Techno-demonology

A summary of:
Szerszynski, B. (2006). Techno-demonology: Naming, Understanding and Redeeming the A/Human Agencies with Which We Share Our World. Ecotheology, 11.1, pp. 57-75.

This paper is incredibly interesting. It attempts to understand the ways in which “technologies increasingly confront us as indifferent or malign agencies” (57). This is what fascinates me: I see technology as being amoral, thus indifferent to our needs and values, and that the more we engage with them (as amoral entities), the more harm it does to us, the more it weakens our sense of morality and confuse our value set.

The author makes an important distinction between two kinds of technologies: “elementals (stoicheia)”, i.e. “technical systems which have become treated as ends in themselves, and have thus started to control human action”, and “powers (dynameis)”, i.e. “technologies whose unanticipated side-effects overwhelm their intended purposes” (57). The difference is that the former can be said to be “in control” and the latter is not (59); or another way of putting it: the former “occurs when technology seems to succeed in securing the future, in imposing certainty on our dealings with nature”; and the latter “manifests itself when it fails to do so” (61). Elementals “take form when basic principles of existence become treated as ends rather than means and used to orient life: when technique becomes such a dominant form of acting and thinking that it becomes an autonomous, self-determining system” (61). Ellul would describe this kind of technology as being ‘self-directing’ (61); and here no one human has much control over steering this process (62). For Ellul, this is when ‘technique’ comes to dominate our lives, seemingly “indifferen[t] to empirical, real human projects and happiness” (62). And in contrast to this, there are times when “technology is experienced not as a deterministic system, but as a capricious agency” (64) – what the author calls dynamis. In this form, it can have consequences no one could have predicted.

The point and the reason for invoking this ‘neologism’ of demonic technology (notably, not dissimilar from Robert W. Daly’s term ‘spectres of technology’ (62)) is that our technologies could be understood as having agency, “as forces which operate in the natural and human world that are neither natural nor under human control” (58). This is not to say, he hastens to add, that this force is inherently evil (58); nor is it not an undefeatable foe (59).

It is important for the author that we contextualize these techno-demons: how do they arise? This has to do with the promise of technology as articulated in his book: “promising to liberate humanity from the contingency and finitude of creaturely existence” (60). It began when we attempted to subjugate techne to logos, and from this technology was understood in “sublime terms” and “became a form of idolatry” (65). The irony is that the “Enlightenment project of delivering humanity from bondage to supernatural agencies… gave form and power to new forms of a/human agency which have come to threaten human freedom” (65). In earlier times, technology was inferior, thus it could not pose much of a danger (65); nor had they any “inherent purpose”, “so could not impose this purpose on their users” (65). Contrast this to now, when the “sublime unconditionedness of modern technological systems thereby allowed them to offer a form of this-worldly salvation by removing uncertainty from human affairs – but a salvation that in practice has arguably subtracted from human freedom as much as it has added” (66). The key here is that in worshiping technology (specifically elementals), we becomes slaves to it.

It’s slightly different with dynamis. These have risen to demons because, as Hannah Arendt argues, “with new technologies the primary mode of activity is not making but acting…, with the effect of increasing rather than decreasing the animacy of matter” (66-7). With new technologies, we are “starting to ‘act’ into nature” (67), and in a sense we are the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

And lastly, while it’s all well and good to understand how these techno-demons came to be, it is far more exciting (and what I want to do once the sociology section of my PhD is nicely polished) to “restore technology to its rightful place in creation” (57). Happily, the author seems to think we have the power to do so! And even more joyfully, he has a cute term for this: “techno-exorcism” (60).

I’ve been meaning to read some of Ellul, having been warned of its opaqueness; for now I’ll settle for this mini summary from Szerszynski in his 2005 bok: “In The Technological Society Jacques Ellul seeks to capture features of this new technological condition – both the way that technology in modern society seems to promise a this-worldly salvation by removing uncertainty from human affairs, and its distinctive, self-reproducing dynamic…. The technical phenomenon (la technique) is a uniquely modern form of making and using artefacts – ‘the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency… in every field of human activity’ (1964: xxv, emphasis in original)” (59).

Here’s what important for right now: “Technology for Ellul is nothing more than a gamble made by modern humanity – the gamble that it would be better or even possible to replace the ‘natural attitude’ towards objects with a technological attitude” (70). But Ellul also does not think that our loss of control of technology was inevitable (70). It was a result of our “voluntary act of idolatry – the elevation of a system or institution to an end in itself” (70). Therefore, “the positive message here is that the development of the practical arts need not lead to a situation where human autonomy is over-mastered by technological elementals” (70). The trick to being “redeemed” is to discover “what Heidegger (1977) called a ‘free’ relation with technology, re-embedding technical systems within non-technical values and purposes” (70).

Wonderful! – this is what I’ve been arguing we need to do!

But there’s more, namely exorcising the dynameis, and it involves, what I am beginning to realize is a culture change, even a behavioral change. The author mentions Ruskin’s Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, in which the storm clouds seemed to be revealing “something of what modern humans were becoming” (17): “Before we can purify the sky, Ruskin was insisting, we must purify ourselves” (71).

There is a chance, the author argues, that the more we come to realize that our “ability to produce effects continues to outstrip our ability to control them” we might become more cautious and take into account unintended consequences in developing technology. I think part of my PhD aims to point out how necessary this pause and reflection is, because I think we have a growing pile of evidence to show that without this stutter-step, we can produce a real mess for ourselves.

Finally, the author argues that we “need to develop new ways of thinking about techne which does not fall into this trap [thinking we are capable of reversing the fall] – to redeem the practical arts by re-embedding them within a larger framework of natural and supernatural flourishing, but also by listening to what they say to us” (72). In this sense, the “techno-demons of risk can also serve as angelic messengers… [by reminding] us of the limits of technical reason” (72). We need to have an epiphany of humility, it would seem. Perhaps then we can get some way toward, not returning to, but recapturing some of what was lost of the non-rationality of matter and “non-technical understandings of human flourishing, incorporating ideas of beauty, justice and contemplation” (66).

And, fascinatingly, the author argues we need to recognize that “technologies ultimately belong to God” as a way of allowing them to play the “redemptive role that they can play in history” (72). To Szerszynski, “the project of democratizing and humanizing modern technological development needs to be understood and approached as a fundamentally theological project” (73). This complicates things slightly for me, because while I suppose I do consider it a spiritual task, framing my PhD as a ‘theological project’ might provoke hostility in the computer science (and design) world.