Quotes from Ch. 6: Democratizing Technology

Technology is power in modern societies, a greater power in many domains than the political system itself. (131)

The legislative authority of technology increases constantly as it becomes more and more pervasive. But if technology is so powerful, why don't we apply the same democratic standards to it we apply to other political institutions? By those standards the design process as it now exists is clearly illegitimate. (131)

Nevertheless, the argument for direct democracy is simple and compelling: representatives substitute themselves for the "people" and pervert their will. True personal freedom and independence can only be realized through active participation. Representation, even at its best, diminishes the citizens by confiscating their agency. (133)

• Not to mention career politicians who are more interested in serving their personal interests (of having a job once their term ends or they're voted out of office) over those of the people they represent. Corruption!!!

The fact that such a [lively] public sphere is, in the context of representative theory, an informal requirement of full democracy leads to a peculiar ambiguity: the constitutional conditions that make public participation possible also protect the privately owned mass media which everywhere substitute themselves for discussion and social action. (133)

Despite its obvious defects, representation is required wherever distances and large populations conspire against direct face-to-face deliberation. (133)

Sclove argues for adjusting technological design to the requirements of strong democratic community. (135)

• Wondering how this would affect technological development. In the abstract, it seems like a good idea--that an informed populace would have an opportunity to offer input on major technological designs that greatly impact their lives. However, does this process occur for all technological innovations? For example, would the new version of the iPhone have to pass democratic approval before it moved forward? Would we vote on prototypes? How would this work?

[Sclove and I] agree that where the public is involved in technological design, it will likely favor advances that enlarge opportunities to participate in the future over alternatives that enhance the operational autonomy of technical personnel. (135)

Popular action in the technical sphere always presupposes a background of accomplishments embodied in specialized knowledge and technical leadership. Technical experts are not chosen by the people, but achieve their position through training and administrative procedures. Past popular action informs their traditions and culture, and insures that they serve many interests in carrying out their professional tasks, but present public participation generally comes from outside technical institutions. (137)

Representation is organized around territorial units which are small enough to reflect common interests that engage the concern and animate the discussions of local citizens. The representative is the bearer of these local concerns, responsible as an individual to the citizens. The representative's duty is to carry a message, to testify for the constituents, either for their real will or the ideal will postulated by the representative on moral or other grounds. (138)

• In an ideal world, yes. But the "ideal will postulated by the representative" is often self-serving, I worry, and this limits how well represented the people actually are.

Design comes to reflect a heritage of properly technical choices biased by past circumstances. Thus in a very real sense, there is a technical historicity; technology is the bearer of tradition that favors specific interests and specific ideas about the good life. (139)

The differentiation of specializations gives specialists the illusion of pure, rational autonomy. This illusion makes a more complex reality. In reality, they represent the interests which presided over the underdetermined technical choices that lie in the past of their profession. The results are eventually embodied in technical codes which in turn shape the training of technical personnel. (139)

Where the individuals deliberate and act in these "local" technical settings, they reenact in the technical domain the very sort of populist participation so prized by advocates of strong democracy when it appears in local geographical settings. True, that deliberation may be highly mediated, and the action may be unexpected from a traditional standpoint, as in the case of consumer boycotts, but these interventions are the equivalent for a technologically advanced society of geographically local action in earlier times. (140)

• "local" technical settings = technological affinity groups?

As Hans Radder writes, "What is at least as important [as 'moral choices, 'adverse side effects,' and 'costs and benefits'] in a normative evaluation of (proposed) technologies is the quality of the natural, personal, and sociocultural world in which the people involved will have to live in order to successfully realize the technologies in questions." (141)

Expertise has historically served class power. The bias in favor of representing the interests of a narrow ruling group is strongly entrenched. An undemocratic technical system can offer privileges to its technical servants that might be threatened by a more democratic system. (143)

The most important means of assuring more democratic technical representation remains transformation of the technical codes and the educational process through which they are inculcated. (143)

Technical decision-making, like state administration, often goes well beyond mere questions of efficiency to shape the social environment and life patterns of the citizens. It too has normative implications and requires legitimating mechanisms based on public inputs if it is to be incorporated into the framework of a modern democracy. These mechanisms must assure its representative character and remove the suspicion that decisions arise in pure arbitrariness or covert interests. (145)

We have other less ambitious models than strong democracy of alternatives to technocratic control, such as the collegial organization of certain professionals. These collegial forms of organization of teachers and physicians have distant roots in the old craft guilds. Like vocational investment in work, collegiality has been replaced by capitalist management practically everywhere and survives only in a few specialized and archaic settings such as universities and hospitals. Even there it is increasingly threatened. Not the essence of technology but the requirements of capitalist economics explain this outcome. (145)

It is not surprising that board membership is ineffective in a society where technical relations in production are uncontested. Indeed, the absence of such contestation is probably a condition for achieving board membership under capitalism. What is perhaps more worrisome is the lack of pressure to democratize public technical institutions in which everyone has a large stake, institutions such as utilities, medicine, and urban planning that are only loosely controlled by elected officials today, if at all. (146)

• What seems to be missing in this chapter is any elaboration on what the democratizing of technology would look like/achieve. Ideally, he seems to be implying that the interests of the masses would be served by technology should it be democratized, but even in these examples he's provided here, I'm not sure I see how giving people a voice in the production of these technologies would make them any better. What kind of voice is he envisioning for people? And what kind of expertise is needed in order to have any understanding of the issues surrounding these various examples? What would democratization look like? What purpose would it serve?

But as Dewey foresaw, the dispersion of the technological citizenry, combined with a privatized culture and a media-dominated public process account for the passivity of a society which has not yet grasped how profoundly affected it is by technology. Only as that realization dawns are citizens likely to demand electoral checks on the policy-making bodies in control of technology. (146)

As distinct from "strong" democracy, I will call a movement for democratization "deep" where it includes a strategy combining the democratic rationalization of technical codes with electoral controls on technical institutions. Such a deep democratization would alter the structure and knowledge base of management and expertise. (147)

• How?

Instead of popular agency appearing as an anomaly and an interference, it would be normalized and incorporated into the standard procedures of technical design. (147)

• How?