What is technology and why is it really the most important issue of our time?
As strange as it may sound, technology is not an entity separate from the natural order. This anachronistic conception, defended and made viral by the ancient Greeks —and which could, why not, have been imported or stolen from one of the Eastern civilizations—, emanates from the surprise produced in us by a kind of excretion or emanation that modifies the world, like the magician who has just discovered the forces that reside in his hands and who turns stones into production lines for chocolate rabbits or seafood.
Rather, technology can be understood as the set of ways in which entities, living or inanimate, transform the world and are, in turn, transformed by it. Worms, for example, live on the technique of digging; a technique that makes human agriculture possible by fertilizing the soil. Artificial intelligence, for its part, promises to extend life—thanks to new forms of diagnosis and treatment of diseases—or even (re)create it, as has already happened in China with the incipient (re)generation—which homo god— of a new type of cattle.
Thus, what we often call an “artifact” or “device” is not simply a tangible, limited and defined object, like a blender or a smartphone. Rather, it encompasses everything that contributes to the transformation of nature – the actual mechanism or apparatus – such as a (soon-to-be-unnecessary) worker operating a tower crane to erect a building, or the waste from a nuclear plant or from xenobots that eliminate cancer from the body, which serve as fertilizer or fuel for other processes in reality. These elements gradually shape a new face of nature, an idea that the great Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset already hinted at, although contaminated by the jargon of philosophical tradition.
But when does technology become a problem? Technology ceases to be a pure and innocent technique, at the service of human beings, when it becomes an autonomous “logos” or a reason unto itself (techno-logos or technology itself), a capacity that diverges from its original objective and scope, and that contravenes the natural order by altering the way entities are, without them being able to resist: humans trapped in the gears of their own systems, birds that no longer nest in trees but on the roofs of cities, greenhouse gases warming the face of the Earth, etc.
It is not a question of eliminating technology, therefore, but of finding opportunities in it, a morality and a positioning that is worthy of our humanity, which does not simply limit us to letting ourselves be carried along by the inertia of our inventions. We are part of its equation, of the technological process and the transformations of the natural order that it sets in motion. As the Frenchman Thierry Hoquet — a Latin European, like Ortega — would say, technology “is the continuation of life by other means.” But — and what is more important for us — technology is also power.
Technology is power, indeed, and it manifests itself in many ways: in nation-states, not just as institutions, but as mechanized entities (mechanically trapped, I mean) in a dialectic that seeks its own freedom by limiting that of its subjects and of the other states with which it competes; in corporations, which, thanks to the effect of their methodologies and other artifacts, have long operated as parallel and transnational institutions, and which through the brilliant technique of marketing—from which true philosophers could learn something to better communicate and make their intuitions more attractive—conquer markets and souls; or in academia, which, thanks to its sacrosanct operators and hierarchies, propagates, in the manner of the Gospel, scientific and philosophical standards on a global level. The idea that “to be a serious philosopher you have to be a specialist” or that “ethics is the path par excellence for philosophical ideas to impact the world” reflects this power that technology provides when it manifests itself in the form of organization (collective enterprise) and discourse.
Technopower, omnipresent and captivating, useful not only to humans but to the System (as a totality of systems created by it), is irrevocably transforming our species and non-humans, as well as the planet we inhabit (and will soon transform those we intend to inhabit, such as Mars). In this context, ethics proves insufficient to address its uncontrolled influence.
And the products of ethics are, in many ways, a balm that allows the elites to clothe themselves in goodness before the audience, and whose production they allow in the awareness of its harmlessness (futility). It is, furthermore, a refuge for those who do not dare to confront power – and above all for those who do not dare to see, like Machiavelli or Hobbes, how we can become as beings when it comes to imposing our worldviews and impulses -; for the whiners and critics, who only see the end of history or the world as guilty at every moment; for the technicians, who want to be well-behaved children of the system and philosophize according to the canons of the Academy; and, of course, it is also the realm of the businessmen, who see in philosophy a space of social status or renown, who dress up as intellectuality and pretended nobility, but with personal ends well hidden in their hearts.
Therefore, what operates in the long run as a simple institutionalized ornament cannot be effective in questioning technological power. Ethics thus deserves to be rethought in the position it occupies today in philosophy and society, giving way to other approaches—even if only provisionally—that allow it to be revitalized and have a real impact on the technological empire that problematizes and threatens our existence.
In this sense, Carl Mitcham, perhaps the longest-serving and most influential living philosopher of technology in the world, proposes political philosophy—barely indexed in philosophy of technology (in a couple of Oxford and Routledge handbooks)—as the first philosophy. The North American agrees with the Dutchman Marteen Franssen that ethics has already fulfilled its role by settling into the discussion of the technological phenomenon, while it seems exhausted in its emphasis on individual agency and its forgetfulness of the historical restrictions imposed by social reality and its codes, which subdue us, if not lay bare our misery (to be philosophically honest and dispense with euphemisms). This approach runs the risk of becoming obscured or sterile, of being nothing more than an occasional and insignificant obstacle to an irreversible technological trend, if not softening it or making it more digestible for us.
His petition was raised at the World Congress of Philosophy. He had already done so in China, in his last master class at the University of Science and Technology of that country. Then he resorted to the argument – much repeated, boring and entrenched in the psyche of academics – of old Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics to justify the primacy of political knowledge over all other knowledge. But the American philosopher overlooked the fact that Chinese society, his host so many times, constitutes in itself a much more striking and up-to-date empirical argument for his purpose. And it is that in the millennial history of China, the interest in truth, unlike the peoples of the West, was never as important as that of ordering and governing its immeasurable population (take as an example the pre-eminence and multi-million dollar export of the philosophy of Confucius, oriented in that direction, through the homonymous institutes).
Only in its recent “material phase or stage” —to put it in the terms of this sophisticated and futuristic socialist state, like no other of its kind—, with the enormous economic resources it manages, has it been able to redirect its course somewhat, in the development of the entire spectrum of philosophy, imitating in principle the Western way of doing philosophy, but persistently seeking to contribute that original turn or revolution, either through Chinese academics themselves, or through their foreign partners collaborating in the territory.
In any case, the incorporation of the political into the equation of the philosophy of technology —which, to be fair, has been worked on for quite some time by the Americans of the Mexican nation— is a milestone in the history of philosophy with a much broader scope than its authors anticipated, since it is at the same time the incorporation of the technological into political philosophy, which opens the doors to the transcendence of modern political philosophy initiated by Machiavelli and Hobbes. Knowledge is, yes, power, as Bacon maintained. But power is also knowledge. Who can refute that a fashionable idea can become popular, regardless of its intrinsic merit or propensity for truth, whether it is necessary or stupid, original or far-fetched, when one has good connections, a communication platform or some other form of power? What will become of knowledge when, thanks to technology, the most ambitious academics live longer, or their lives can be reproduced more or less exhaustively and transferred to new bodies? Without a doubt, the new great philosophical and antagonistic problem will no longer be, on the human side, technology, but an egocentric Narcissus who will end up emerging, vengeful, to fight the new battle of the cosmos.
-
The content expressed in this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of The Counter.
#political #philosophy #technology #philosophy