Technology Out of Control

In: Critical review: an interdisciplinary journal of politics and society, Band 1, Heft 4, S. 24-39

Abstract

A review essay on books by: Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in the Age of High Technology (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1986) & Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977); Stephen F. Goldberg & Charles R. Strain (Eds), Technological Change and the Transformation of America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U Press, 1987); & Joel Colton & Stuart Bruchey (Eds), Technology, the Economy and Society: The American Experience (New York: Columbia U Press, 1987 [see listings in IRPS No. 51]). The issue of technology is critical to social theory because it cannot be raised without stumbling into the paradox of whether artifacts or the people who produce them control social relations. Winner's thesis that technology is autonomous advances dialogue on the subject by making the paradox explicit & laying bare the conceptual confusion that leads into it. He argues that technological systems have inherently political qualities, & advocates the establishment of conscious control over the process of technological evolution. Winner's arguments could also be applied to any product of human culture, with language as the most obvious example. It is argued that humans are inherently incapable of exerting the kind of control over the process of cultural evolution that Winner seems to want. Both Technological Change and the Transformation of America & Technology, the Economy and Society sound the same note as Winner's books; the authors of these essays fall into two categories: technology assessors, who propose the rational assessment of the effects of technological innovation on the total environment; & communitarians, who emphasize that the assessment & adoption of technology must flow from a set of common values. Liberalism is viewed as the real target of the philosophical attack on technology; it is argued that critics of liberalism sense that a freely developing technology is their enemy because it permits cooperation among people whose values, religions, or beliefs are so different that cooperation on any other terms would lead to irreconcilable conflict. F. S. J. Ledgister