On the Mystical Basis of the “Neutrality” of Technology

There is an assumption popular among leftists and other radicals who still feel some attachment to the concept of progress or even to Marxian theoretical constructions that technology, as such, is neutral. The assumption is particularly amusing because those who hold it will accuse the critics of technology of having a mystical and ahistorical conception of it. What these apologists for technology claim is that the critics of technology promote “technological determinism”, making technology the central determining factor in social development, and thus losing sight of the social factor. They end up by proclaiming that the problems do not lie in the technological systems as such but in who manages them and in how they choose to utilize them.

Doubtless, there have been those who have attributed essential determining powers to technology. One of the greatest proponents of this view was Marx, whose economism was decidedly a technological economism. In his perspective, economic necessity created technological developments (such as the early industrial factory) that then created the basis for the supersession of the dominant economic system. Thus, Marx’s economism incorporated a kind of technological determinism as well.
Marx’s fault lies precisely in his determinism (an unavoidable consequence of the fact that his critique of Hegel was limited to turning Hegel – a historical determinist – “right side up” rather than rejecting his fundamental constructs). A truly historical, as opposed to a mystical, approach to social struggle and all the factors involved in it has to reject any form of determinism, because it begins from the idea of history as human activity rather than as an expression of any overarching metaphysical value or conception. Thus, any product of history has to be viewed as a product of its contexts in terms of the concrete social relationships in which it developed. From such a perspective, there can be no such thing as a “neutral” technology.
Technology always develops within a social context with the explicit aim of reproducing that context. Its form, its purpose and its possibilities are determined by that context, and this is precisely why no technology is neutral. If we understand technology as large-scale systems of techniques (such as industrialism, cybernetics, etc.), then we do not know of any technological system that was not developed within the context of domination, class rule and exploitation. If Marx, in his myopic Hegelian vision, could somehow see communism in the industrial system, it is only because his vision of communism was the negation of individual freedom, the absorption of the individual into the “species being” that was manifested in the compulsory collective productive process of the factory. In fact, the industrial system was developed for one purpose – to maximize the amount of profit that could be gotten from each moment of labor by increasing the level of control over each and every movement of the worker on the job. Each new technological development within the industrial capitalist system simply increased the level of control over the processes to the point where now they are mostly automated, and nanotechnology and biotechnology are creating the basis for bringing this control directly into our bodies on a molecular level.
Just as the ideologies of any epoch are the expression of the ruling system of that epoch, so the technologies of any epoch also reflect the ruling systems. The conception that technologies are neutral, that we could simply reappropriate the technological systems and use them for our ends, is a mystical conception granting an ahistorical innocence to technology. Like ideology, those systems of reified ideas through which the ruling order enforces its domination, technology is a product of the ruling order, created to reinforce its rule. The destruction of the ruling order will involve the destruction of its technology, of the system of techniques it developed to enforce its rule.
At this point the technological systems developed by the ruling order are so intrusive and so harmful that to even pretend that they could be used for any liberatory purpose is absurd. If Marx, following Hegel, wanted history to have a final, determined end, we now know such a view is far too Christian to ever be truly revolutionary. Revolution is a wager, and that wager is precisely that the unknown, which offers the possibility of the end of domination and exploitation, is worth risking, and that taking this risk involves the destruction of the totality of this civilization of domination and exploitation – including its technological systems – that has been all we have ever known.

Willful Disobedience
Volume 4, number 3-4, Fall-Winter 2003