Theories of Technological Determinism

Theories emphasizing the influence of technology on society and politics, often termed theories of technological determinism, inherited from the nineteenth century three basic stories about the history of technology.

These three competing and collaborating stories are
- The idea of the progressive human conquest of nature (insofar as technologies are well- defined extensions of human action).

- The massive industrial proliferation of goods and services (through increased division of labor and standardized production routines).

- A tendency of technology to itself escape human control (as artifacts progressively tap non-human energy resources, formalize human behavior routines, and overwhelm the social world with the products of human labor that produce manifolds of unintended consequences).

The work of American cultural critic Lewis Mumford and French sociologist Jacques Ellul explored, refined, and criticized these three inherited stories, and in the process presented theories of technology as an underappreciated and often unwelcome determinant of many aspects of society and politics.

Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934) took the anthropologist’s periodization of human prehistory as defined by materials (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age) and extended it into history, proposing to complement the more traditional cultural and political distinctions (Greek and Roman Ages, Middle Ages, modern period of nation states) with one defined by changes in technologies.

Mumford’s proposal was to distinguish the ‘‘eotechnic’’ use of animal power and increasingly specialized tools during the Middle Ages, the ‘‘paleotechnics’’ of steam power and the machines of the Industrial Revolution, and the ‘‘neotechnics’’ of electric power in the twentieth century, each sponsoring special social and political orders. Although his terminology never took hold, the book itself virtually created the notion of a social history of technology, all previous attempts being more internalist technological histories.

In one of his vivid illustrations of the power of technologies to influence social order, Mumford argued that the invention of the clock transformed the experience of time; before the clock, for instance, working days had varied in length with the seasons of the year. The clock made possible the standardized working day and thus the mass production factory in which all workers for a particular shift are required to show up at the same time.

A later example was nuclear energy, which virtually required centralized, hierarchal, antidemocratic management For Mumford the twentieth century was in a situation comparable to that of the Industrial Revolution, having created powers that it now needed to learn to guide and manage. Making alliances with socialists and liberal progressives, he called for a more conscious appreciation of this circumstance and an effort to bring a broad spectrum of human values to bear on what he saw as a monomaniacal technological world focused too exclusively on the pursuit of power.

In his last work, however, The Myth of the Machine (2 vols, 1967 and 1970), Mumford appeared to despair of the possibilities for this exercise in human responsibility, although in reality his arguments almost certainly had an influence on the environmental and economic criticisms of technology.

Whereas Mumford’s intellectual background was literary-based cultural criticism, Ellul sought to extend perspectives inherited from Karl Marx. Even though he was not a strong technological determinist, Marx credited technology with exercising a powerful social and political influence. In a famous phrase from The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), Marx remarked, ‘‘The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord, the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.’’

Of course, one then has to ask, but what gives you the technologies of hand-mill or steam engine. To claim, as Marx did, that such technological change is a more or less unconscious process of human interaction with the natural world and existing technologies, which then have unanticipated social consequences, constitutes a kind of soft determinism.

This is the view developed at length by Ellul in La Technique (1954), which begins by distinguishing between ‘‘technical operations’’ and the ‘‘technical phenomenon.’’ Polytechnical operations are present throughout history, always subordinate to the contexts in which they occur. The technical phenomenon, by contrast, is a unified method for the guidance of making and using that arises more or less by accident.

However, once it comes on the historical scene, this phenomenon begins to transcend all particular contexts with appeals to decon- textualized notions of efficiency. The public faith that human beings then place in ‘‘technological efficiency’’ furthers its dominance. To appreciate the determining power of this new phenomenon, which may also be described as technology turned into a social institution, requires a special act of consciousness. It is Ellul’s aim to contribute to the emergence of this consciousness with what he calls a ‘‘characterology’’ of technology.

According to Ellul’s characterology, technology in the mid-twentieth century exhibits the distinguishing features of artificiality, self-augmentation, universality, and autonomy. It replaces the natural milieu with one increasingly fabricated by human beings, thus occluding natural orders and influences. It repeatedly extends itself (‘‘The only solution to the problems of technology is more technology’’). It is more and more the same everywhere (‘‘If you’ve seen one Holiday Inn, you’ve seen them all’’).

It becomes increasingly independent of external values (‘‘Why do something in a way that is inefficient?’’). By means of these characteristic features, technology transforms economics, politics, medicine, education, sports, and entertainment, driving all such traditional human activities to incorporate technical means and seek efficiency in their respective areas of activity.

These two versions of technological determinism emphasized, in turn, the primacy of technology as physical artifact (Mumford) and human process (Ellul). In a more abstract interpretation, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889— 1976) argued that modern technology was constituted by a stance at once willful and epistemological; technology takes up an attitude toward the world that forces it to reveal itself as resources available to be controlled and manipulated.

From each perspective—artifact, activity, will, and knowledge—technology is argued to exercise deep influences on politics and society. Langdon Winner’s Autonomous Technology (1977) and The Whale and the Reactor (1986), along with a Merrit Roe Smith and Leo Marx edited volume titled Does Technology Drive History? (1994), provide fitting reviews of the determinist tradition in the midst of the emergence of a major alternative research program called social constructivism.