Quotes from Ch. 4: The Limits of Technical Rationality

According to Weber, modernity is characterized by the increasing role of calculation and control in social life, a trend leading to what he called the "iron cage" of bureaucracy. (75)

This notion of enslavement by a rational order inspires pessimistic philosophies of technology according to which human beings have become mere cogs in the social machinery, objects of technical control in much the same way as raw materials and the natural environment. (75)

While this view is overdrawn, it is true that as more and more of social life is structured by technically mediated organizations such as corporations, state agencies, prisons, and medical institutions, the technical hierarchy merges with the social and political hierarchy. (75)

Modern societies experienced real crises in the late 1960s that marked a turning point in the willingness of the public to leave its affairs in the hands of the experts. (76)

The crux of [my] argument is the claim that technology is ambivalent, that there is no unique correlation between technological advance and the distribution of social power. The ambivalence of technology can be summarized in the following two principles.

1. Conservation of hierarchy: social hierarchy can generally be preserved and reproduced as new technology is introduced. This principle explains the extraordinary continuity of power in advanced capitalist societies over the last several generations, made possible by technocratic strategies of modernization despite enormous technical changes. (This principle explains why there can be no technical "fix" to fundamental social and political injustices.)
2. Democratic rationalization: new technology can also be used to undermine the existing social hierarchy or to force it to meet needs it has ignored. This principle explains the technical initiatives that often accompany the structural reforms pursued by union, environmental, and other social movements. (76)

Faith in progress has been supported for generations by two widely held deterministic beliefs: that technical necessity dictates the path of development, and that that path is discovered through the pursuit of efficiency. (77) I will argue that here that both beliefs are false, and that, furthermore, they have anti-democratic implications. (77)

Determinism thus implies that our technology and its corresponding institutional structures are universal, indeed, planetary in scope. There may be many forms of tribal society, many feudalisms, even many forms of early capitalism, but there is only one modernity and it is exemplified in our society for good or ill. (78)

Thus economic choices are necessarily secondary to clear definitions of both the problems to which technology is addressed and the solutions it provides. But clarity on these matters is often the outcome rather than the presupposition of technical development. For example, MS DOS lost the competition with the Windows graphical interface, but not before the very nature of computing was transformed by a chance in the user base and in the types of tasks to which computers were dedicated. A system that was more efficient for programming and accounting tasks proved less than ideal for secretaries and hobbyists interested in ease of use. Thus economics cannot explain but rather follows the trajectory of development. (79)

• Wonder how this argument is complicated by the fact that Windows runs on top of MS DOS. It's not as though Windows did away with MS DOS...it just made MS DOS invisible...and used in less direct ways than it once was.

Constructivism argues, I think correctly, that the choice between alternatives ultimately depends neither on technical nor economic efficiency, but on the "fit" between devices and the interests and beliefs of the various social groups that influence the design process. What singles out an artifact is its relationship to the social environment, not some intrinsic property. (79)

But what if the various technical solutions to a problem have different effects on the distribution of power and wealth? Then the choice between them is political and the political implications of that choice will be embodied in some sense in the technology. (80)

Determinism ignores these complications and works with decontextualized temporal cross-sections in the life of its objects. It claims implausibly to be able to get from one such momentary configuration of the object to the next on purely technical terms. But in the real world all sorts of attitudes and desires crystallize around technical objects and influence their development. Differences in the way social groups interpret and use the objects are not merely extrinsic but make a difference in the nature of the objects themselves. (80)

In a society where determinism stands guard on the frontiers of democracy, indeterminism is political. If technology has many unexplored potentialities, no technological imperatives dictate the current social hierarchy. Rather, technology, is a site of social struggle, in Latour's phrase, a "parliament of things" on which political alternatives contend. (83)

• Determinism seems just as political--ignoring the human agency in the development of technologies allows for social injustices.

Perhaps the prevalence of such tendentious definitions explains why technology is not generally considered an appropriate field of humanistic study; we are assured that its essence lies in a technically explainable function rather than a hermeneutically interpretable meaning. At most, humanistic methods might illuminate extrinsic aspects of technology, such as packaging and advertising, or popular reactions to controversial innovations such as nuclear power or surrogate motherhood. Of course, if one ignores most of its connections to society, it is no wonder technology appears to be self-generating. Technological determinism draws its force from this attitude. (83; emphasis added)

These three points thus establish the legitimacy of applying the same methods to technology that are employed to study social institutions, customs, beliefs, and art. With such a hermeneutic approach, the definition of technology expands to embrace its social meaning and its cultural horizon. (84)

Technical design responds not only to the social meaning of individual technical objects, but also incorporates broader assumptions about social values. The cultural horizon of technology therefore constitutes a second hermeneutic dimension. It is one of the foundations of modern forms of social hegemony. As I will use the term, hegemony is domination so deeply rooted in social life that it seems natural to those it dominates. One might also define it as the aspect of the distrubution of social power which has the force of culture behind it. (86)

When one looks at old photos of child factory workers, one is struck by the adaptation of machines to their height (Newhall, 1964: 140). The images disturb us, but were no doubt taken for granted until child labor became controversial. Design specifications simply incorporated the sociological fact of child labor into the structure of devices. The impress of social relations can be traced in the technology. (86-7)

Technological regimes reflect this social decision unthinkingly, as is normal, and only social scientific invenstigation can uncover the source of the standards in which it is embodied. (88)

Why aren't we more aware of the public interventions that have shaped technology in the past? Why does it appear apolitical? It is the very success of these interventions that gives rise to this illusion. Success means that technical regimes change to reflect interests excluded at earlier stages in the design process. But the eventual internalization of these interests in design masks their source in public protest. The waves close over forgotten struggles and the technologists return to the comforting belief in their own autonomy which seems to be verified by the conditions of everyday technical work. (89)

But in reality technical professions are never autonomous; in defending their traditions, they actually defend the outcomes of earlier controversies rather than a supposedly pure technical rationality. Informal public intervention is thus already an implicit factor in design whatever technologists and managers may believe. (89)

• Is this always the case? Does all technology necessarily stem from these controversies?

If [technologists] have succeeded in incorporating public concerns in the past, why reject participation on principle today? However, even if the democratic position is granted this much, it is still possible to argue that participation has unreasonable costs. Thus the autonomy thesis still has another leg to stand on. This is the notion that technical rationality can supply the most efficient solution to economic problems when it suffers the least interference. (92)

Many would [claim] that public involvement in technology risks slowing progress to a halt, that democratization and environmental reform are tantamount to Luddite reaction. (92)

But it is a good question where the "irrationality" lay, in the government and utility industries which pushed for impracticable goals or in the public which called them to account out of unverified fears. (93)