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By Root 1686 0

philosopher at the University of Chicago, argues that society’s fascination with the technological at the expense of the moral reaches a point where “what ought to be understood as contingent, one option among others, open to political discussion is instead falsely understood as necessary; what serves particular interest is seen without reflection, as of universal interest; what ought to be a part is experienced as a whole.” Facebook’s executives justifying their assault on privacy by claiming that this is where society is heading anyway is exactly the kind of claim that should be subject to moral and political—not just technological—scrutiny. It’s by appealing to such deterministic narratives that Facebook manages to obscure its own role in the process.

Abbe Mowshowitz, professor of computer science at the City College of New York, compares the computer to a seed and concrete historical circumstances to the ground in which the seed is to be planted: “The right combination of seed, ground and cultivation is required to promote the growth of desirable plants and to eliminate weeds. Unfortunately, the seeds of computer applications are contaminated with those of weeds; the ground is often ill-prepared; and our methods of cultivation are highly imperfect.” One can’t fault Mowshowitz for misreading the history of technology, but there is a more optimistic way to understand what he said: We, the cultivators, can actually intervene in all three stages, and it’s up to us to define the terms on which we choose to do so.

The price for not intervening could be quite high. Back in 1974, Raymond Williams, the British cultural critic, was already warning us that technological determinism inevitably produces a certain social and cultural determinism that “ratifies the society and culture we now have, and especially its most powerful internal directions.” Williams worried that placing technology at the center of our intellectual analysis is bound to make us view what we have traditionally understood as a problem of politics, with its complex and uneasy questions of ethics and morality, as instead a problem of technology, either eliminating or obfuscating all the unresolved philosophical dilemmas. “If the medium—whether print or television—is the cause,” wrote Williams in his best-selling Television: Technology and Cultural Form, “all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history, are at once reduced to effects.” For Williams, it was not the end of history that technology was ushering in; it was the end of historical thinking. And with the end of historical thinking, the questions of justice lose much of their significance as well.

Williams went further in his criticism, arguing that technological determinism also prevents us from acknowledging what is political about technology itself (the kind of practices and outcomes it tends to favor), as its more immediately observable features usually occupy the lion’s share of the public’s attention, making it difficult to assess its other, more pernicious features. “What are elsewhere seen as effects, and as such subject to social, cultural, psychological and moral questioning,” wrote Williams, “are excluded as irrelevant by comparison with the direct physiological and therefore ‘psychic’ effects of the media as such.” In other words, it’s far easier to criticize the Internet for making us stupid than it is to provide a coherent moral critique of its impact on democratic citizenship. And under the barrage of ahistorical blurbs about the Internet’s liberating potential, even posing such moral questions may seem too contrarian. Considering how the world reacted to Iran’s Twitter Revolution, it’s hard not to appreciate the prescience of Williams’s words. Instead of talking about religious, demographic, and cultural forces that were creating protest sentiment in the country, all we cared about was Twitter’s prominent role in organizing the protests and its resilience in the face of censorship.

Similarly, when many Western observers got carried away discussing the implications of Egypt’s