148: Howard Segal's Technologial Utopianism

In Technological Utopianism in American Culture, Howard Segal argues that a strain of utopian literature produced in American between 1833 and 1933 firmly linked human improvement to technology.  While technological utopianism may have been a marginal thread in popular culture, it had a huge influence on both European and American intellectuals' thoughts on technology and American movements like scientific management, the conservation movement, and technocracy.  In tracing the careers and writings of 25 American technological utopians, Segal hopes to make their ideas more accessible and also to show that utopianism is a useful tool for social criticism.

According to Segal, American technological utopianism has four unique characteristics that distinguish it from other utopian traditions:

• technological utopians envision a world very similar to the one in which they live; the difference is more quantitative than qualitative
• versus Europe, America in the 19th century was perceived as a place where utopia could still be built
• American technological utopians were less revolutionary and more practical than their European counterparts
• these writers used utopianism not to fantasize about the future but to critique and suggest improvements for present-day society.

144: Thomas Hughes' American Genesis

In American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, Thomas Hughes argues that the 100 years from 1870 to 1970 were the years in which Americans made the country over into the modern technological nation; American "technological systems" revolutionized both technology/ technological development and American culture.  American Genesis is not a celebration of American industrial might, but a critical history: because inventors, industrial scientists, engineers, and system builders created modern America via technological systems, their values have become our values, so examining the messy history of technological development can both release us from the burden of the past and free us to turn technology to our own ends.

Hughes divides the century of technological enthusiasm into several overlapping processes:

140: Siegfried Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command

In Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History, Siegfried Giedion studies the history of the mechanization of everyday life to determine how mechanization has affected human beings and what the political limits of mechanization might be with regard to humans.  In doing so, he creates an "anonymous history," a study of "our mode of life as affected by mechanization - its impact on our dwellings, our food, our future," as well as links between industrial methods and extra-industrial practices in art and literature.  This book is thus an early (1948) cultural history of technology, with which Giedion intends to restore faith in human agency by revealing how human "work and... innovation - whether they know it or not - are continually shaping and reshaping the patterns of life."

Working from a wide range of sources, including models, manufacturing records, catalogues, advertising leaflets, etc. (he was frustrated to find that most inventors and businesses did not keep records of failed inventions), Giedion traces the development of mechanization in Western history, from ancient and medieval times to the mid-20th century, with an emphasis on the 19th and 20th century.  The books is arranged first thematically and then chronologically, and technologies, photography, painting, and business history are all intermingled, so that the reader can get a sense of the social and cultural context of different kinds of technologies in addition to a general sketch of their development.  For instance, his section on movement includes Oresmi's 15th century diagrams of planets in motion, Marey's 19th century photographic studies of birds in flight, Muybridge's photos of men at work and Gilbreth's abstract lines of time and motion studies; as movement becomes more abstract, representations of it (Joyce, Picasso) become more fragmented and sad about the loss of human continuity.  Perhaps mechanization, as linked to this rationalization of living movement, separates thought and feeling?

138: Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology

Published in 1977, Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought examines the idea of autonomous technology as a "convenient receptacle for a host of  contemporary anxieties." Using literary and political writings from a wide range of historical moments, he shows how autonomous technology has been associated with fears about a loss of human agency and self-governance, both at the individual and the societal level, to machines of our own creation.  Technology therefore has a politics, and if humans are to regain control and autonomy, we need to dismantle technologies, learn how they work, and rebuild them so that they serve human needs rather than their own dominance and reproduction.

Winner argues that while technology has been central to political thought for some 200 years, the 20th century proliferation of technologies and their integration in everyday life has made technology into a "vast, diverse, ubiquitous totality that stands at the center of our modern culture."  This diversity makes the word "technology" so complex as to be meaningless, or at least illegible, with the result that technology itself becomes a rather terrifying black box, appearing to usurp political power and move forward of its own volition.  In modernity, the complexity of technology requires a new ruling class, engineers, to interface with it, and an environment conducive to its operations, with which architects and engineers happily comply.  Technology also requires a particular social order to fulfill its operational requirements - which is to say that technology creates a particular form of technological politics, where the claim that "man controls technology" looks more irrational than the opposite.

137: Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Rhodes is a novelist, and The Making of the Atomic Bomb is, as most reviewers have noted, a readable, and at times engrossing, epic (or as Hacker calls it, an “Atomiad.”)  It traces the development of the atomic bomb from the early 1900s, when physicists were just beginning to suspect the existence of an atom (though he locates belief in the “atom” as “an invisible layer of eternal, elemental substance” in ancient Greeks Leucippus and Democritus) through Los Alamos and WWII, and on to the development and testing of the “Super” or hydrogen bomb in the 1950s.  Various reviewers put their own political slants on Rhodes’ thesis, but Broad, I think, captures it most fairly: since 1945, when the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, science has for the first time become powerful enough to challenge the state.  Critically, unlike technological determinists, Rhodes sees that though atomic technology has changed the way politics is enacted, the relationship between politics and technology is a two-way street – which means, following Bohr, that a peaceful, unified, global system is just as possible in the Nuclear Age as the current system of warring states.

26: Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media

Reviews of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man seem to follow roughly the same format: a brief overview of McLuhan's life that characterizes him as a wacky, provincial English professor-turned-overnight-celebrity; a few vague references to his most famous dictums; and an extension of his work to today's media, with an insistence that despite the passage of time, McLuhan's work is still surprisingly fresh and new and relevant. 

Be that as it may (hey, I'm all for finding relevance, even if I don't have the need to call someone a prophet), McLuhan's language is as obtuse as it is lovely, which makes for hard slogging.  Since one of the things he's known for is his tendency to write in aphorisms, I think the easiest way to summarize him here is to write out the three that gave me the most trouble, plus a fourth that gives me faith in humanity.

"the medium is the message"

This is the phrase McLuhan is probably most famous for.  Because it is so short, it's also a hard one to wrap my head around, and McLuhan wasn't much for giving careful explanations. The "is" doesn't help, either, because it implies that the two things are equal - which is confusing because it implies a tautology.  The way that this makes sense to me is to think about the relationship between social media and communication forms: a tweet or a Facebook status update or a Tumblr post is radically different from a blog post both in length and content; with less space and a greater emphasis on visuals, whatever information you're trying to convey in these smaller, more networked formats gets compressed, transformed, digested.  It's less medium = message and more medium --> message.  And the most successful messages are those that are well-tailored to by synergistic with their medium.

"the content of any medium is always another medium"

Ok.  Thanks, McLuhan, for defining a word with itself.  He goes on to explain, however, in his chapter on radio, that "[t]he content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel.  So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming."  In a way, media are like a hall of mirrors or like Baudrillard's simulacra, copies of copies of copies; or maybe, in a more subversive vein, like Judith Butler's processes of translation.  They are telescoping, reflecting and repeating one another like a big, coordinated multimedia ad campaign.  And because of the time-space compression of newer media (see the blog-to-Twitter progression), older media are kept alive, at least for a time, within newer media: books within e-books within blogs and so on.

 "the bad news sells the good news"

Ever wonder why the news is always bad?  It's because bad news draws the viewer in to gawk or recoil in horror at the spectacle, so that the good news - the advertisements that show you what you can buy to make the horror go away - can catch you at a vulnerable moment.  Thus, when McLuhan was writing, anyway, commercials and programming were combined into one big program, so that program flowed into ad flowed back into program.  The interesting thing is that because a series of commercials is really a set of fragmented, disconnected texts, programmers rely on viewers' brains to fill in the gaps and connect the fragments into a larger coherent narrative.  Luckily, our brains are trained - ideologically, repetitively - to look for common threads, and to see nothing strange about a seamless integration of real life news, entertainment, and injunctions to consume.

Although "the medium is the message" seems to argue that content follows form, the telescoping nature of media seems to ensure that we stay on a technologically-mediated level playing field of reflected images, and the media themselves seem capable of sheer manipulation, I don't think that McLuhan was necessarily a technological determinist.  I say this because of his discussion of bicycles:

"It was no accident that the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics, or that early airplanes seemed in some ways like bicycles.  The transformations of technology have the character of organic evolution because all technologies are extensions of our physical being."

Technologies may condition the way humans communicate, but human beings are still very much a part of the technological system; technological change is still "organic evolution" because technologies are "extensions of our physical being" and therefore humans, not technologies, control the direction and rate and quality of technological change.  To folks who fear that the culture industry is going to take over the world and we'll wake up one day and find ourselves in the middle of Idiocracy, McLuhan argues that humans have the power to stop that kind of development from happening.  Which, if you think about it, was a necessary, albeit old school, message for Cold War America, presented in an interestingly old-fashioned print media-turned-celebrity package.

25: Jeff Meikle's American Plastic

Jeff Meikle's American Plastic delves into the history, technology, and business of plastic (in the US) to show that plastic is both material and metaphor for American culture.  On the one hand, plastic's seemingly infinite malleability can lead to creative freedom and human domination over nature; on the other, its synthetic, chemical artificiality detaches us from the natural world and thus leads, somehow, to death.  Lest this dichotomy seem too simple, he situates his history of plastic within Thomas Hughes' "technological momentum" framework, which holds that when technologies are young, they are easily manipulated by society; as they (and their attendant industries and systems of distribution) age, they shift from the manipulated to the manipulators.  Thus, if plastic was all "whatever" in the late 1800s, by the late 20th century, plastic had become a necessary, if silently lurking, element in our everyday lives.

The majority of the book focuses on technological manufacturing processes, the development of the plastics industry, and changing cultural perceptions of plastic (which were often, especially in DuPont's case, carefully crafted by ad execs).  The part that I found most interesting was Meikle's discussion of the relationship between plastics and streamlining in the 1930s, as it captures an industry, a technology, a culture and an aesthetic all in transition at once.

Although Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic, had been around since the turn of the century, it didn't take off until the 1920s, when its promoters were able to recast it as a material of innovation rather than one of simulation.  This reframing of plastic as something wholly man-made - and the reframing of "man-made" as a positive quality - was reflected in Bakelite's new emphasis on modern design, which took advantage of plastic's plasticity to create shapes and textures that could not be held by natural materials.  Inspired by Bakelite, other plastics manufacturers followed suit and developed radios, furniture, bowls, and other household goods with sleek, smooth surfaces and simple, sweeping curves.  Meikle is careful to point out that this streamlining trend was NOT a direct result of the plastic manufacturing process, which involved pouring softened plastic into molds.  Instead, he argues that the 1930s were a moment of flux, when culture and technology were on relatively equal footing: 1930s design resulted partly from consumer demand for 'machine-age forms' and partly from the high cost of machining plastic molds, which pushed manufacturers to develop simpler, more streamlined forms.  In other words, plastic and streamlining came together as a "happy coincidence."  Plastic sure did look good in curvilinear forms, though.  More importantly, the visual disconnect between the new streamlined plastics and natural materials and forms, which now looked irregular and staid by comparison, appealed to Americans' utopian aspirations while also giving plastic its identity.


After WWII and into the 1960s, plastic stopped being the utopian super material and started to seem emblematic of everything that was wrong with American society: cookie cutter homes filled with identical vinyl floors, naugahyde furniture, and Tupperware, social isolation, inequality and environmental destruction.  Meikle doesn't suggest that plastics directly caused the countercultural revolution - his analysis is far too nuanced to do that - but he does tie the proliferation of plastic to an ongoing tension between human creativity and the sense that American culture is increasingly detached from "the resistant stuff of nature."  Considering that a little under a century ago we were celebrating the domination of nature via plastic, this tension reveals a now-mature technological system's imbalance of power between humans and nature.  Meikle calls the tension "insoluble;" I've never considered myself much of an environmentalist, but I do hope he's wrong. 

23: Edwin Layton's Revolt of the Engineers

Revolt of the Engineers lives in the depths of library storage, which is unfortunate because it's a rather interesting study of a failed social movement among early 20th-century engineers.  Also, it was written in 1971, and the political and ideological struggles of that era seem clearly to have influenced Layton's thinking.  And maybe it's just me, but I find reading about a social movement from one era through the eyes of another to be rather illuminating.

Layton argues that professionalization and progressive organizing efforts among engineers in the early 20th century may not have led to large, lasting social change either within the profession or in American society, but the engineers' efforts were still an important cross-pollination between technology and culture.

To support this claim, Layton traces a chronological history of the rise and fall of different professional engineering organizations and their relationship to the broader social reform movement in turn-of-the-century America.  One of his more entertaining examples is the career of Henry Gantt, whose appropriately-named Gantt charts are still in use today, at least among my undergrad Civil Engineering students.

Henry Gantt was a talented follower of Frederick Taylor, the guy who devised all those time and motion studies to make Ford's assembly lines faster and more efficient.  (Harry Bravermann and Tim Cresswell both do cool - and very different - treatments of Taylor and his impact.)  Like Taylor, Gantt thought scientific management was the best thing ever, and he developed his Gantt chart as a visual project management tool to help users maintain top-down scientific control over an entire process.  Also like Taylor, Gantt thought that scientific management principles could and should be applied in areas beyond the confines of business, especially government and education.  But Gantt, who liked to carefully chart out arms production and ship production processes in his office during WWI, went a step further.  With the right visualization tools (heh) and a firm commitment to scientific management principles, Gantt thought that engineers could potentially plan not just individual industries but the whole economy, from defense production, education, and government to automobile manufacturing, city development, and social services.  And because scientific management efficiently allocated resources and talent, letting the engineers run society would be perfectly efficiently and perfectly just.  Democracy and scientific management would finally become synonymous!

Now, the problem with this scheme, as Layton points out, is that it's not a democracy but a technocracy, where the engineers in their central planning offices get to design sociotechnical systems, but all citizens can do is conform to them.  Incidentally, this kind of thinking also plagued engineering's professional societies, where infighting over power and prestige kept engineers from making any serious progress toward social goals.  Layton concludes here, with the decline of a movement that could have had a huge impact on society, particularly during the Great Depression. 

Yet I think that if self-serving politics hindered engineers from effecting large-scale social reform or a mass seizure of political power, they helped them spread scientific management ideas in more conservative arenas like business, and manufacturing in particular.  Here, stripped of its revolutionary potential, scientific management could be used to further exploit the labor of assembly-line and sweatshop workers by speeding the pace of production and thus lowering per-unit labor costs.  Layton doesn't dwell on this particular legacy, but his frustration with his subjects' deflation of their movement is clear.  The implications for the time in which he was writing seem pretty clear, too.

20: John Staudenmaier's Technology's Storytellers

Technology's Storytellers is an analysis of 20 years' worth of articles from Technology and Culture, the main journal for historians of technology.  It is also, despite this limited scope, an articulation of a new way if thinking about the relationship between technology and culture, which Staudenmaier calls the "constituency model."

Staudenmaier's taxonomies of the articles are interesting, especially insofar as this book is basically a big long bibliography essay for an emerging field of study.  But his constituency model is probably more interesting, so I'll focus on that here.

The constituency model is based on (his dissertation director) Thomas Hughes' theory of technological momentum, which argues (basically) that when technologies are new, they are very malleable and thus very responsive to cultural conditions, but as they age, they become harder to change, and thus they are more likely to shape culture than to be shaped by it.

Staudenmaier adds to this theory in a couple of ways.  First, he divides the aging of technology into three phases and assigns a constituency to each:

•  the design stage + design constituency: the attitudes of the inventors, the economic and ideological climate when (and where) the design is taking place, potential users, potential workers, and available technologies all help shape the technology
• the momentum stage + maintenance constituency: as a technology matures and becomes more rigid/ harder to change, it's easier to change culture to fit the technology than to try to change the technology, so new social patterns start to emerge
• the senility stage: a technology, which is an artifact of the particular time and place of its creation and early life, finally becomes outmoded because the world around it has changed so much.  Sometimes the technology gets redesigned; more often, the technology's boosters try to realign culture with the technology and fail.
• the impact constituency: these are the people who lose because of a technology, or those who suffer from the rigidities and limitations in the technology.

Like Hughes, Staudenmaier is interested in broadening the study of technology from histories of the development of the object itself to explorations of the relationship between a technology and its particular historical moment.  More than Hughes, however, he has a radical agenda of uncovering and giving voice to those people who are adversely affected by technologies, form the Lakota Sioux whom Staudenmaier taught after college to the people in third world countries who are forced into sweatshop labor.  He also argues that historians of technology should not be afraid of Marx.

While a study of a single journal's articles is more a study of editorial preferences than field-wide trends, Staudenmaier's theoretical intervention is rather useful, especially in a globalized economy where the Western faith in technological progress is now pretty much everywhere.  I'm a big fan of finding ways to give voice to the oppressed and questioning the drive to solve all the world's problems with ever more technological solutions.

10: Claude Fischer's America Calling

 
America Calling is a social history of the telephone in America from 1900 to 1940, and it's an impressive piece of work.  Fischer is a well-funded sociologist - which means that in addition to liking big structural arguments, clearly-defined terms, and general conclusions drawn from massive amounts of data, he also had an army of research assistants to help him with this project.  And really, why do just one study when you have enough people to research and write five?  Yes, five. 

Fischer embarked on this project to answer three questions about the relationship between the telephone and American culture.  First, who subscribed to residential telephone service, where did they live, and why did they get phones?  Second, how did the collective use of the telephone affect social structure and culture?  And third, what personal meanings did phones have for subscribers?

To answer these questions (again, because he had an army of assistants), he undertook the following studies:

1. A historical study of how the telephone industry marketed phones to North American households, with particular attention to rural and working-class customers
2. A statistical analysis of national diffusion patterns for telephone subscriptions over time to see where in the country people were likely to have phones, and whether phone subscriptions varied with class and rural vs local households
3. Community studies in three communities in the San Francisco Bay area (Antioch, Palo Alto, and San Rafael), which included social histories for each town, statistical analyses of phone diffusion, and statistical analyses of social change
4. Statistical analyses, also at the community level, of relationships between telephone subscriptions and a variety of indicators, like occupation, presence and number of adult women in the household, and distance from the city center
5. Oral histories with 35 elderly people living in the three towns

He also situated this study within technology studies, which means that he was interested in the question of power and agency in the human-technological relationship.  Therefore, he looked at both how industry and government constrained people's use and adoption of telephones AND how consumers adopted the technology and used it for their own purposes.

And the result?  After a lot of number crunching, Fischer determined several things, but two of his conclusions regarding social and cultural change particularly stand out (to me).  First, rather than functioning primarily as a tool for business or as a replacement for human contact (as promoters intended and detractors feared), the telephone quickly became a "technology of sociability."  Americans (especially women) discovered that telephones made organizing events and coordinating people much more efficient - and so they coordinated more events and thus raised their overall level of in-person socializing.  Instead of replacing personal interaction, the telephone amplified it and thus contributed to the overall accelerated pace of modern life.

But the telephone wasn't all modern, all the time.  Rather than operating as a tool of modernity by destroying local places and helping people connect with strangers in foreign lands (as telephone promoters initially claimed), the telephone was actually anti-modern; it helped people form closer bonds with people they already knew.  It thus helped people create a bunch of small, insular, place-bound parochial cultures instead of contributing to the growing mass culture

Both of these conclusions are really fascinating because they show that people used telephones to help them adjust to the upheavals of modernization, and that they were happy to do more things as long as they had the support and close contact of a small group of friends.  The strange thing about all of this is that Fischer insists that the telephone didn't change American culture in any significant way (when it obviously did.)  I'm hoping he just means that people used it to satisfy existing needs rather than to create new ones.

the unabomber as a radical philosopher of technology?

David Skrbina and Ted Kaczynski have been corresponding since 2003, and they have a lot in common - intellectually, I mean.  Both come from educational backgrounds in mathematics; both have since turned from math to philosophy; and both are fascinated by the relationship between technology and society. Skrbina has also written a good bit on panpsychism, a philosophy which sees 'mind' in all things and which he relates to eco-philosophy, so it's not entirely unsurprising that in 2010 Feral House published a collection of Kaczynski's writings as Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski, a.k.a. "The Unabomber," with a supportive introduction from Skrbina.  Like Skrbina, Kaczynski develops a critique of technological society from a perspective of mind/ psychology rather than from more (academically) conventional dialectical or social constructivist approaches; also like Skrbina, he questions the levels of dependence on technology in 'advanced' societies.