The power of "tech" discourses to incumbent interests arises from the way they disavow history while appearing to assert substance. The work of "tech" discourses of prosthetic or therapeutic "enhancement," for example, is to disavow the interdependence of human agency. The one to be "enhanced" is always already the isolated neglected precarized individual "self," their "enhancement" (setting aside the hyperbole & deceptions typical in such presentations) valorizes and naturalizes this isolated self, then offers compensatory fantasies of "capacity" that never redeem violations compelled by the sociopathic model of selfhood they fortify.
The real work of "tech" discourses of AI is to disavow the incarnation of intelligence and responsibility in living bodies and history. The investment of human-made machines with intelligence and agency -- as when we treat "autonomous" weapons as killers, or algorithms as bureaucrats -- divests humans of intelligence and agency, denigrates intelligence and responsibility in their human forms: the better to rationalize the mistreatment of humans as if they were robots, the better to disavow responsibility for murderous uses of artifacts or rationalize callous decisions by bureaucrats.
As Evgeny Morozov mentioned in a tweet yesterday (an observation that set me off on this twitter-essaylet), the real work of "tech" discourses of Smart this'n-that is to disavow the artificial imposition by elites of austerian scarcity: What makes a smart device "smart" is its promise to make do with less, and quite apart from the fact that "Smart" gizmos rarely live up to the hype with which they are marketed -- indeed, what gets peddled as "smart" tends to end up looking stupid before it gets tossed into the landfill to poison the world --what one is not paying attention to when one is celebrating coping with less is the question just why are we compelled to cope with less?
Why are we coping with less? Is the leanness necessary? Is it shared? Are some benefiting disproportionately from the leanness of others? It is one thing to grasp sustainable civilization must stop fantasies of limitless growth and harmless waste with shared problem-solving, but quite a lot of the "tech" that gets called Smart seems instead to facilitate the erosion of social support and collective humanity.
"Smartness" figures unintelligent artifacts as intelligent: the literal denigration of humans follows upon their figurative denigration. The real work of "tech" discourses of Design and Technocratic policy is to disavow their hostility to and demolition of democracy. Designers amount to small cohorts of privileged individuals claiming to solve political problems by circumventing political processes: So digirati promise to code democracy from privileged enclaves, green design promises sustainability without threatening consumerism, designers fail to accomplish their avowed universal ends while succeeding in self-promotion and parochial profitability for incumbents. In a related development, Paul Krugman has taken to describing so-called neoliberal technocrats as "faithocrats":
Espousing faith in serially failed austerity and trickle-down, they peddle their plutocratic politics as neutral apolitical engineering. Of course, no "tech" has a single politics, but the disavowal of politics through the conjuration of "tech" is indeed a "tech" politics.
It is never true that all artifacts and techniques are discerned as "tech": We describe only some of the field of the artifactual as "tech" while naturalizing the rest of that field as the natural, the customary. There is an inevitable de-politicization of that which is naturalized, and that naturalization always conduces to the status-quo and its beneficiaries.
Further, when "tech" fixates on power as capacitation then promises to solve/circumvent political problems with instrumental rationality, such "tech" discourses always disfigure freedom and progress as political categories as they also disable democratic processes.
The disavowal of history at the heart of prevailing "tech" discourses is reactionary, reductionist and anti-democratizing in its thrust. Only by pluralizing, narrativizing, politicizing "tech" can we engage critically in real progressive technoscientific social struggle. fin.
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