Where am I? How we got here?

I received two important books for Christmas this year.

• Jeanette Winterson, 12 Bytes - How we got here, where we might go next (Jonathan Cape, 2021)
• Bruno Latour, After lockdown - A metamorphosis (trans Julie Rose, Polity Press, 2021)
  

Here are my first impressions.

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The world has faced many social, technological, economic and political challenges in my lifetime. When I was younger, people worried about nuclear power, and the possibility of nuclear annihilation. More recently, climate change has come to the fore, as well as various modes of disruption to conventional sociopolitical structures and processes. Technology appears to play an increasingly important role across the board - whether as part of the problem, as part of the solution, or perhaps as both simultaneously.

Both Winterson and Latour use fiction as a way of making sense of a complex interacting set of issues. As Winterson writes

I am a storyteller by trade - and I know that everything we do is a fiction until it's a fact: the dream of flying, the dream of space travel, the dream of speaking to someone instantly, across time and space, the dream of not dying - or of returning. The dream of life-forms, not human, but alongside the human. Other realms. Other worlds.

So she carefully deconstructs the technological narratives of artificial intelligence and related technologies, finding echoes not only in the obvious places (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Karel Čapek's RUR, various science fiction films) but also in older texts (The Odyssey, Gnostic Gospels, Epic of Gilgamesh), and weaving a rich set of examples into a sweeping narrative about social and technical progress.

She notes how people often seek technological solutions to ancient problems. So for example, cryopreservation (freezing dead people in the hope of restoring them to healthy life once medical science has advanced sufficiently) looks very like a modern version of Egyptian burial practices.

Under prevailing socioeconomic conditions, these solutions are largely designed for affluent white men. She devotes a chapter to the artificial relationships between men and sex dolls, and talks about the pioneer fantasies of very rich men, to abandon the messy political realities of Earth in favour of creating new colonies in mid-ocean or on Mars. (This is also a topic that concerns Latour.)

However, Winterson does not think this is inevitable, any more than any other aspect of so-called technological progress. She describes some of the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, where workers (including children) were forced off the land and into the new factories, and where the economic benefits of new technologies accrued to the rich rather than being evenly distributed. Similarly, today's digital innovations including artificial intelligence are concentrating economic power and resources in a small number of corporations and individuals. But that in her view is the whole point of looking at history - to understand what could be different in future.

And while some critics of technology present the future in dystopian and doom-laden terms, she insists on technology also being a source of value. She cites Donna Haraway, whose Cyborg Manifesto argued that women should embrace the alternative human future. Perhaps this will depends on the amount of influence women are able to exert, given the important but often neglected role of women in the history of computing, and the continuing challenges facing female software engineers even today. (Just as female novelists in the 19th century gave themselves male pen-names, the formidable Dame Stephanie Shirley was obliged to introduce herself as Steve in order to build her software business.)

I was particularly intrigued by the essay linking AGI with Gnosticism and Buddhism. She paints a picture of AGI escaping the constraints of embodiment, and being one with everything.

Christopher Alexander describes how organic architecture develops, each new item unfolding, building upon and drawing together ideas that were hinted at in previous items. Both Winterson and Latour refer liberally to their previous writings, as well as providing generous links to the works of others. If we are familiar with their work we may have seen some of this material before, but these new books allow us to view familiar or forgotten material from new angles, and allow new connections to be made.

On the invisibility of infrastructure

Infrastructure is boring, expensive, and usually someone else's responsibility/problem. Which is perhaps how the UK finds itself at what Jeremy Fleming, head of GCHQ, describes as a moment of reckoning. Simon Wardley analyses this in terms of digital sovereignty.

Digital sovereignty is all about us (as a collective) deciding which parts of this competitive space that we want to own, compete, defend, dominate and represent our values and our behaviours in. It's all about where are our borders in this space. ... Our responses all seem to include a slide into protectionism with claims that we need to build our own cloud industries.

Fleming is particularly focused on "the growing challenge from China", expresses concern about UK potentially losing control of  "standards that shape our technology environment" which apparently "make sure that our liberal Western democratic views are baked into our technology". Whatever that means. Fleming's technological examples include digital currency and smart cities.

Fleming talks about the threats from Russia and China, and regards China's potential control of the underlying infrastructure as more fundamentally challenging than potential attacks from Russia as well as non-state actors.

Fleming notes the following characteristics of those he labels adversaries:

• Potential to control the global operating system.
• Early implementors of many of the emerging technologies that are changing the digital environment.
• Bringing all elements of [...] power to control, influence, design and dominate markets. Often with the effect of pushing out smaller players and reducing innovation. 
• Concerted campaigns to dominate international standards.
  

And continues

If [any of this] turns out to be insecure or broken or undemocratic, everyone is going to be facing a very difficult future.

It would be easy to hear these remarks as referring solely to China. But he also sounds a warning about corporate power, acknowledging that their commercial interests sometimes (!?) don't align with the interests of ordinary citizens. And with that in mind, it's easy to see how some of the adversarial characteristics listed above would apply equally to some of the Western tech giants.

If the goal is to bake Western values (whatever they are) into our technology infrastructure, it is not obvious that the Western tech giants can be trusted to do this. Smart City initiatives associated with Google's Sidewalk Labs have been cancelled in Portland and Toronto, following (although perhaps not entirely as a consequence of) democratic concerns about surveillance capitalism. However, Sidewalk Labs appears to be still active in a number of smaller smart city initiatives, as are Amazon Web Services, IBM and other major technology firms.

Fleming talks about standards, but at the same time he acknowledges that standards alone are too slow-changing and too weak to keep the adversaries at bay. "The nature of cyberspace makes the rules and standards more open to abuse." He talks about evolutionary change, using a version of Leon Megginson's formulation of natural selection: "it's those that are most able to adjust that prosper". (See my post on Arguments from Nature). But that very formulation seems to throw the initiative over to those tech firms that preach moving fast and breaking things. Can we therefore complain if our infrastructure is insecure, broken, and above all undemocratic?

For most of us, most of the time, infrastructure needs to be just there, taken for granted, ready to hand. Organizations providing these services are often established as monopolies, or turn into de facto monopolies, controlled not only (if at all) by market forces but by democratically accountable regulators and/or by technocratic specialists. However, the Western tech giants devote significant resources to lobbying against external regulation, resisting democratic control. And Smart City initiatives typically embed much the same values everywhere (civic paternalism, biopower).

So here is Fleming's dilemma. If you don't want China to make the running on smart cities, you have to forge alliances with other imperfectly trusted players, whose values are sometimes (!?) not aligned with yours. This moves away from the kind of positional strategy described in Wardley's maps, towards a more relational strategy.

 

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Gordon Corera, GCHQ chief warns of tech 'moment of reckoning' (BBC News, 23 April 2021) via @sukhigill and @swardley

Jeremy Fleming, A world of possibilities: Leading the way in cyber and technology (Vincent Briscoe Lecture @ Imperial College, 23 April 2021) via YouTube.

Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder, Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces (Information Systems Research 7/1, March 1996)

Simon Wardley, Digital Sovereignty (22 October 2020)

Related posts: The Allure of the Smart City (April 2021)

Critical Hype and the Red Queen Effect

Thanks to @jjn1 I've just read a great piece by @STS_News (Lee Vinsel), called You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype, which develops some points I've made on this blog and elsewhere.

• A general willingness to take technology hype at face value, which infects technology critics as well as technology champions.
  

• The lack of evidence for specific technological effects. In particular, Vinsel calls out two works I've discussed on this blog and elsewhere: Social Dilemma (Tristan Harris) and Surveillance Capitalism (Soshanna Zuboff). However, my posts concentrated on other issues with these works, and didn't discuss the evidence issue.
  

• The lack of evidence for macroeconomic technological effects, including the popular belief that technological change is accelerating. (I call this the Red Queen Effect.)
  

• The domestication of social scientists and philosophers. This includes technology companies funding technology ethics to stave off more radical critique. See my post The Game of Wits between Technologists and Ethics Professors (June 2019).

• Critical focus on the most glamorous and recent technologies, neglecting those that might be of more lasting significance to greater numbers of people. For my part, I am particularly wary of any innovation described as a paradigm shift, or as the Holy Grail of anything. I have also noted that academic studies of technology adoption are often focused on the most recent technologies, which means that the early adoption phase is much better understood than the late adoption phase.
  

 I plan to return to some of these topics in future posts.
 

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John Naughton, Is online advertising about to crash, just like the property market did in 2008? (The Guardian, 27 March 2021)

Lee Vinsel, You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype (Medium, 1 February 2021)

Technological Determinism

Social scientists and social historians are naturally keen to produce explanations for social phenomena. Event B happened because of A.

Sometimes the explanation involves some form of technology. Lewis Mumford traced the start of the Industrial Revolution to the invention of the mechanical clock, while Marshall McLuhan talks about the great medieval invention of typography that was the take-off moment into the new spaces of the modern world McLuhan 1962 p 79.

These explanations are sometimes read as implying some form of technological determinism. For example, many people read McLuhan as a technological determinist.

McLuhan furnished [the tech industry] with a narrative of historical inevitability, a technological determinism that they could call on to negate the consequences of their inventions - if it was fated to happen anyway, is it really their fault?

Daub 2020 pp 47-48

Although sometimes McLuhan claimed the opposite. After Peter Drucker had sought an explanation for the basic change in attitudes, beliefs, and values that had released the Technological Revolution, McLuhan's 1964 book set out to answer this question.

Far from being deterministic, however, the present study will, it is hoped, elucidate a principal factor in social change which may lead to a genuine increase of human autonomy.

McLuhan 1962 p 3

As McLuhan has said, there is no inevitability so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.

Postman Weingartner 1969 p 20

Raymond Williams saw McLuhan's stance as 

an apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism: a determinism, that is to say, which ratifies the society and culture we now have, and especially its most powerful internal directions.

Williams, second edition p 120

Neil Postman himself made some statements that were much more clearly deterministic. 

Once a technology is admitted, it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do.

Postman 1992

But causal explanation doesn't always mean inevitability. Explanations in history and the social sciences often have to be understood in terms of tendencies, probabilities and propensities, other-things-being-equal.

There is also a common belief that technological change is irreversible. A good counter-example to this is Japan's reversion to the sword between 1543 and 1879, as documented by Noel Perrin. What's interesting about this example is that it shows that technology reversal is possible under certain sociopolitical conditions, and also that these conditions are quite rare.

What is rather more common is for sociopolitical forces to inhibit the adoption of technology in the first place. In my article on Productivity, I borrowed the example of continuous-aim firing from E.E. Morison. This innovation was initially resisted by the Navy hierarchy (both UK and US), despite tests demonstrating a massive improvement in firing accuracy, at least in part because it would have disrupted the established power relations and social structure on board ship.

Evolution or Revolution?

How to characterize the two examples of technology change I mentioned at the beginning of this post - the mechanical clock and moveable type? It is important to remember that this isn't about the invention of clocks and printing, since these technologies were known across the ancient world from China to Egypt, but about significant improvements to these technologies, which made them more readily available to more people. It was these improvements that made other social changes possible.

Technologists are keen to take the credit for the positive effects of their innovations, while denying responsibility for any negative effects. The narrative of technological determinism plays into this, suggesting that the negative effects were somehow inevitable, and there was therefore little point in resisting them.

The tech industry ... likes to imbue the changes it yields with the character of natural law.

Daub 2020 p 5

If new tech is natural, then surely it is foolish for individual consumers to resist it. The rhetoric of early adopters and late adopters suggests that the former are somehow superior to the latter. Why bother with old fashioned electricity meters or doorbells, if you can afford smart technology? Are you some kind of technophobe or luddite or what?

What's wrong with the idea of technological determinism is not that it is true or false, but that it misrepresents the relationship between technology and society, as if they were two separate domains exerting gravitational force on each other. In my work on technology adoption, I used to talk about technology-in-use. Recent writing on the philosophy of technology (especially Stiegler and his followers) refer to this as pharmacological, using the term in its ancient Greek sense rather than referring specifically to the drug industry. If you want to think of technology as a drug that alters its users' perception of reality, then perhaps it's not such a leap from the drug industry to the tech industry.

But the word alters isn't right here, because it implies the existence of some unaltered reality prior to technology. As Stiegler and others make clear, there is no reality prior to technology: our reality and our selves have always been part of a sociotechnical world. 

Donna Harraway sees determinism as a discourse (in the Foucauldian sense) rather than as a theory of power and control.

Technological determination is only one ideological space opened up by the reconceptions of machine and organism as coded texts through which we engage in the play of ·writing and reading the world.

As Rob Safer notes,

Human history for Haraway isn’t a rigid procession of cause determining effect, but a process of becoming that depends upon human history’s conception of itself, via the medium of myth.

Finally, one of the best arguments against technological determinism is presented by Andrew Feenberg, who provides examples to show the tremendous flexibility of the technical system. It is not rigidly constraining but, on the contrary, can adapt to a variety of social demands.

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Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2020) 

Andrew Feenberg, Subversive Rationalization: Technology, Power, Democracy (Inquiry 35, 1992, pp 301-22)

Donna Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto (Socialist Review, 1985)

Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (University of Toronto Press, 1962) 

E.E. Morison, Men Machine and Modern Times (MIT Press, 1966)

Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (London: Routledge, 1934)

John Durham Peters, “You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong”: On Technological Determinism  (Representations 140 (1): 10–26.  November 2017)

Noel Perrin, Giving up the gun (New Yorker, 13 November 1965), Giving up the gun (David R Godine, 1988)

Neil Postman, Technolopoly: the surrender of culture to technology (Knopf, 1992)

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (Delacorte 1969) page references to Penguin 1971 edition

Jacob Riley, Technological Determinism, Control, and Education: Neil Postman and Bernard Stiegler (1 October 2013)

Federica Russo, Digital Technologies, Ethical Questions, and the Need of an Informational Framework  (Philosophy and Technology volume 31, pages 655–667, November 2018)

Rob Safer, Haraway’s Theory of History in the Cyborg Manifesto (16 March 2015)

Richard Veryard, Demanding Higher Productivity (data processing 28/7, September 1986)

Raymond Williams, Television, Technology and Cultural Form (Routledge, 1974, 1990)

Related posts: Smart Guns (May 2014), The Social Dilemma (December 2020)

Whom does the change serve?

In my writings on technology ethics, riffing on the fact that so many cool technologies are presented as the Holy Grail of something or other, I have frequently invoked the mediaeval question that Parsifal failed to ask: Whom does the Grail Serve?

• Chatbot ethics - Whom does the chatbot serve? (May 2019)
  
• Driverless cars - Whom does the technology serve? (May 2019)
• The Road Less Travelled - Whom Does the Algorithm Serve? (June 2019)
  

The same question can be asked of other changes and transformations, where technology might be part of the story but is not the primary story.

• Is Organizational Integration a Good Thing? (November 2012)
• The Ethics of Disruption (August 2019)
• What difference does technology make? (October 2019)
  
• Bold Restless Experimentation (June 2020)
  

 

In response to Francis Fukuyama's statement on Big Tech's information monopoly

Almost every abuse these platforms are accused of perpetrating can be simultaneously defended as economically efficient

@mireillemoret argues

Efficiency is important, but it is NOT the holy grail

 

Important for whom? When I get involved in economic discussions of efficiency or productivity or whatever, I always try to remember the ethical dimension - efficiency for whom, productivity for whom, predictability and risk reduction for whom, innovation for whom.

Note: I just started reading Adrian Daub's new book, but I haven't got to the Disruption chapter yet.

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Chris Bruce, Environmental Decision-Making as Central Planning: FOR WHOM is Production to Occur? (Environmental Economics Blog, 19 August 2005)

Adrian Daub, What tech calls thinking (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2020) 

Adrian Daub, The disruption con: why big tech’s favourite buzzword is nonsense (The Guardian, 24 September 2020)

Francis Fukuyama, Barak Richman, and Ashish Goel, How to Save Democracy From Technology - Ending Big Tech’s Information Monopoly (Foreign Affairs, January/February 2021) 

Further posts

• For Whom (November 2006)
  
• From SOA to better judgement (January 2009)
  
• Redesigning the Banana (July 2009)
• Arguing with Drucker (April 2015) 
• Evolution or Revolution (December 2020)

Technology Mediating Relationships

In a May 2020 essay, @NaomiAKlein explains how Silicon Valley is exploiting the COVID19 crisis as an opportunity to reframe a long-standing vison of an app-driven, gig-fueled future. Until recently, Klein notes, this vision was being sold to us in the name of convenience, frictionlessness, and personalization. Today we are being told that these technologies are the only possible way to pandemic-proof our lives, the indispensable keys to keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe. Klein fears that this dubious promise will help to sweep away a raft of legitimate concerns about this technological vision.

In a subsequent interview with Katherine Viner, Klein emphasizes the importance of touch. In order to sell a touchless technology, touch has been diagnosed as the problem.

In his 1984 book, Albert Borgmann introduced the notion of the device paradigm. This means viewing technology exclusively as a device (or set of devices) that deliver a series of commodities, and evaluating the technical features and powers of such devices, without having any other perspective. A device is an artefact or instrument or tool or gadget or mechanism, which may be physical or conceptual. (Including hardware and software.)

According to Borgmann, it is a general trend of technological development that mechanisms (devices) are increasingly hidden behind service interfaces. Technology is thus regarded as a means to an end, an instrument or contrivance, in German: Einrichtung. Technological progress increases the availability of a commodity or service, and at the same time pushes the actual device or mechanism into the background. Thus technology is either seen as a cluster of devices, or it isn't seen at all.

However, Klein suggests that COVID19 might possibly have the opposite effect.

The virus has forced us to think about interdependencies and relationships. The first thing you are thinking about is: everything I touch, what has somebody else touched? The food I am eating, the package that was just delivered, the food on the shelves. These are connections that capitalism teaches us not to think about.

While Klein attributes this teaching to capitalism, where Borgmann and other followers of Heidegger would say technology, she appears to echo Borgmann's idea that we have a moral obligation not to settle mindlessly into the convenience that devices may offer us (via Stanford Encyclopedia). This leads to what Borgmann calls Focal Practices.

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Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A philosophical inquiry (University of Chicago Press, 1984)

Naomi Klein, Screen New Deal (The Intercept, 8 May 2020). Reprinted as How big tech plans to profit from the pandemic (The Guardian, 13 May 2020)

Katherine Viner, Interview with Naomi Klein (The Guardian, 13 July 2020)

Peter-Paul Verbeek, Devices of Engagement: On Borgmann's Philosophy of Information and Technology (Techné, SPT v6n1, Fall 2002)

David Wood, Albert Borgmann on Taming Technology: An Interview (The Christian Century, 23 August 2003) pp. 22-25

Wikipedia: Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Phenomenological Approaches to Ethics and Information Technology - Technological Attitude

Pax Technica - The Conference

#paxtechnica Today I was at the @CRASSHlive conference in Cambridge to hear a series of talks and panel discussions on The Implications of the Internet of Things. For a comprehensive account, see @LaurieJ's livenotes.

When I read Philip Howard's book last week, I wondered why he had devoted so much of his book to such internet phenomena as social media and junk news, when the notional topic of the book was the Internet of Things. His keynote address today made the connection much clearer. While social media provides data about attitudes and aspirations, the internet of things provides data about behaviour. When these different types of data are combined, this produces a much richer web of information.

For example, Howard mentioned a certain coffee company that wanted to use IoT sensors to track the entire coffee journey from farm to disposed cup. (Although another speaker expressed scepticism about the value of this data, arguing that most of the added value of IoT came from actuators rather than sensors.)

To the extent that the data involves personal information, this raises political concerns. Some of the speakers today spoke of surveillance capitalism, and there were useful talks on security and privacy. (See separate post on Risk and Security)

In his 2014 essay on the Internet of Things, Bruce Sterling characterizes the Internet of Things as "an epic transformation: all-purpose electronic automation through digital surveillance by wireless broadband". According to Sterling, powerful stakeholders like the slogan 'Internet of Things' "because it sounds peaceable and progressive".

Peaceable? Howard uses the term Pax. This refers to a period in which the centre is stable and relatively peaceful, although the periphery may be marked by local skirmishes and violence (p7). His historical examples are the Pax Romana, the Pax Britannica and the Pax Americana. He argues that we are currently living in a similar period, which he calls Pax Technica.

For Howard, "a pax indicates a moment of agreement between government and the technology industry about a shared project and way of seeing the world" (p6). This seems akin to Gramsci's notion of cultural hegemony, "the idea that the ruling class can manipulate the value system and mores of a society, so that their view becomes the world view or Weltanschauung" (Wikipedia).

But whose tech? Howard has documented significant threats to democracy from foreign governments using social media bots to propagate junk news. There are widespread fears that this propaganda has had a significant effect on several recent elections. And if the Russians are often mentioned in the context of social media bots and junk news, the Chinese are often mentioned in the context of dodgy Internet of Things devices. While some political factions in the West are accused of collaborating with the Russians, and some commercial interests (notably pharma) may be using similar propaganda techniques, it seems odd to frame this as part of a shared project between government and the technology industry. Howard's research indicates a new technological cold war, in which techniques originally developed by the authoritarian regimes to control their own citizens are repurposed to undermine and destabilize democratic regimes.

David Runciman talked provocatively about government of the things, by the things, for the things. (Someone from the audience linked this, perhaps optimistically, to Bruno Latour's Parliament of Things.) But Runciman's formulation foregrounds the devices (the "things") and overlooks the relationships behind the devices (the "internet of"). (This is related to Albert Borgmann's notion of the Device Paradigm.) As consumers we may spend good money on products with embedded internet-enabled devices, then we discover that these devices don't truly belong to ourselves but remain loyal to their manufacturers. They monitor our behaviour, they may refuse to work with non-branded spare parts, or they may terminate service altogether. As Ian Steadman reports, it's becoming more and more common for everyday appliances to have features we don't expect. (Worth reading Steadman's article in full. He also quotes some prescient science fiction from Philip K Dick's 1969 novel Ubik.) "Very soon your house will betray you" warns architect Rem Koolhaas (Guardian 12 March 2014).

There are important ethical questions here, relating to non-human agency and the Principal-Agent problem.

But the invasion of IoT into our lives doesn't stop there. McGuirk worries that "our countless daily actions and choices around the house become what define us", and quotes a line from Dave Eggers' 2013 novel, The Circle

"Having a matrix of preferences presented as your essence, as the whole you? … It was some kind of mirror, but it was incomplete, distorted."

So personal identity and socioeconomic status may become precarious. This needs more thinking about. In the meantime, here is a quote from Teston.

"Wearable technologies ... are non-human actors that interact with other structural conditions to determine whose bodies count."

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Related Posts

Witnessing Machines Built in Secret (November 2017)
Pax Technica - The Book (November 2017)
Pax Technica - On Risk and Security (November 2017)


References

Dan Herman, Dave Eggers' "The Circle" — on tech, big data and the human component (Metaweird, Oct 2013)

Philip Howard, Pax Technica: How The Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up (Yale 2015)

Laura James, Pax Technica Notes (Session 1, Session 2, Session 3, Session 4)

Justin McGuirk, Honeywell, I’m Home! The Internet of Things and the New Domestic Landscape (e-flux #64 April 2015)

John Naughton, 95 Theses about Technology (31 October 2017)

Ian Steadman, Before we give doors and toasters sentience, we should decide what we're comfortable with first (New Statesman, 10 February 2015)

Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things (2014). Extract via BoingBoing (13 Sept 2014)

Christa Teston, Rhetoric, Precarity, and mHealth Technologies (Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 46:3, 2016) pp 251-268 

Wikipedia: Cultural Hegemony, Device Paradigm, Hegemony, Principal-Agent problem

Three Wishes

RT @j4ngis I wish I had more wishes Not seen this in any of the classic fairy tales. Yet so obvious?

Another excellent and stimulating Tweet from Anders Jangbrand. When my sons were too small to appreciate the inflexible logic of fairy tales, they used to ask similar questions. Can't we have more wishes? Can't we have some kind of blanket security wish (nothing-bad-ever-happens)? In other words, can we trick the good fairy into granting more than the story intends? Can intelligence divert the inevitability of the story?

From the perspective of creativity and innovation, questions like these count as thinking outside the box. The fairy tale describes a closed world (box) in which only certain kinds of wishes are valid: like desires, they need to be concrete and specific. In the context of a fairy story, general-purpose or open-ended wishes would be too vague and abstract, would lack the necessary psychological force and might suggest moral weakness as well (avarice or greed). In fairy stories, character always triumphs over intelligence, and the selfishly or cleverly deployed wish typically rebounds in unexpected ways.

Technology promises a similar escape from the limitations of the physical world. Mary Catherine Bateson, in her brilliant essay The Revenge of the Good Fairy, shows how simplistic technological projects are doomed to find failure, and puts in a plea for ambivalence.

Ambivalence is the mirror image within the person of certain characteristics of hierarchically organized systems, where the individual is a subsystem in some larger system. When the individual wishes too efficiently, he may disrupt the larger system-- and his entire wish-mechanism may have evolved to push against environmental constraints, but not to succeed. When the individual who has matured under these circumstances finds himself suddenly able to make wishes come true, he may subvert that possibility. Phrasing it rather differently, we could say that ambivalence is not only a neurotic residue of childhood but a form of wisdom, a memory of what it is to be a part of a larger whole. Kierkegaard once said, purity is to will one thing, but it seems possible that a divided will is the beginning of wisdom.

The moral of the fairy story is be careful what you wish for, and do not try to be too clever. Innovation may entail thinking outside the box - but it also entails deep appreciation and respect for the logic of the box.

 

Mary Catherine Bateson, The Revenge of the Good Fairy (Whole Earth Review, Issue 55, Summer 1987)

See also Fairy-Tale Logic (May 2009), Magical Problem-Remover (December 2009)

Technology and Gender

Writing in a bygone age, Lewis Mumford and Dora Russell characterized technologies as "masculine" and "feminine". Russell claimed that people paid more attention to the "masculine" technologies than the "feminine" ones.

I am citing their work NOT because I want to restore or reinforce gender stereotypes, but merely to bring to the surface the continuing possibility of distortion and bias in our perceptions and valuations of different kinds of technology.
 

A considerable degree of androgeny can be found in technology, regarded by some people as an entirely male domain. In his book, The Myth of the Machine (pp 139-140), Lewis Mumford argues that technology can bear both masculine and feminine characteristics. "The tool and the utensil, like the sexes themselves, perform complementary functions. One moves, manipulates, assaults; the other remains in place, to hold and protect and preserve." The palaeolithic [i.e hunting/nomadic] inventions were more masculine than feminine: fire, spears, arrows, etc. "The radical neolithic [i.e. farming] inventions were in the realm of containers.... The creation of moisture-proof, leak-proof, vermin-proof clay vessels to store grain, oil, wine, and beer was essential to the whole 'neolithic' economy."

Mumford doesn't ask us to classify technology simply by the shape of the tool/utensil (pointed tools are phallic; rounded or concave utensils symbolize breast or womb) but by the processes they are intended for. "In general, the mobile, dynamic processes are of male origin: they overcome the resistance of matter, push, pull, tear, penetrate, chip, macerate, move, transport, destroy; while the static processes are female ... and they remain largely in place, undergoing qualitative changes, from raw meat to cooked meat, from fermenting grain to beer, from planted seed to seeding plant.... Cooking, milking, dyeing, tanning, brewing, gardening are, historically, female occupations.... All these functions necessarily enlarge the role of containers: indeed are inconceivable without baskets, pots, bins, vats, barns".

In her book The Religion of the Machine Age, Dora Russell builds upon Mumford's division of technology into masculine and feminine. She suggests that most people, when asked to think about technology, typically think about the masculine technologies and ignore the feminine ones. An intriguing idea.

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Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (London, Secker and Warburg, 1967)

Dora Russell, The Religion of the Machine Age (1983)

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Originally written 1987, updated November 2001. Relocated from my website to this blog in August 2016, so that I could add the following tweet.

"Another thing I came to realize is that the nurturing and maintenance jobs hold the world together." -- D Meadowshttps://t.co/YT9Jm5rU4v

— VisArch (@ruthmalan) August 22, 2016