The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [161]
Technological determinism—the belief that certain technologies are bound to produce certain social, cultural, and political effects—is attractive precisely because “it creates powerful scenarios, clear stories, and because it accords with the dominant experience in the West,” write Steve Graham and Simon Marvin, two scholars of urban geography. Forcing a link between the role that photocopies and fax machines played in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the role that Twitter played in Iran in 2009 creates a heart-wrenching but also extremely coherent narrative that rests on the widespread belief, rooted in Enlightenment ideals, in the emancipatory power of information, knowledge, and, above all, ideas. It’s far easier to explain recent history by assuming that communism dropped dead the moment Soviet citizens understood that there were no queues in Western supermarkets than to search for truth in some lengthy and obscure reports on the USSR’s trade balance.
It is for this reason that determinism—whether of the social variety, positing the end of history, or of the political variety, positing the end of authoritarianism—is an intellectually impoverished, lazy way to study the past, understand the present, and predict the future. Bryan Pfaffenberger, an anthropologist at the University of Virginia, believes that the reason why so many of us fall for deterministic scenarios is because it presents the easiest way out. “Assuming technological determinism,” writes Pfaffenberger, “is much easier than conducting a fully contextual study in which people are shown to be the active appropriators, rather than the passive victims, of transferred technology.”
But it’s not only history that suffers from determinism; ethics doesn’t fare much better. If technology’s march is unstoppable and unidirectional, as a horde of technology gurus keep convincing the public from the pages of technology magazines, it then seems pointless to stand in its way. If radio, television, or the Internet are poised to usher in a new age of democracy and universal human rights, there is little role for us humans to play. However, to argue that a once-widespread practice like lobotomy was simply a result of inevitable technological forces is to let its advocates off the hook. Technological determinism thus obscures the roles and responsibilities of human decision makers, either absolving them of well-deserved blame or minimizing the role of their significant interventions. As Arthur Welzer, a political scientist at Michigan State University, points out, “to the extent that we view ourselves as helpless pawns of an overarching and immovable force, we may renounce the moral and political responsibility that, in fact, is crucial for the good exercise of what power over technology we do possess.”
By adopting a deterministic stance, we are less likely to subject technology—and those who make a living from it—to the full bouquet of ethical questions normal for democracy. Should Google be required to encrypt all documents uploaded to its Google Docs service? Should Facebook be allowed to continue making more of their users’ data public? Should Twitter be invited to high-profile gatherings of the U.S. government without first signing up with the Global Network Initiative? While many such questions are already being raised, it’s not so hard to imagine a future when they would be raised less often, particularly in offices that need to be asking them the most.
Throughout history, new technologies have almost always empowered and disempowered particular political and social groups, sometimes simultaneously—a fact that is too easy to forget under the sway of technological determinism. Needless to say, such ethical amnesia is rarely in the interests of the disempowered. Robert Pippin, a