Is modern technology inevitable? Does it represent an objective improvement of earlier forms of technology? Do different types of technology all fall under the same category?
There are distinct types of technology, not only particular technologies falling under one and the same concept. Take an indigenous bow and a missile, for example. Putting them under the same concept would be a mistake, as, contrary to what it might seem, they are not two different classes of “weapons.” Also, they do not only reflect two different technological modalities, one rudimentary (is it?) and the other one pretty sophisticated instead (or sophisticated in a different way) combining as it does various technologies into one. They incarnate – they condense and express – two radically-different mindsets and, accordingly, two radically-different, in fact opposed, types of technology.
How can we better appreciate their differences? By noticing, for instance, that the technology in a bow is closer to that at stake in the assemblage formed by a wasp and an orchid in their transversal becoming than it is to the technology of a missile; while the technology of a missile is closer to that implied in the production of a smartphone or StyrofoamTM than to a bow’s. For, in one case, there is no “extractivism” involved: the woods are respected by the indigenous bowmen, who would never put the forest at risk of being damaged by their activity, let alone destroyed by it, as they regard the wood they carefully take from the tree as a living part of a living being with whom they interact and ally in that manner. Whereas to the eyes of those who produce smartphones, missiles, or StyrofoamTM (by the way, is there any difference between these from the point of view of the production of surplus value?), the world exists, literally, to take dominion over it.
It is interesting to observe how this fundamental difference is usually ignored, or overlooked, or deemed insignificant. We are facing here, it would seem, a conceptual region conquered by that thing against which philosophy has never ceased to fight: common sense – the common sense that tells us that, regardless of its fabrication process and its use, a weapon is always a weapon; the common sense that takes us to merely draw advantages from the production of modern technology, or to view its disadvantages as undesirable side effects.
Yet modern technology is a monster grounded on human and other-than-human exploitation. As Sara Nelson and Bruce Braun put it:
Today, in an age in which the human is so clearly entangled with a wider nonhuman milieu, and where political struggles center on these entanglements and the possibilities they hold, . . . it is . . . important that the common be understood as immanent to concrete arrangements of existence/existents. . . . In this context, new . . . politics may be necessary, requiring in particular that we overcome . . . [the left’s] congenital allergy to the “backward” glance of ecology, a retrospection that is often discredited as nostalgia for a better world in the past. We may instead need to “reclaim” old knowledges and practices as part of a pragmatic and experimental politics of commoning, just as we must also take seriously the limits of solidarity in any commoning project. For if the Anthropocene represents the farcical realization of human autonomy in the form of planetary devastation — in which the “production of man by man” appears to lead to his extinction — then we are forced to recognize that while the multitude may be undeniably more-than-human, not all forms of existence will find common ground within it. As one of the challenges of the Anthropocene, we are thus faced with the uncomfortable prospect of deciding which forms of existence may need to be extinguished in order to realize our capacities to be in common, including, perhaps, a particular anthropos that drowns out other possible arrangements of being.
In short, not only modern technology proves to be a monster, it proves to be the creature of another, bigger, monster: the type of human Western culture has produced, a type of human that aims at dominating everything else, a type of human the cosmos can no longer bear.
In turn, Paul Preciado supplies a very complete and rigorous picture of the biopolitical horrors intermeshed with the scientific-technological development of the mid- to late-20th century. Preciado stresses the obscene convergence of the medical, the pharmacological, the military, the mediatic, the educational, the domestic, and the recreational in a sort of “punk capitalism.” From the production and commercialisation of Secobarbital as a “sedative . . . [with] hypnotic properties conceived for the treatment of epilepsy, insomnia, and as an anaesthetic for short surgery” in the 1950s, to its becoming in the 1960s (popularised as “red pill” or “doll”) “one of the drugs of the rock[-and-roll] underground culture,” to its adoption by the state of Oklahoma in the mid-1970s as a pharmaco-chemical model for the “barbiturates . . . to be used for the death penalty”; from the 1960s cyber-tail of Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline’s lab-rat, to the 1980s OncoMouse™, to the $921 million recently invested by the Japanese government (which, of course, is not the only one investing in this of scientific-technological programmes) for transhuman-cyborg research; from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) Network, the military Arpanet of the 1960s, to the 1990s World Wide Web or Internet, to the upcoming Internet of Things (5G)… “punk capitalism” proves to be the final(?) nightmare of human exceptionalism.
None of this means that nature is, in contrast to all of it, a sort of virginal womb. We should be perfectly aware that “nature” (which is already a bad, Western-centric, term) is technological through and through (in the sense that it is made of connections and relational nodes like any technology). But it is not technological in the way modern technology is: its technology is closer to the bow maker’s which remains eco-friendly through and through. And if it is true, on the other hand, that the commonly-held boundaries between what is “natural” and what is not can be rightly questioned, insofar as nature is capable of making many more connections than we assume possible, it is also reasonable and necessary to keep that conceptual divide. Thus, for instance, closed-cell extruded polystyrene foam, or Styrofoam™, could be incorporated to the catalogue of the earth’s “natural” ecosystems… for those bacteria capable of transforming it into degradable plastic, that is. Besides, Styrofoam™ can be said to be an embodiment of human subjectivity, and hence something ultimately belonging in “nature,” since human subjectivity belongs nowhere else… yet at the same it is not autopoietic like we say a plant is. Furthermore, one should not overlook that in the production of StyrofoamTM, or any other synthetic-aromatic-hydrocarbon polymer, something terrible inevitably happens, something that the earth cannot support anymore – as simple as this.
In the last instance, therefore, this fascinating mixture of perspectives and realities – this fascinating complexity – should not make us overlook, however, that in the production of StyrofoamTM, or any other synthetic-aromatic-hydrocarbon polymer, something terrible inevitably happens, something that the earth cannot support anymore – as simple as this.
It is all, then, a question of determining what forms of technology represent a menace to livability (to use Anna Tsing’s term) and of analysing which is the mindset behind each. Affirming that modern technology is inevitable is either an ignorant or a perverse claim.
Image: The Great Pacific (300-mile) Garbage Patch, detail