michael toscano
(ZENIT News – First Things / USA, October 1, 2024) – It’s not often that a crank’s status recovers in 10 years, but that’s what happened to me. I spent 20 years in New York City, from 1999 to 2019, watching social media and smartphones transform early adopters. After reading about Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan, I was convinced that the “myth of technological neutrality” was just that. Often in conversations with friends somewhere downtown, I challenged the notion that these technologies merely add technological capabilities to our lives. They had negative spiritual, cultural and political effects. They replaced better ways of being and acting, giving certain groups more power than others. I have argued that the first question about any technology is what kind of people it makes us. I basically didn’t convince anyone.
Today, the Institute for Family Research, where I am executive director, is a leader in efforts to require age verification on social media platforms and porn sites, and to weaken children’s lifelong hold on smartphones. In August 2022, we and our friends at the Ethics and Public Policy Center published a policy brief calling for legislative action on these issues. Two years later, we are witnessing more than a dozen state laws, including one signed by governors just nine months after promulgation. My colleagues and I are pleased to celebrate the achievements made in this short period of time, from white paper to law. But I believe it tells us something much more important. That means the days of respecting Big Tech are coming to an end.
The fact that these measures seek to address the youth mental health crisis certainly increases their urgency and political appeal. But there’s more going on. Just five years ago, it would have been unimaginable for lawmakers to think that their responsibilities included shaping technology for the public good. The sudden shift to regulation comes as a surprise to everyone. Social media and smartphones are just a few examples. Different types of technology are embroiled in social and political controversy. The myth of technological neutrality is crumbling.
In March 2024, YouGov published a poll of more than 1,000 adults that found sharp political divisions over artificial intelligence. More Biden voters view AI positively than negatively. Sentiment has reversed among Trump supporters, with more than twice as many people having a negative opinion than a positive one. AI appears to be a partisan issue. An April 2022 survey of more than a dozen technologies, also conducted by YouGov, confirmed this pattern. Although there is some overlap, Biden voters by a wide margin think AI, virtual reality, self-driving cars, lab-grown meat, and gene editing are “good for society,” whereas Trump voters considers them “bad”.
Technology has moved to the center of the battle on Capitol Hill and on the dais of the two leading presidential candidates. Kamala Harris is advocating for a Green New Deal. This amounts to an almost total transformation of our industrial economy, from the small (gas stoves, showerheads, light bulbs) to the big (electric cars, solid state batteries, charging stations) to the very large. . Great (laboratory production of the world’s food, top-down reform of energy infrastructure). Through thousands of nudges, orders, and regulations, the old technological order by which we have organized our lives, communities, and nations is disappearing and being replaced.
Although Trump has taken a more piecemeal approach, his technological vision has also been surprisingly consistent. He defends the old technological order as essential to the American way of life. He opposes bureaucratically required technology obsolescence for several reasons, including functionality. He opposes a forced transition to electric cars. He opposes converting the energy sector to one based on renewable energy, deciding that renewable energy cannot sustain a thriving industrial powerhouse. Like a medieval prince, he considers it his duty to protect the jobs, and ultimately the livelihoods and communities, of those threatened by unnecessary technological change. He is courting members of the United Auto Workers union, whose jobs have been made vulnerable by a bureaucratically forced transition to electric motors. This stance is a technical expression of President Trump’s protectionist instincts. But his preservation of the old technological order is balanced by a call for heroic efforts to expand that order through the domination of space and the creation of an American-led industry that manufactures flying cars.
These proposals make it clear that technology is subject to partisan politics. The internal combustion engine is a republican technology. Electric motors are Democrats. Republican technology serves America and the hinterland. Democratic technology serves the planet, coastal regions, and global elites. Republican technology expands Americans’ power, both individually and collectively. Democratic technology allows bureaucrats (corporations and states) to control electricity consumption. Whatever you think of these visions, they are not ideologically neutral.
Polarization is not the reason for the demise of the myth of technological neutrality. Technology has never been neutral. Remarkably, this truth, which has been obvious to theorists for decades, is now being recognized by the general public. I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time, and yet many things could go wrong. On the one hand, technology will be humanized by subjecting it to politics, the art of ordering things for the common good. People will do everything in their power to align technology with the interests of their families, communities, and nations; they will not stand idly by as their way of life is destroyed for the benefit of others. It probably won’t happen.
On the other hand, technology will become all too human in a darker sense. As Big Tech companies and state bureaucracies put aside the mask of impartiality, technological change will become increasingly divisive. In The Coming Wave (2023), Mustafa Suleiman, co-founder of DeepMind and CEO of Microsoft AI, attacks the concept of technological neutrality and argues that “technology is a form of power.” It is openly declared. He is calling on governments and international organizations to create “containment” regulatory structures. That means giving companies like Microsoft exclusive rights to technologies like AI and distancing them from “bad guys” like France’s Jaune Bolsonaro supporter. Brazil and Brexiteers. Such groups are considered too dangerous to speak out about “future” technology. The fact that such a judgment was made openly suggests that an era of conflict and force is not far away.
Recall the events that led to the Jaune Gillet riot. President Macron imposed a new gas tax and lowered speed limits to make drivers more susceptible to France’s Photoradar speed enforcement network. As Matthew Crawford explains, this move was seen by the French working class as punishment for their dependence on the automobile. and gasoline car preference). Significantly, Jaune Gilet has destroyed around 60 percent of the speed camera network across France during months of violence. Governments rebelled against the old fossil fuel-dependent technological order through technocratic arrangements that imposed costs on those outside the new technological order. Dissatisfied people responded to this action with a ferocious counterattack against the successor government. The French government was forced to retreat, but its larger purpose remained undaunted. The street fight was broken up by police wielding batons and rubber bullets.
Conflicts are escalating around the world, and their intensity is commensurate with the struggle for the way of life and even survival of entire populations and classes. Inspired by protests by long-haul truckers in Canada, farmers have blocked streets in Brussels and other European cities with convoys of tractors, spread liquid fertilizer and banned common farming techniques required by the European Union. It opposes the bureaucratic obsolescence of machines. The net zero agenda. In July 2022, Sri Lanka’s president fled the country on a military plane to escape large-scale riots among the poor, who were on the brink of starvation due to the government’s ban on chemical fertilizers. Violent tractor protests sparked by forced innovation persist in India as well. Don’t get me wrong. The green transition requires technological changes that have revolutionary social and political consequences.
Protecting one’s way of life is one of the most powerful motives in politics. This primitive impulse seeks to counter a total restructuring of the technological regime around the perceived needs of the planet, perhaps with the viability of humanity at stake.
Will the myth of technological neutrality actually crumble? Events show it is under serious strain. However, if the contest period expires or is suspended, it may be approved again. Society was transformed as the Industrial Revolution sparked a politically explosive conflict between workers and capital, bringing about the unimaginable as agricultural life was overshadowed by wage-earning life in the cities. A deadly force for the war effort. Technology shook the West during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
To my knowledge, no social history of the myth of technological neutrality has been written. But my hypothesis is that it appeared as a compromise between labor and capital, as the working class of unskilled proletarians grew and the number of skilled craftsmen decreased. The struggle for fair wages, rather than control over the means of production (that is, technology), became the mainstream of the time. But that’s also speculation. What we do know is that during its short lifespan, technological neutrality has endured for a long time. The machine warfare of World War I, the atomic bomb of World War II, and the sexual contraceptive revolution of the 1960s each could have failed, and they did. I fear it will be the same this time. Under liberalism, neutrality is awarded to the winners. We must never again be fooled by its false promises.
Michael Toscano is the executive director of the Family Research Institute.
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