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By Root 1865 0

Facebook Revolution in April 2008—when thousands of young Egyptians were mobilized via the Internet to express their solidarity with the textile workers who were on strike in the poor industrial city of Mahala—few bothered to ask what it was the workers actually wanted. As it turns out, they were protesting extremely low wages at their factory. It was primarily a protest about labor issues, which was successfully linked to a broader anti-Mubarak constitutional reform campaign. Once, for various reasons, the labor component to the protests fizzled, other attempts at a Facebook revolution—the one with consequences in the physical world—failed to resonate, even though they attracted hundreds of thousands of supporters online. As was to be expected, most reports in the Western media focused on Facebook rather than on labor issues or demands on Mubarak to end the emergency rule imposed on Egypt since 1981. This is yet another powerful reminder that by focusing on technologies, as opposed to the social and political forces that surround them, one may be drawn to wrong conclusions. As long as such protests continue to be seen predominantly through the lens of the technology through which they were organized—rather than, say, through the demands and motivation of the protesters—little good will come of Western policies, no matter how well-intentioned.

What is, therefore, most dangerous about succumbing to technological determinism is that it hinders our awareness of the social and the political, presenting it as the technological instead. Technology as a Kantian category of understanding the world may simply be too expansionist and monopolistic, subsuming anything that has not yet been properly understood and categorized, regardless of whether its roots and nature are technological. (This is what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger meant when he said that “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological.”) Since technology, like gas, will fill in any conceptual space provided, Leo Marx, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes it as a “hazardous concept” that may “stifle and obfuscate analytic thinking.” He notes, “Because of its peculiar susceptibility to reification, to being endowed with the magical power of an autonomous entity, technology is a major contributant to that gathering sense ... of political impotence. The popularity of the belief that technology is the primary force shaping the postmodern world is a measure of our ... neglect of moral and political standards, in making decisive choices about the direction of society.”

The neglect of moral and political standards that Leo Marx is warning about is on full display in the sudden urge to promote Internet freedom without articulating how exactly it fits the rest of the democracy-promotion agenda. Hoping that the Internet may liberate the Egyptians or the Azeris from authoritarian oppression is no good excuse to continue covertly supporting the very sources of that oppression. To her credit, Hillary Clinton avoided falling for technological determinism in her Internet freedom speech, saying that “while it’s clear that the spread of these [information] technologies is transforming our world, it is still unclear how that transformation will affect the human rights and welfare of much of the world’s population.” On second reading, however, this seems like a very strange statement to make. If it’s not clear how such technologies will affect human rights, what is the point of promoting them? Is it just because there is little clarity as to what Internet freedom means and does? Such confusion in the ranks of policymakers is only poised to increase, since they are formulating policies around a highly ambiguous concept.

Leo Marx suggests that the way to address the hazards of the concept of technology is to rethink whether it is still worth putting it at the center of any intellectual inquiry, let alone a theory of action. The more we learn about technology, the less it makes sense to focus on it alone, in isolation from