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