Technology - STILL not the problem
(or the solution)
Writing about technology is usually a constant game of catch up, as things I confidently predicted were imminent, or impossible, turn out to be the other way around. Or, more often, things that were novel and about to “change everything” are simply absorbed into our everyday lives and we forget that we ever managed without satnav/dating apps/being able to track our family’s whereabouts in real time.
But when my editor asked what I wanted to change for the paperback edition of Technology is Not the Problem (out this week) there was almost nothing. One example that didn’t stand up to further research gets an apologetic footnote, and a couple of typos finally get sorted.
One reason for this is simply that a lot of the book is historical. My central argument is that we shape technology, not vice versa, and that the problems we associate with technology are rooted, not in the cunning algorithms designed by Silicon Valley tech companies, but in our own needs, desires and insecurities - which are themselves rooted in our unique time and place in history.
In order to understand our relationship with technology today, I really did need to go back to the time when Michelangelo, Machiavelli and Martin Luther were shaking up our idea of who we are (and even earlier). There’s also a potted history of the technology we use today, alongside a history of the practical and theoretical expansion of choice as an organising principle of how we live today. The key historical strand, though, is the emergence, over centuries of mainly European thought, of identity as the kernel of how we understand ourselves in the world.
We have never before lived in a society so centred on affirming each individual’s particular view of the world - and of themselves. That’s why everything today has to be personalised - from the turn-by-turn directions your SatNav gives you, to the products adorned with your kid’s (or pet’s) face and name, to the social media feeds tailored to keep you coming back for more.
All the technology does is promise to fulfil our need for recognition as a unique person, recognition that we should be getting from our fellow human beings in the course of everyday life - where it would be tempered by acceptance that they, too, are unique human beings with their own world views, preoccupations, desires, ideas, and feelings.
But wait, you say. Surely the technology is contributing to isolating us from our fellow humans, or at best forcing us to conduct our social lives through screens and algorithms? Technology may not have instigated this world of atomised individuals, tapping away like pigeons on our smartphone screens, desperate for a simulacrum of social interaction, but it does shape that world.
This is true. New technologies always reshape how we live, from the development of Mesopotamian cities and trading under the influence of beer1 to the bicycle expanding the social and marriage circles of the working classes2. The kind of technology we have does affect what we can do with it. But the kind of technology we have evolves in response to what we want from it.
To see ourselves as the dumb servants of digital devices is to bring about exactly the kind of dystopia we are so often warned against. Is checking social media the first habit we humans find hard to break? Of course not: ask the Sumerian brewers. For a measured response to the panic about screen time, based on actual research, I heartily recommend Professor Pete Etchells’ book Unlocked.
Ironically, alongside our increasing tendency to blame technology for everything from childhood mental health problems to global inequality, we also increasingly turn to technology for solutions - both to our everyday needs and to large social and political problems. Governments seem compelled to involve AI or an app in every policy proposal to tackle every problem.
Underlying both these tendencies is a lack of confidence in our own ability to tackle even everyday challenges. Restoring that confidence, being willing to take action, inevitably to make mistakes, and to take responsibility for what we have set in motion, is what we need to solve our many challenges, great and small. And there is no app for that.
As I wrote in the introduction:
“We don’t have a shrinking sense of who we are because of personalising technology. We have personalising technology because of our shrinking sense of who we are. The problem is not technology, but our own obsession with how others see us, and our insatiable need to be reassured that we are the person we want others to see. How to turn our energy away from the digital mirror of Narcissus, and out to the wider world, is the challenge this book tries to meet.”
https://armstronghistoryjournal.wordpress.com/2019/11/11/the-beverage-of-the-ages-the-role-and-function-of-beer-in-sumerian-society/
Perry, P. J. “Working-Class Isolation and Mobility in Rural Dorset, 1837-1936: A Study of Marriage Distances.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, no. 46 (1969): 121–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/621412.