CCS - Techno-Utopianism
Techno-Utopianism
“Keep on flying says Blair – Science will save the planet”
The Guardian, Tuesday, 9th January 07
This headline caught my eye from the news-stand yesterday. Science and Technology are once again being asked to save us from ourselves and deliver us to a gleaming future, in this case one of super efficient planes allowing government ministers to fly round the globe just as much as they wish. I see this strand of Techno-Utopianism around in the world more and more, providing the easy answers to a world many of us feel increasingly uneasy living in.
I noticed two adverts in particular that have been everywhere recently. The TV adverts for Honda’s new ‘More Forwards Please’ campaign features an astounding little robot wandering gracefully around a technology museum while the accompanying posters show a progression of different versions of the final, toddler size robot, from an awkward looking contraption to the TV ad model, smooth and sophisticated, like an I-pod robot. Honda aren’t selling robots, they’re selling the dream of technological progress. By buying Honda you’re buying a bit of the dream; technology will deliver you ever cleaner, more beautiful, more efficient cars. Taking a very different line, AOLs ‘What do you think?’ campaign was one of the more thought-provoking and intelligent adverts of recent years. One TV advert argued that ‘The Internet is a good thing’ and another illustrated its potential for misuse, with the same question being asked at the end of both. So, one shows children researching their school projects online while the other gives us a glimpse of the filming of exploitative porn for the web. The advertisers realized they don’t need to actually ‘sell’ the internet; everyone has a fair idea how it can be used and misused, no-one holds AOL or any of the service providers responsible for Al-Qaeda’s online recruitment drives. These days the net just ‘is’, it’s as ubiquitous as the air. The answer to the question ‘what do you think [about the internet]?’ is of course ‘it’s as good or bad as the people who use it’. The adverts were so clever because they encouraged people to grasp a tricky concept with far reaching consequences for all of us. Technology won’t save us; anything created by man will mirror both the better and worse aspects of human nature.
“Each wave of major technological innovation in the twentieth century, from the automobile to TV to nuclear power "too cheap to meter" to the Internet, has been greeted with wild optimism, but each has brought a slew of unintended consequences. Let us remember our current collective behavior is not sustainable: global climatic integrity is imperiled, biodiversity is plummeting, fisheries are collapsing, etc. We are so far not handling it; our civilization is careening out of control, and a lot of our ills are technologically induced or exacerbated."
( http://www.garynull.com/Documents/LAPIS/genome.htm)
I found this piece from on an online technology magazine and it is very much the viewpoint I subscribe to; I just don’t believe in a future where science and technology have solved all our direst human and ecological problems. Utopian societies always fail, whether religious or secular they fail because they ignore the fact that you can’t change human nature. It was John Gray’s book Straw Dogs that first opened my eyes to these concepts;
“Those who ignore the destructive potential of new technologies can do so only because they ignore history. Pogroms are as old as Christendom; but without railways, the telegraph and poison gas there could have been no Holocaust. There have always been tyrannies; but without modern means of transport and communication, Stalin and Mao could not have built their gulags. Humanity's worst crimes were made possible only by modern technology.
There is a deeper reason why 'humanity' will never control technology. Technology is not something that humankind can control. It is an event that has befallen the world.”
We are ever more involved with technology, ever more reliant on it and much of its effects have been positive but I think Techno-Utopianism has entered the public consciousness very much over the last few years. Influential thinkers like Richard Dawkins have proposed that Science replace religion as the basis of our hopes for a better tomorrow, but I believe it’s a fatally flawed ideology that distracts us from finding practical solutions to our problems. Surveillance technology won’t mean an end to global terrorism any more then online communities have provided any meaningful substitute for the real communities we had sixty years ago.
posted by nick_gerrard @ 5:36 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home