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By Root 1837 0

visionaries”—still rings true today. Their technological fetishism combined with a strong penchant for populism—perhaps just a way of making the “little guys” in their fan base, now armed with iPhones and iPads, feel important—prevents most Internet gurus from asking uncomfortable questions about the social and political effects of the Internet. And why would they ask those questions if they might reveal that they, too, have little control over the situation? It’s for this reason that the kind of future predicted by such gurus—and they do need to predict some plausible future to argue that their “fix” would actually work—is rarely reflective of the past.

The technologists, especially technology visionaries who invariably pop up to explain technology to the wider public, “largely extrapolate from today or tomorrow while showing painfully limited interest in the past,” as Howard Segal, another historian of technology, once mused. This, perhaps, explains the inevitable barrage of utopian claims every time a new invention comes along. After all, it’s not historians of technology but futurists—those who prefer to fantasize about the bright but unknowable future rather than confront the dark but knowable past—that make the most outrageous claims about the fundamental, world-transforming significance of any new technology, especially if it is already on its way to making the cover of Time magazine.

As a result, excessive optimism about what technology has to offer, bordering at times on irrational exuberance, overwhelms even those with superior knowledge of history, society, and politics. For better or worse, many such people don’t have the resources (and time) for studying how every new iPhone app contributes to the progress of civilization and are thus in desperate need of expert judgment on how technology really transforms the world. It’s thanks to their overblown claims about yet another digital revolution that so many Internet gurus end up advising those in positions of power, compromising their own intellectual integrity and ensuring the presence of Internet-centrism in policy planning for decades to come.

Hannah Arendt, one of America’s most treasured public intellectuals, was aware of this problem back in the 1960s, when the “scientifically minded brain trusters”—Alvin Weinberg was just one of many; another whiz kid with a penchant for computer modeling, Robert McNamara, was put in charge of the Vietnam War—were beginning to penetrate the corridors of power and influence government policy. “The trouble [with such advisers] is not that they are cold-blooded enough to ‘think the unthinkable,’” cautioned Arendt in “On Violence,” “but that they do not ‘think.’” “Instead of indulging in such an old-fashioned, uncomputerizable activity,” she wrote, “they reckon with the consequences of certain hypothetically assumed constellations without, however, being able to test their hypothesis against actual occurrences.” A cursory glimpse at the overblown and completely unsubstantiated rhetoric that followed Iran’s Twitter Revolution is enough to assure us that not much has changed.

It was more than just the constant glorification of technical, largely quantitative expertise at the expense of erudition that bothered Arendt. She feared that increased reliance on half-baked predictions uttered by self-interested technological visionaries and the futuristic theories they churn out on an hourly basis would prevent policymakers from facing the highly political nature of the choices in front of them. Arendt worried that “because of their inner consistency ... [such theories] have a hypnotic effect; they put to sleep our common sense.” The ultimate irony of the modern world, which is more dependent on technology than ever, is that, as technology becomes ever more integrated into political and social life, less and less attention is paid to the social and political dimensions of technology itself. Policymakers should resist any effort to take politics out of technology; they simply cannot afford to surrender to the kind of apolitical hypnosis