Technology and the Common Good: The Unity and Division of a Democratic Society by Allen W. Batteau (review)

Reviewed by:

• Technology and the Common Good: The Unity and Division of a Democratic Society by Allen W. Batteau
• Thomas A. Stapleford (bio)

Technology and the Common Good: The Unity and Division of a Democratic Society
By Allen W. Batteau. New York: Berghahn Books, 2022. Pp. 205.

Technology and the Common Good provides an ambitious but sometimes loosely argued synthesis that combines critical perspectives on technology with Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize–winning analyses of the political economy of shared resources. In her 1990 book Governing the Commons and subsequent research, Ostrom examines how, despite the “tragedy of the commons” predicted by rational choice theory, communities have in fact found ways to manage shared goods, whether natural resources, shared spaces, or more metaphorical commons such as knowledge. Batteau aims to build on Ostrom’s work by highlighting the critical role modern technology has played in both creating and governing the physical and metaphorical commons of contemporary life. In Batteau’s eyes, as in much of this literature, common goods are both the source and site for struggles to identify and shape the common good.

The strongest parts of Batteau’s book explore how modern technology has created new common goods and thus the need for new governance strategies (e.g., chs. 4 and 5). For example, airflight opened a new common physical space, airspace, but likewise created the need to regulate and control movement through that space, eventually instantiated in elaborate national and international policies governing air travel. More metaphorically, we can think about the common “spaces” of the radio frequency spectrum (allocated by [End Page 1026] governments for various purposes) or the virtual “commons” of social media platforms such as Facebook. Beyond creating new commons, modern technology has extended the ability of human action in one locale to affect common goods in far distant places (just think of global warming, for example), thereby extending and integrating previously localized common goods into broader, at times global, common goods that demand an appropriately global governance strategy. Of course, modern technology has not only constructed or altered these commons; it has also become essential to managing them.

To this promising line of analysis, Batteau has wedded a more tendentious and underdeveloped historical thesis, namely that while material culture and artifacts have existed since the beginnings of human civilization, “technology” per se is a more recent phenomenon. Batteau has different stories about precisely what distinguishes “technology” (in his usage) from other material culture and when this new form emerged. Thus on the very first page, he attributes it to the coining of the word “technology” in 1612 (though this occurred in a theological treatise); to the union of “a discourse of téchnē” with “learned authority represented by written language” (though this happened well before 1612); to the Industrial Revolution (always a contentious term but generally dated to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries); and to the erasure of class distinctions between “rude mechanicals” and “educated gentlemen” (seemingly a late nineteenth-century phenomenon). Later, Batteau links technology to systems of mass production, standardization, and mass distribution of manufactured goods (p. 13), developments that date to the latter half of the nineteenth century at the earliest. Batteau is an anthropologist by training, not a historian, and he is surely correct to identify vast and important differences in the structure, capabilities, and affordances of artifacts, as well as how they are produced, distributed, used, and conceived, when comparing, say, 1920s America to isolated Indigenous tribes, ancient societies, or even medieval Europe. Yet to isolate the different dimensions along which these differences occur and to track when and where they emerged requires a much more finely grained and broadly sourced account than Batteau is able to provide in two short chapters.

Historical genesis aside, Batteau wants readers to recognize how Ostrom’s institutional strategies for managing shared resources can and should be applied to new, technologically mediated commons. He worries deeply that what he describes as neoliberal privatization (such as the corporately owned commons of social media) represents a new form of the sixteenth-century British enclosure movement, in which technology fosters ostensibly open public spaces that gradually become more heavily controlled by private owners. To resist...