technology is culture (refactor camp 2014)
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Technology is Culture
Mike TraversRefactor Camp 2014
Humans ?¿ Technology
• Do humans control technology,Or the other way around?
• Wrong Question• Neither• Both
Wrong Question
• Technology is [part of] culture.• We’re prejudiced because “culture”
seems to be in a different university department.
• But culture is no more or less than what humans do and make.
Neither
• Agency is a fiction• Nothing controls anything• Humans and technology are part of
the same evolving process
Both
• Humans are agents, technology is agents, everything is agents
• Actor-Network Theory(Bruno Latour, sociology of science)
• Science (eg) is a network of “bacillus, microscope, laboratory, funding agency, food industry” (Latour litany)
• Humans and non-human actors considered in a single network (a “flat ontology”)
• New scientific humanities MOOC http://bit.ly/1jAOJ2M
Latour against everyday dichotomies
• “Truth and falsehood. Large and small. Agency and structure. Human and non-human. Before and after. Knowledge and power. Context and content. Materiality and sociality. Activity and passivity…all of these divides have been rubbished in work undertaken in the name of actor-network theory” (John Law 1999)His approach is the opposite of 2x2s
Autonomous Technology
• Not a new idea…• (Langdon Winner,
1997)• “Do Artifacts
Have Politics?” (LW, 1980)
Example: The Internet
• an open and decentralized systems • because of conscious design decisions, • not because of any inevitable evolution of
technology • There were walled-garden competitors;
they failed not because of any technological reason
• And its political structure is being renegotiated today (net neutrality, NSA backdoors, etc).
Extreme Historical Irony
• The open Internet was the creation of a massively centralized state bureaucracy (post WWII defense research)
• Hated by both progressives and libertarians, and with good reasons
• The libertarian do-what-you-please SV culture is trying to yank us back into walled gardens where the public sphere is privately owned.
tl;dr – Technology has Politics
• Technology doesn’t happen free of political and social influences.
• These are huge forces, nonetheless we are part of them and have a human obligation to influence them
• “Obligation” in a stronger-than-moral sense – we can’t help having and expressing opinions about this stuff.
What do we do about that?
• We are in charge as much as anyone• It is a professional responsibility to
take into account the social consequences of technology.
• The more software eats the world, the more technologists are in charge of society – we better get good at it.
End
Epigraph
Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had already happened — that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable...
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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