Dr. Andrew Feenberg: Ten Paradoxes of Technology

the irac center is proud to present the SFU Canada Research chairs seminar Series this bi-weekly series hosts five presentations this semester for the spring 2010 semester the presenters belong to the faculties of science The Faculty of communication art and technology and the faculty of Health Sciences today's speaker is Dr Andrew fenberg Canada Research chair in philosophy of Technology from the school of communication um it's my great honor uh to introduce Andrew fenberg um who's our speaker today um Professor fenberg uh is a uh candidate research chair in the philosophy of Technology uh in the school

of communication here at Simon Fraser and he's also the director of the applied communication lab uh applied communication and Technology lab here at SFU um he's been here for six years and he tells me he enjoys it quite a bit uh in our in our wonderful city um but before coming to SFU um he was a a professor and taught uh in the philosopy departments at a number of universities including Universities at the US uh in France and Japan um in the 1990s Professor uh fenberg authored three books that established him as one of the

leading scholars in the philosophy of Technology um including critical theory of technology in 1991 um alternative modern enity um in 1993 and questioning technology in 1999 um and I believe this is the area that is going to be talking to us uh about today what I find uh most intriguing about uh Professor feenberg's work is that not only is a leading philosopher in this area um but his group and his research lab um considers um how these Technologies uh impact Our Lives um and and our society um and he does that in a lot of

different areas including online gaming and online learning so uh not only is he uh a philosopher but he also uh and his lab um works at a very Hands-On level in terms of uh the technology itself without further Ado [Applause] Professor well thank you very much I very pleased to be here um I'll present you with a paper maybe the lights could go down a little bit in the front of the room so the slides are easier to see is that possible um yeah that's that's probably right not not too dark or you won't be

able to see me U okay I'm going to present a paper here um that describes a philosophy of Technology it draws on what we've learned in the last 30 years as we abandoned old hiigaran and and positivist Notions and face the real world of technology it turns out that most of our Common Sense ideas about technology are wrong this is why I've put my 10 propositions in the form of paradoxes although I use the word Loosely these are counterintuitive propositions but of not formally paradoxes in The Logical sense so the first one is the Paradox

of the parts and the whole let me describe this one for you Martin heiger once asked whether birds fly because they have wings or have wings because they fly the question seems silly but it offers an original point of entry for reflection on technology and development Birds appear to be equipped with wings and it is this that explains their ability to fly this is the obvious Common Sense answer to haider's question question but the answer has implications that are less than obvious Although our intuitions tell us Birds belong in the air our language seems to

say that they are separate from the environment on which they act and even separate from the equipment they use to cope with the environment Birds use wings to fly in something like the way in which we humans use airplanes pursuing the analogy we could say that if Birds did not have wings they would be just as Earthbound as were humans before the Wright brothers invented the airplane but this makes no sense although there are a few species of flightless birds most birds could not survive without flying flying is not just something birds do it is

their very being a better analogy to bird's flight would be human speech although speechless humans do exist they lack an essential aspect of what it is to be human speech is not properly understood as a tool humans use to communicate because without it they are not fully human speech like flight for Birds is essential in a way that tools are not one can pick up and put down a tool but humans can no more abandon speech than birds can abandon flight push to the extreme the common sense answer to heyer's puzzling question breaks down of

course we usually do not fall into such absurdities when talking about animals but the misleading implications of ordinary language do reflect our inadequate Common Sense understanding of Technology this has consequences I will discuss in the rest of this paper heer's second option that birds have wings because they fly challenges us in a different way it seems absurd on the face of it how can birds fly unless they have wings so flying cannot be the cause of wings unless an effect can precede a cause if we are going to make any sense of haider's point we

need to reformulate it in less paradoxical language here's what he really means Birds belong to a specific niche in the environment that Niche consists of Treetops in which to dwell insects to eat and so on it is only available to a specific type of animal with a specific type of body flying as a necessary property of an organism that occupies this particular Niche requires Wings rather than the other way around as common sense would have it this is a holistic conception of the relation of the animal to its environment we are not to think of

birds insects and trees as fully separate things but rather as forming a system in which each relates essentially to the other but this is not an organic hole the parts of which are so intimately connected they can only be separated by destroying the organism in the case of an animal and its Niche separation is possible at least temporarily although it threatens the survival of the animal and perhaps of other elements of its environment dependent on it these relationships are a bit like those of the parts of a machine to the whole machine the part can

be separated from the whole but then it loses its function a tire that has been removed from a car continues to be a tire but it cannot do the things tires are meant to do following haer's thought it is easy to see that the form and even the existence of tires such as we know them depends on the whole car they are destined to serve and the reciprocal also holds car and tire are mutually interdependent the car is not just assembled from pre-existing Parts since the nature of the parts is derived from the design of

the car and vice versa the car does not ride on the road because it has tires rather the tires belong to the car because the car rides on the road I will call this the Paradox of the parts in the hole here it is the apparent origin of complex holes lies in their parts but paradoxical though it seems in reality the parts find their origin in the hole to which they belong I want to illustrate this Paradox with two images Each of which exemplifies the two an answers to haider's question in graphic terms the first

of these images shows a carburetor in a manufacturer's catalog the one on on your left as you can see it is a Wonder of sharp edged surfaces and smooth Curves in cold shiny steel it is completely separate from its environment and fulfills the dream of reason the dream of pure order now look at this second image by the painter Walter merch we are once again in the presence of a carburetor but this time it is portrayed as a warm and fuzzy object that blurs into the air around it it is compared subtly with a sprouting

onion over to the left you see the onion which establishes a scale that contradicts its strangely Monumental aspect this is a romantic rather than a rationalistic image it hints at the history and the connectedness of the thing rather than emphasizing its engineering Perfection which image is truer to life I prefer merchesi used as cover art for a book called questioning technology merch sets us thinking about Technology's complexity questioning it the environment in which it functions the history out of which it arises rather than answering the question in advance with a nod to its supposedly pure

rationality of course you can you can see why the manufacturer preferred that picture to this one but uh it's not necessarily a good philosophical uh argument examples that confirm the point are easy to find a technology imported or imitated from a developed country is implanted in a new environment in a less developed country it is expected that it will perform in the same way everywhere that it is not a local phenomenon B bound up with a particular hisory and environment in this respect Technologies differ from such rooted phenomena as Customs or language different difficult though

it be to transfer Western industrial technology to a poor country it is far easier than importing such things as a different Cuisine or different relations between men and women or a different language so we say that technology is universal in contrast to these particular and local features and and this is usually correct to a considerable extent of course it makes no sense to send tractors to Farmers who have no access to gasoline such gross mistakes are occasionally made but for Mo the most part the problems are more subtle and are often overlooked for a long

time for example industrial pollutants that were evacuated safely by a good sewage system in a rich country May poison wells in a new much poorer local differences in culture to pose problems the keyboards of the typewriters and computers Japan imported from the West could not represent its written language before a technical adaptation was found some Japanese concluded that modernization would require the adoption of English good suwage systems and Roman alphabets form a niche essential to the proper functioning of these Technologies just like the water in which fish swim Technologies res resemble animals in belonging to

a specific niche in a specific Society they do not work well if at all outside that context but the fact that Technologies can be detached from their appropriate Niche means they can be imported without bringing along all the contextual NE elements necessary for their proper functioning Technologies can be plucked from the environment in which they originated and dropped into a new environment without afterthoughts but this can be a formula for disaster consider the adoption of the private automobile by China as a primary means of transportation in February 2009 Auto Sales in China surpassed those in

the United States for the first time China is now the largest market for private cars in the world this is not surprising given the size of China's population but that very for that very reason it was foolish to commit so many re resources to the automobile automobiles are a very inefficient means of transportation they consume a great deal of fuel for every passenger mile driven China is so big that its participation in oil markets will eventually push the price of oil up to the point where the private automobile will be unaffordable to operate meanwhile China

will have built its cities around Automotive Transportation with consequences that can be very expensive to reverse mistakes such as this occur because policy makers fail to realize the dependence of the parts on the whole in this they resemble ordinary people everywhere in modern societies our Common Sense misleads us into imagining that Technologies can stand alone so why do we think like this here's our second Paradox why does common sense tend to validate the first of the two images I have presented I find the answer to these questions in another Paradox which I will call the

Paradox of the obvious here is a general formulation what is most obvious is most hidden an amusing coraly dramatizes the point fish do not know that they are wet now I may be wrong about fish but I suspect that the last thing they think about is the medium of their existence water the niche to which they are so perfectly adapted a fish out of water quickly dies but it is difficult to imagine fish enjoying a bath water is what fish take for granted just as we humans take air for granted we know that we are

wet because water is not our natural element it exists for us in contrast to air but like fish who do not know they are wet we do not think about the air we breathe we have many other experiences in which the obvious withdraws from View for example when we watch a movie we quickly lose sight of the screen as a screen we forget that all the action takes place in the same spot at a certain distance in front of us on a flat surface a spectator unable to ignore the obvious would fail to foreground the

action of the film and would remain disturbingly conscious of the screen the medium recedes into the background and what we notice in the foreground are the effects it makes possible this explains why we see the possession of wings as the adequate explanation of flying and why it looks to us like machines are composed of independent Parts I just had an experience with a screen that REM this reminds me of if you go to Avatar and watch it in 3D you'll observe the following peculiar fact about what you're seeing in this room if I look at

something close and then look at something far my eye the focus of my eye adjusts instantly and I'm not aware aware that while I'm looking at this you're out of focus and vice versa but when you are watching avatar the 3D images are fixed your eye can't change the focus of the background so at first you tend to look you see what's that in the background but it stays just as blurry and suddenly you're reminded that you're watching a screen that it isn't real yeah even um even though if you just stick keep your eyes

on the foreground it really does look quite real okay so this brings us then to a third Paradox which I'll call the Paradox of the origin too bad you can't quite make out what's in the background it's a it says Exit in the background it's that sign the Paradox of the origin our forgetfulness also blinds us to the history of technical objects these objects differ from ordinary things and people in the way they relate to time this person that book The the tree behind our house all have a past and that past can be read

on his wrinkled and smiling face the doged pages of the book the stump of the branch that broke from the tree in the last storm in such cases the presence of the past in the present seems to us unremarkable but Technologies seem disconnected from their past we usually have no idea where they came from how they developed the conditions under which the decisions were made that determined their features they seem self-sufficient in their rational functioning an adequate explanation of Any Given device appears to consist in tracing the causal connections between its parts in reality there

is just as much history to an electric toaster or a nuclear power plant as there is to person's books and trees no device emerged full-blown from the logic of its functioning every process of development is fraught with contingencies choices alternative possibilities the perfecting of the technical object obliterates the traces of the labor of its construction and the social forces that were in play as its design was fixed it is this process that adjusts the object to its Niche and so the occlusion of its history contributes to the forgetfulness of the whole to which it belongs

I call this the Paradox of the origin behind everything rational there lies a for gotten history here is an example with which we are all familiar what could be more rational than the lighted exit signs and outward opening doors in theaters yet in the United States these simple life-saving devices were not mandated by any law or regulation until the famous iroy theater fire in Chicago in 1903 some 600 people died trying to find and get out of the exits thereafter cities all over the the country introduced strict safety regulations today we do not take much

notice of exit signs and doors and certainly few theater goers have an idea of their origin I suspect that none of you knew about the iroy theater fire of 1903 um I didn't either until I looked it up we think if we think at all that they are that exit signs are surely there as a useful precaution but the history shows that this is not the full explanation it can contingent fact a particular incident lies behind the logic of theat design so there's a corollary of the Paradox of the origin I call this fourth Paradox

the Paradox of the frame and formulated as follows efficiency does not explain success success explains efficiency this is counterintuitive our Common Sense tells us that Technologies succeed because they are good at doing their job efficiency is the measure of their worth and explains why they are chosen from among the many possible Alternatives but the history of Technology tells a different story often at the beginning of a line of development none of the Alternatives work very well by the standards of a later time when one of them has enjoyed many generations of innovation and Improvement when

we look back from the standpoint of the improved device we are fooled in into thinking its obvious superiority explains its success but that superiority results from the original choice that privileged the successful technology over the Alternatives and not vice versa so what does explain that choice why do we ride bicycles with two wheels the same size instead of weird things like that again the history of Technology helps it shows that many different criteria are applied by the social actors who have the power to to make the choice sometimes economic criteria Prevail sometimes technical criteria such

as the fit of the device with other Technologies in the environment sometimes social or political requirements of one sort or another in other words there is no general rule under which the paths of development can be explained explanation by efficiency is a little like explaining the presence of pictures in a museum by the fact that they all have frames of course all Technologies must be more or less efficient but that does not explain why they are present in our technical environment in each case only a study of the contingent circumstances of success and failure tells

the true story this brings me to my fifth Paradox which I call the Paradox of action I think of this as a metaphoric Cory of Newton's third law Newton's law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction this law is verified every time two billiard balls bounce off each other my corollary applies this model to human behavior it is it most obviously applies in interpersonal relations where anger evokes anger kindness kindness and so on every one of our acts returns to us in some form as feedback from the other but this

means that in acting we become the object object of action in more formal philosophical language the Paradox of action says that human beings can only act on a system to which they belong because we belong to the system any change we make in it affects us too this is the Practical significance of our existence as embodied and social beings through our body and our social belonging we participate in a world of causal powers and meanings we do not fully control control we are exposed through our body to the laws of nature and we are born

into a cultural world we largely take as given in short we are finite beings our finitude shows up in the Newtonian reciprocity of action and reaction but technical action appears to be non- neonian an exception to the rule of reciprocity when we act technically on an object there seems to be very little feedback to us certainly nothing proportionate to our impact on the object but this is an illusion the illusion of technique it blinds us to three reciprocities of technical action these are causal side effects of Technology changes in the meaning of our world and

changes in our identity it is only when we narrowly Define the relevant zone of action that we appear to be independent of the objects on which we act in context technical action always conforms to my version of Newton's law and comes back to affect the actor the illusion of Independence arises from the nature of technical action which dissipates or defers causal feedback from the object indeed the whole point of technology is to change the world more than the actor it is no accident that the gun harms the rabbit but not the hunter that the hammer

transforms the stack of lumber but not the carpenter tools are designed designed to focus power outward on the world while protecting the tool user from that equal and opposite reaction Newton proclaimed but Newton cannot be defied for long in one way or another the reaction will manifest itself in the case of pollution all one need do to identify the reaction is to enlarge the context in time and space and wait for the chickens to come home to roost Barry commoner's ecological coraly of Newton's Law declares that quote everything goes somewhere end quote in other words

all the poisons introduced uh by industry are going to end up in someone's backyard even if it takes years to notice as technology grows more powerful its negative side effects become more difficult to avoid and finally it is impossible to ignore the dangers they create this observation brings us back to our first three paradoxes the Paradox of the Parts in the whole states the importance of Niche or context that Niche must include a way of absorbing the impact of the technology including its waste products but attention to this aspect of technology is obscured by a

narrow conception of technical action the Paradox of the obvious works against recognizing this connection the feedback that is invisible in the immediate zone of action becomes visible when a wider or longer Range View is available the Paradox of the origin wipes the Slate clean and obscures the history in which past feedback influenced Current Designs in modern society Technologies are perceived as purely instrumental and separate from their past also and separate from their past and from the environment in which they function and their operator like those wings that cause birds to fly but these apparent separations

hide essential aspects ofch technology as we have seen I have called this principle the illusion of Technology this illusion is less of a problem in traditional societies there craft knowledge and everyday experience are in constant communication the lessons learned from using technical devices are absorbed into the craft tradition where they limit and control technical activity from a modern standpoint this appears to be an obstacle to development but there may be wisdom in Restraint certainly our recent experience with Technologies such as nuclear weapons and toxic chemicals indicate a need for restraint but this is not the

way most technology in modern societies has developed under capitalism control of technology is no longer in the hands of Craftsmen but is transferred to the owners of Enterprise capitalist Enterprise is unusual among social institutions and having a very narrow goal profit and the freedom to pursue that goal without regard for consequences once technology has been delivered over to such an institution the lessons of experience are ignored workers users of Technology victims of its side effects all are silenced throughout the industrialization process technological development can proceed without regard for the mo more remote aspects of its

own context this makes possible the development of sophisticated technical disciplines and very rapid progress but with unfortunate side effects in communist countries this same pattern prevailed under government control where the goal assigned to State Enterprises meeting a quota was similarly narrow instead of correcting the illusion of Technology modern societies take that illusion for reality they imagine they can act on the world without consequences for themselves but only God can act on objects from outside the world outside the system on which he acts all Human Action including technical action exposes the actor the illusion of Godlike

power is dangerous when Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the explosion of the first atom bomb a quotation from the bhavat Gita flashed through his mind here's the quote I have become death the shatterer of Worlds but Sunni was attempting to negotiate disarmament with Moscow he realized that the shatterer could be shattered presumably Shiva the god of death does not have to worry about the Russians our actions not only come back to us through causal feedback they also change the meaning of our world the most dramatic examples of such transformations of meaning occur around new technologies of transportation

and communication railroads and later Automobiles and airplanes have radically diminished the experience of distance regions once remote were suddenly made close by these Technologies the spatial coordinates of Our Lives what we mean by far and near are completely different from what it was for all Humanity throughout previous history added to these changes electronic communication has radical consequences as a multicultural World gradually emerges from the monocultures of old Ordinary People now know more about foreign lands and cultures from movies encounters with immigrants and tourism than all but a few adventurers and Colonial administrators a century ago

what is more such familiar distinctions as those between public and private work and home are subverted as new technology brings the office into the domestic space and extrudes creative activities and private fantasies into public Arenas even the meaning of nature is subject to technological transformation take amniocentesis for example it allows the sex of the fetus to be identified early in pregnancy relatively few parents abort fetuses because of their sex but the fact that they can do so at all transforms an act of God into a human Choice what formerly was a matter of luck can

now be planned even choosing not to use the information has become a choice in favor of nature whereas before no choice was involved you had to have names for both a boy and a girl our society is now capable of technologizing reproduction and has thus changed its meaning for everyone even for those who do not use the technology okay so this leads me to another Paradox the Paradox of action also holds in the case of identity the hunter kills a rabbit with his gun and all he feels is a little pressure from the kickback of

the weapon but the rabbit is dead there is an obvious disproportion between the effect of the action on the actor and his object but the action does have significant consequences for the hunter his identity is determined by his axe that is to say he is a hunter in so far as he hunts this reverse action of Technology on identity is true of everyone's productive activity in some you are what you do consumer Society has brought the question of identity to the four in another way the Technologies we use in daily life such as automobiles iPods

mobile phones signify us as the kind of people we are we now wear our Technologies just as we wear clothes jewelry and other for forms of self-presentation today not only are you what you do but even more emphatically you are what you use these observations suggest a sixth Paradox of the means which follows directly from the Paradox of action and here's the formulation the means are the end there's a weaker version of this Paradox with which everyone is familiar it is obvious that means and ends are not completely separate Common Sense tells us not to

expect much good to come from using bad means even if the ends we have in view are benign but my formulation is more radical the point is not that means and ends are related but they are in fact one and the same over a wide range of technological issues by this I mean that the changes in meaning and identity discussed above are often the most important effect of technological change and not if ostensible purpose consider the example of the automobile again automobile ownership involves far more than Transportation it symbolizes the owner's status in poor countries

it has an even greater symbolic charge than in rich ones signifying the achievement of modernity and its vision of a rich and fulfilling life you'll be interested to know that the hmer belonged to General Motors before General Motors went bankrupt that and when they went bankrupt guess who they sold it to a Chinese company so it cannot be said that in such cases means and ends are separate possession of the means is already an end in itself because identity is at stake in the relation to technology this brings me to a seventh Paradox of complexity

which can be succinctly stated as simplification complicates this Corel area of the Paradox of action flows from the nature of Technology as we have seen Technologies can be removed from their context and transferred to alien locals but more profoundly considered technology is in some sense already decontextualized even before it is transferred even in its normal setting by this I mean that creating a technology involves abstracting the useful aspects of materials from their natural connections this constitutes a radical simplification of those materials so radical in fact that it must be compensated by a recontextualization in a

new technological Niche where we find them transformed in a finished and working device but the recontextualization Is Not always completely successful here's an example to make the paper on which this lecture is printed trees were removed from their place in the Ecology of the forest as they were reduced to simplified raw materials they were then transformed to become useful in a new context the context of contemporary writing practices that new context brought with it all sorts of constraints such as size thickness compatibility with current printers and so on WE recognize the paper as belonging to

this new context but the process of decontextualizing and recontextualizing Technical objects sometimes results in unexpected problems in the case in point paper making employs dangerous chemicals and its poorly regulated Pursuit causes air pollution and harm to rivers and their inhabitants that's an example in some in simplifying technological projects such as paper making produce new complications this is why context matters ignorance of context is especially prevalent in developing countries that receive a great deal of transferred technology blindness to the context and consequences is the rule in such cases Technologies adapted to One World disrupt another world

these complications become the occasion for popular reactions and protests as they impinge on the health and well-being of ordinary people this proposition is tested over and over in one developing Society after another we frequently read now about riots in China over pollution problems where popular reaction leads to correctives sorry where popular reaction leading to correctives is effectively suppressed as it was in the Soviet Union the consequences of development can be catastrophic severe chemical pollution of the air water and soil extensive radioactive contamination and declining fertility and life expectancy as it grows more powerful and pervasive

technology becomes more and more difficult to insulate U from I'm sorry as it grows more powerful and pervasive it becomes more and more difficult to insulate technology from feedback from the underlying population workers users victims and potential victims all have their say at some point their feedback provoked by maladaptation negative side effects or unrealized technical potential leads to interventions that constrain development and Orient its path once mobilized to protect themselves protesters attempt to impose the lessons of experience with Technologies on the technical experts who possess the knowledge necessary to build working devices in a modern

society it appears superficially that two separate things technical knowledge and everyday experience interact in a clash of opposites technical experts sometimes decry what they think of as ideological interference with their pure objective knowledge of nature they protest that values and desires must not be allowed to muddy the Waters of fact and Truth protesters may make the corresponding error and denounce the experts in general while nevertheless employing their technology constantly in everyday life I'm used to this from people who study the internet as I do and who take airplanes to conferences where they denounce technology but

but in fact technical knowledge and experience are complimentary rather than opposed technical knowledge is incomplete without the input from experience that corrects its oversights and simplifications public protests indirectly reveal the complications unintentionally caused by those simplifications for example aspects of nature so far overlooked by the experts protests work by formulating values and priorities the demand for such things as safety Health skilled employment recreational resources aesthetically pleasing cities testified to the failure of technology to adequately incorporate all the constraints of its environment eventually those values will be incorporated into improved technical designs and the conflict between

the public and its experts will die down indeed in years to come the technical experts will forget the politics behind the reforms uh that they made in designs and when new demands appear those experts will defend them as a product of pure and objective knowledge of a nature values cannot enter technology without being translated into technological language simply wishing away inconvenient technical limitations will not work the results of such a voluntaristic approach are disastrous as the Chinese discovered in the cultural revolution for something useful to come out of public interventions experts must figure out how

to formulate values as viable technical specifications when that is accomplished a new version of the contested Technologies can be produced that is responsive to its context in the process values are translated into technical facts and Technology fits more smoothly into its Niche the structure of this process is a consequence of a technology cut cut off to a considerable extent from the experience of those who live with it and use it but the experience of users and victims of Technology eventually influences the technical codes that preside over design early examples emerge in the labor movement around

health and safety at work later such issues as food safety and environmental pollution signal the widening circle of affected publics today as we have seen such interactions are becoming routine and new groups emerge frequently as worlds change in response to technological change this overall Dynamic of technological change closes the circle described in the Paradox of action as we say in Southern California what goes around comes around and because we have experience and are capable of reflecting on it we can change our Technologies to safeguard ourselves and to support the new activities they make possible sometimes

the problem is not the harm technology does but the good it might do if only it were configured to meet unmet demands this case is exemplified by the internet it was created by the US military to test a new type of network computer time sharing but a graduate student came up with the idea of networking not only the computers but also the users and introduced email since then one generation of users after another has developed an explored new ideas for social interaction on the internet homepages were followed by web forums and web fors by social

sites dedicated to music sharing and photography these sites were integrated into blogs and now social sites such as Myspace and Facebook have emerged pulling together many social resources at each stage programmers have worked to accommodate the new demands of users with the corresponding Technical Solutions this is a process repeated endlessly as Technologies develop this leads to my eighth Paradox which I will call H the Paradox of value and fact values are the facts of the future values are not the opposite of facts subjective desires with no basis in reality values Express aspects of reality that

have not yet been incorporated into the taken from granted technical environment that environment was shaped by the values that presided over its creation Technologies are the crystallized expression of those values new values open up established Technologies for revision okay so this brings us to the ninth Paradox we're reaching the end social groups form around the technologies that mediate their relation ations make possible their common identity and shape their experience we all belong to many such groups some are defined social categories and the salience of technology to their experience is obvious a worker in a factory

a nurse in a hospital a truck driver in his truck are all members of communities that exist through the Technologies they employ consumers and victims of side effects of Technology form latent groups that surface when their members become aware of the shared reasons for their problems the politics of Technology grows out of these technical mediations that underly the many social groups that make up modern society such encounters between the individuals and the technologies that connect them proliferate with consequences of All Sorts social identities and worlds emerge together and form the backbone of modern society in

the technology studies literature this is called the the co-construction of technology and Society the examples cited here show this co-construction resulting in ever tighter feedback loops like the drawing hands in MC escher's famous print of that name you can see the print behind the text I want to use this image to discuss the underlying structure of the technology Society relationship eer self-drawing hands are emblematic of the concept of the strength Loop or entangled hierarchy introduced by Douglas hofstader in his book girdle eer Bach the strange Loop arises when moving up or down a logical hierarchy

leads paradoxically back to the starting point a logical hierarchy in this sense can include a relationship between actors and their objects such as seeing and being seen talking and listening the active side stands at the top of the hierarchy and the passive side at the bottom in the eer print the Paradox is Illustrated in a visible form the hierarchy of drawing subject and drawn object is entangled by the fact that each hand plays both functions with respect to the other if we say that the hand on the right is at the top of the hierarchy

drawing the hand on the left we come up against the fact that the hand on the left draws the hand on the right and so is also located at the top level thus neither hand is at the top or both are which is contradictory on H's terms the relation between technology and Society is an entangled hierarchy in so far as social groups are constituted by the technical links that associate their members their status is that of the drawn object in eer scheme but they react back on those links in terms of their experience drawing that

which draws them once formed and conscious of their identity technologically mediated groups influence technical design through their choices and protest this feedback from society to technology constitutes the Democratic Paradox and here here's the formulation the public is constituted by the technologies that bind it together but in turn it transforms the technologies that constituted neither Society nor technology can be understood in isolation from each other because neither has a stable Identity or form this Paradox is endemic to democracy in general self-rule is an entangled hierarchy as the French Revolutionary sanjust put it quote the people is

a submissive Monarch and a free subject end quote over the centuries since the Democratic Paradox was first enacted its reach has extended from basic political issues of civil order and defense to embrace social issues such as marriage education and Health Care the process of extending democracy to technology began with a labor movement it called attention to the contradiction between Democratic ideology and the tyranny of the factory this was the first expression of a politics of Technology at a time when technical mediation was still confined to a single sector of society it's in the 19th century

the dream of control of the economy by those who build it with their brains and hands has never been fully realized but today around the many issues raised by technology something very like that dream is revived in new forms those who demand environmentally compatible production a medical system more responsive to patient needs a free and public internet and many other Democratic reforms of Technology following the footsteps of the Socialist movement whether they know it or not they are broadening Democratic claims to cover the whole social terrain incorporated into the technological system H's scheme has a

limitation that does not apply in the case of Technology the strange Loop is never more than a partial sub subsystem in a consistent objectively conceived universe according to hofstatter hofstatter evades Ultimate Paradox by positing an invi level of strictly Hier hierarchical relations above the strange Loop that it makes possible he calls this level inviolet because it is not logically entangled with the entangled hierarchy it creates in the case of the eer drawing the Paradox only exists because of the UNP paradoxical activity of the actual print maker eer who drew it in the ordinary way without

himself being drawn by anybody the notion of an inviolet level has its place in logic but not in the life of a technological Society in fact the illusion of technique is precisely defined by this notion this illusion gives rise to the popular belief that through technology we conquer nature but human beings are natural beings and so the project of Conquest is inherently paradoxical this 10th Paradox of Conquest was succinctly formulated in another context by F Scott f Gerald V Gerald said the victor belongs to the spoils end quote the Conqueror of nature is despoiled by

its own violent assault this Paradox has two implications on the one hand when Humanity conquers nature it merely arms some human beings with more effective means to exploit and and oppress others human beings As Natural beings are among the conquered subject on the other hand as we have seen actions that harm the natural environment come back to haunt the perpetrators in the form of pollution or other negative feedback from the system to which both conqueror and conquered belong in some the things we do as a society to Nature are also things we do to ourselves

in reality there is no inviolet level no equivalent of eer in the real world of co-construction no Godlike agent creating technology and Society from the outside all the creative activity takes place in a world that is itself created by that activity only in our fantasies do we transcend the strange Loops of technology and experience in the real world There Is No Escape From the logic of finitude the 10 paradoxes of Technology 10 paradoxes form a philosophy of technology that is remote from current views but corresponds more nearly to experiences we have with increasing frequency in

rich countries the internet and the environment are the two domains in which the paradoxes are most obviously at work the many disorders of development illustrate their relevance in the rest of the world everywhere technology reveals its true complexity as it emerges from the cultural ghetto in which it was confined until recently today technological issues routinely appear on the front pages of the newspapers fewer and fewer people imagine they can be left to The Experts to decide this is the occasion for the radical change in our understanding of Technology the institutionalized abstractions of the corporations and

the technical professions are no longer the only standpoint from which to understand technology now it is more and more in the foreground of our everyday activities and provokes renewed philosophical reflection okay so that's the end um I'd be happy to respond to questions now and uh also if you want to email me to emails you might find some interesting things on my web page where there's a good deal of material on technology so first question all right any questions uh so we have a mic um and we're web streaming this so if you could use

the microphone for so I can see I mean this is one way to look at these things you know things that seem separate but they're together as part of a whole what I'm what I'm not seeing is a kind of a I don't know a evolutionary approach or idea that would give a sense of where any of where any of these things are going in terms of certain Technologies today for for example with the birds and their wings it's it seems like you could Bounce Around inside your own head on which uh the flying or

the wings which is for the the other but if you think of in terms of you know what's advantageous then it makes sort of a satisfying explanation of why most of the birds around here can fly and a lot of them in New Zealand uh lost that ability you know for uh because there weren't land animals and so on so but I mean it seems like I'm looking for some kind of an explanation like that in terms of I don't know modern biotechnology or something where's that going to Well we'd like to have that kind

of explanation of social events because we are really happy to have that kind of explanation of GE geological biological events I had a slide showing complexity uh I'm not sure that we can really expect that kind of explanation in the case of social Evolution we have to tell the story it's history rather than Natural Science we have to tell the story to find out what contingent circumstances oriented development so for example the whole development of production technology from the 19th century down to the present has been oriented by the problems of maintaining control of production

in capitalist Enterprise it might look quite different had guilds somehow transformed themselves into Collective owners of manufacturing and workers controlled Cho technological choices from the that's a that's a phenomenon in the in society right it's not a technological matter it's a social matter which comes to influence uh the course the path of technological development and I think that's generally the case the recent explosion of study in Te uh in sociology and history of Technology seems to show everywhere we're finding contingent uh causes in non-technical domains that oriented the decisions made about technology that's why I

didn't offer such an explanation there any other questions uh thank you for your talk I I really appreciated the uh framing of these issues in terms of the Paradox I think it encapsulates quite a few really significant um implications the one that the Paradox that I deal with every day in in my own area of research and technology is the one that uh we seem to have opposing effects of Technology one that simplifies and degrades uh a previous Pro uh process and one that extends and uh seems to lead us into new territories right of

Human Experience or perception and perhaps social implication so I wondered I keep wondering if there's a relationship between that formulation that I just gave and the formulations you gave if they relate to it or extend it or just simply could be subsumed by some of your paradoxes stopped at 10 would you like 11 I I started with three I think and it gradually grew and when I reached 10 I figured no this that's it um but that is a that is OB obviously another kind of paradox I'm not sure how to subsume it you could

say that it's part of the simplification complicates right it's a it's not the not a bad effect but a good effect of complication and I could incorporate it there um because it is true that um that often simplifying for example the internet we all use it to communicate the communication process simplifies us we no longer present ourselves in our clothes and you know tone of voice and so on we just present a little text that's a radical simplification which complicates in an interesting way not in a bad way makes it possible to Main maintain contact

with people all over the world so on so yeah that could could fit there I was thinking because you were here that there is still a lot of craft technology especially in domains like music and the communication between the technical experts and the U experience of people who use technology is still very close very it's very different from what happens in the industrial sector Ju Just unfortunately does not structure our social world to the same extent that industry does are there any other questions NOP if not uh let's thank our speaker one more time thank

you [Applause] greenber