, for Radiohead—“we are the dollars and cents/and the pounds and the pence,” as one track on Amnesiac has it), such modern notions as “human resources” are more than ominous metaphors, they are a sign about the fundamental way we experience the world.
This Is the Panic Office
The danger is that this way of seeing things blots out any other ways of experiencing the world; the river is never just a river again. It’s either a reserve of hydroelectric power, or a reserve for tourist attraction—or, like the Hoover Dam, it’s both. Seeing the world through the framework of means/ends calculation and as a repository of resources to be exploited only allows for “technological” solutions (again, the very idea that technology might be a means that we could put to a better end is a technological solution to the problem of technology).
At the same time, this framework of technology has produced the modern form of alienation. Inauthenticity thus takes on an even more illusory character: for even if we can see the problem of inauthenticity—which was the entirety of our problem as recently as “The Bends,” a past which already seems blissfully naïve (“I wish it was the 60s / I wish we could be happy . . .”)—the framework of technology now ensures that we can only come up with technological (and, hence, further alienating) solutions to the problem (as if “her green plastic watering can” could make her “fake plastic tree” any less fake). We have gone from “anyone can play guitar” to “this is our new song / just like the last one / a total waste of time.” By OK Computer, Radiohead will be warning us that “ambition makes you look pretty ugly.”
Again, we can’t simply discard technology completely to try and solve the problem, as