Does Technophilia Incline Right?

It is a matter of ongoing perplexity and frustration to me that technodevelopmental discourse in an affirmative mode seems so readily to drift into a project of accommodation to or consolation for established elites or to take up the contours of ring-wing ideology, and how even explicit left-identified progressive technodevelopmental discourse often seems (at least to me) far more supportive and generous of arguments and figures coming out of the right than one would one would normally expect from the left.

Let me grant in advance that I may simply be wrong about all this as a straightforward empirical matter. Maybe I am wrong to discern an overall rightward technophiliac skew. Also, maybe I am simply oversensitive to any manifestations of such a skew among my colleagues, rubbed raw my whole adult life through in the debased era of conservative ascendancy from Reagan through Clinton (possibly the greatest Republican President of the Twentieth Century) through Gingrich through to the terminally awful gun-toting criminal clown college that is the Bush Administration.

But if I do happen to be the least bit right about this rightward technophiliac skew, it seems to me worthwhile to try to puzzle through some of the conditions that may have engendered it. And so, let me propose a couple of initial candidates, and then we can see where we can go on to from here:

First: Technoscientific research and development is a matter of material cultures, with actual people occupying legible sociocultural positions in it, engaging in material institutional and ritual lives. It matters, then, that research and development is driven almost exclusively by the urgencies of corporate-militarism in a market globalist developmental order.

Second: It also matters that warranted consensus scientific beliefs converge onto best descriptions according to shared protocols and shared values, while warranted political beliefs in a democratic mode strive for a kind of peaceful productive dissensus. That is to say, democratic politics would see a convergence or stabilization of public belief as a sign of tyranny, not success. There are, then, rather deep differences in the ways belief and value operate in the modes of reasonable technoscientific versus reasonable political life and belief.

I sometimes think there is a cultural and temperamental strain that resists or quails at the exactions of democratic stakeholder politics right at the very heart of technoscientific practice in an important sense (even if, as I have written elsewhere, I also think consensus science is a more democratic than authoritarian accomplishment, too -- just in a different way than stakeholder politics is).

Anyway, taken together, this temperamental tendency in addition to the historical context of a technoscientific development driven by the exigencies of corporate-militarism both contribute to an almost irresistable drift to the right in contemporary technology discourse and political practice.

The left and especially the technoprogressive left need to understand this far better than they seem to do and need to compensate with a greater scrupulousness and care around their formulations, sympathies, and alliances.

Under the present structural circumstances it seems to me technoprogressive discourses, however necessary and marvellous, are actually deeply vulnerable to appropriation by right-wing ideologies in a number of variations -- human-racist eugenicism, "free trade" global coporate-militarism, transcendentalizing techno-sublime consolation for religious fundamentalisms, etc.

Technoprogressives need to be clearer about the stakes here, about the structural conditions and historical forces that constitute the context in which we are acting, and about what these stakes and conditions tell us about who are friends are.