Technology ideology

For the Global North and many in the South, contemporary ‘technoscience frames our everyday life at all levels, down to our notion of the self’ (Biagioli, 2009, p. 818). Consider these numbers: in 1965, fewer ‘than 12 materials were in wide use: wood, brick, iron, copper, gold, silver, and a few plastics’. Today, there is a comprehensive ‘materials basis to modern society’. The computer chip that enabled us to type this editorial contains more than sixty. New materials are taken as signs of progress. But the notion of endless growth and progress fails to acknowledge that unearthing these things is a drain on natural resources; we have a finite supply of the basic ingredients of modern material life; and potential substitutes rarely deliver equivalent quality (Graedel et al., 2015). The technology that relies on these materials is both a key index of modernity and its doom-laden consequence and portent – a bravura blend of reason and magic, of confidence and hubris. As befits a genealogy of ‘millenarianism, rationalism, and Christian redemption’ channelled through ‘monks, explorers, inventors, and... scientists’, technologies guarantee a present and a future that appear to be at once perfect and monstrous: life, liberty, happiness; death, enslavement, misery. Their ideological trappings offer transcendence via machinery rather than political-economic activity; but the machinery is always already obsolete and replaceable and has a saturnine side (Dinerstein, 2006, p. 569; Nye, 2006, p. 598). As Armand Mattelart explains, we are given ‘an eternal promise symbolizing a world that is better because it is united. From road and rail to information highways, this belief has been revived with each technological generation’ (2000, viii). Almost a century ago, Keynes suggested the near future would see a fifteen-hour work week, thanks to technology and compound interest (1963, pp. 358–73). But technologized societies always produce ‘unintended consequences’: good and bad, Pacific and violent, democratic and capitalist (Merton, 1936) through military, governmental, scholarly, and commercial desires and perversions. Whereas initial modernization by states was primarily concerned with establishing national power and accumulating and distributing wealth, developed modernity produces new, trans-territorial risks, beyond the scope of traditional governmental guarantees of collective security and affluence. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri graphically, and romantically, describe the subsequent exchange of knowledge through computers as ‘immaterial labour’ (2000, p. 286, 290–292). How right they were, in terms of propaganda, how wrong in terms of environmental and social relations. For example, a ‘new practice of piety’ emerges with each ‘new communications technology’ (Hunter, 1988, p. 220), in the contradictory, competitive form: love letters/critiques, fantasies/anxieties, and annunciations/denunciations remorselessly, repetitively accompany each media innovation (Naughton, 2014, pp. 74–84; Wajcman, 2004, pp. 1–9). Hence Baron [sic] Anthony Giddens advises that the ‘digital revolution... has made the world one’, but ‘is fracturing and dividing’ the result (2018). Vannevar Bush, US Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, spoke proudly of computing as a route to the release of humanity ‘from the