[D66] Techno Madness

[R.O.]

  Techno Madness

an overview


        by John Zerzan <https://www.fifthestate.org/fe_author/john-zerzan/>


        Fifth Estate # 403, Spring 2019
        <https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/403-spring-2019/>

We live in a technological life-world, more so by the hour. Our ecology 
is now all too largely technology, which has been irreversible, 
directional, and cumulative. The process that now characterizes 
civilization is a generalized technicization. Its success is measurable 
by how totally it has insinuated itself into society and into our 
consciousness––with grave consequences.

Raymond Tallis put it well: “Once technology penetrated every aspect of 
life and the model of rationality that it exemplified entered human and 
social relations, the ‘disenchantment of the world’ (to use Max Weber’s 
famous phrase) was inevitable.”1 Those who see Capital and the State as 
the only villains to be overcome are very much in the dark.

There are institutions more foundational than those two; first, and most 
basic, is division of labor. The first specialists represented a 
gradient of power in society, a pre-political type of effective 
authority. Specialization is the core feature of the march of 
technology, always strengthening the dominant order while weakening the 
individual. In the 19th century Emile Durkheim, the so-called father of 
sociology, saw division of labor as furthering “organic solidarity,” or 
community.2 In fact, it increases domestication, separation, and 
hierarchy. Durkheim’s utter error in this regard is rivaled only by 
Marx’s notion that herding people into factories––the temples of 
division of labor and domestication––makes them a revolutionary force.

Early on, Marx insisted that the division of labor must be undone, for 
the divided self, as well as divided society, to be healed. Later, 
siding with industrial technology, he abandoned that perspective.3 A 
fateful choice of values.

In today’s world of massified and ever-deepening alienation, we endure 
the results of tech’s triumph. Undergirding this structure is the belief 
that technology will always improve nature, as if nature itself is 
constructed like a technological device. IBM’s long-running advertising 
mantra comes to mind: “Let’s Build a Smarter Planet.” More and more 
technology. And yet environmental catastrophe is arriving.

It is common knowledge that today’s global climate crisis was initiated 
by technology’s great leap forward, the Industrial Revolution. Each 
increase in earth’s over-heating corresponds to an increase in 
industrialization.

Many continue to claim that the meaning or value of technology is 
determined solely by how it is used. In itself, the argument runs, 
technology is neutral, merely a tool to be used for good or ill. But 
this view is false. Every tool, every technology embodies certain values 
and choices, beyond its actual uses. Simple tools, which don’t involve 
much or any division of labor, embody traits like flexibility and 
intimacy. Technological systems, which involve considerable 
specialization, are standardizing and distancing. The use to which 
something is put, while important, is secondary to what the thing is.

Some apply a values yardstick to a particular technology, as critique 
and/or safeguard. Gandhi, for example, represented such ‘primitive’ 
values as simplicity and self-reliance; he held that technology (e.g. 
industrialization) is acceptable if it respects those values. But this 
is akin to saying that cancer is OK, if it respects the host body. The 
logic of cancer and the logic and nature of technology are equivalent.

Martin Heidegger saw technology dominating everything, mobilizing 
everything to its own purposes, and ultimately obliterating 
everything––including thought. There was always some ambiguity, though, 
as Bernard Stiegler has pointed out.4 Heidegger’s late call for a “free 
relation” to technology seemed to say that technology is not the 
problem, rather our attitude or consciousness with respect to 
technology. As if the two can be separated; as if values and choices do 
not inhere in technology itself. Division of labor is not a category of 
mind, but a reality in the actual world, with tangible consequences. As 
is domestication, technology’s next qualitative advance.

Karl Jaspers traveled a somewhat similar road, moving away from his 
earlier diagnosis of technology’s “demonism”5 to the spurious claim that 
is is, after all, merely a neutral means.

More recently, the leftist Alain Badiou characterized Heidegger’s 
(admittedly limited) critique of technology as “uniformly ridiculous,” 
and called for the unleashing of much more tech into the world.6

Donna Haraway has posited technology as key to overcoming patriarchy. We 
must embrace the inevitable merging of human and machine, thereby 
transcending gender differences. This is the gist of her well-known 
“Cyborg” thesis of the 1980s.7 More recently, she has continued to 
uphold the basics of the technosphere; e.g. domestication is “an 
emergent process of cohabiting,”8 and “machines can be…friendly 
selves,”9 technology is “not the enemy,” etc.10 Not far from the 
unhealthy transhumanists’ fantasies.

“The internet is the great masterpiece of human civilization,” announced 
M.I. Franklin.11 In civilization, achievement is more and more a 
technological matter. Technology now makes the claims that, since, the 
Enlightenment, were the province of politics. The bright vista of 
Enlightenment, rational and tolerant Progress, has dimmed altogether. 
Political projections have failed, and technology fills the vacuum. It 
tells us, via constant mass media, that technology is a cornucopia of 
variety and difference. But we live in the most standardized world that 
has ever existed. Technology claims to empower us, but have we ever been 
so disempowered?

Technology connects us. Which is savagely mocked by the reality of a 
landscape without community, one of loneliness, isolation, disappearing 
social ties. From which lethal pathologies emerge: mass shootings, 
rising suicide rates, and the opioid epidemic, among others.

Destiny Domesticated: The Rebirth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of 
Technology, by Jos de Mul (2014) is, sadly, very much to the point. 
Tragedy meaning fate, the “fateful character of technology.”12 As humans 
become ever more deskilled and dependent, one can see a surrender to the 
techno-world, to the totality of this global civilization. But there has 
always been resistance. We are seeing some signs of pushback, as 
technology’s unavoidable consequences are borne in on all of us.


        Notes

1 Raymond Tallis, The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into 
Knowledge and Truth (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 282.

2 Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free 
Press, 1997 [1893]).

3 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1997 [1966]).

4 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford 
University Press, 1998), pp. 7-8.

5 Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957 
[1931]).

6 Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University 
of New York Press, 1999), pp. 53, 54.

7 The cyborg model/destination was a hit with postmodernists, always 
interested in blurring distinctions, in this case between human and 
machine. Lorenzo Simpson’s, Time, Technology and the Conversations of 
Modernity (1995) shows that at base, postmodernism is a function of tech 
dominance. At the 2001 “Taking Nature Seriously” conference (University 
of Oregon), Haraway told me that I’ll get nowhere as an “angry prophet” 
outside the system. That I must be a part of it and “play the game.”

8 Donna J. Haraway, Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis, MN: University of 
Minnesota Press, 2016), p. 122.

9 Ibid., p. 61

10 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham, NC: Duke 
University Press, 2016), p. 3.

11 M.I. Franklin, Digital Dilemmas (New York: Oxford University Press, 
2013), p. 16.

12 Jos de Mul, Destiny Domesticated: The Rebirth of Tragedy out of the 
Spirit of Technology (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2014).

John Zerzan has been a contributor to the /Fifth Estate/ since the 
1970s. He is the author of eight books, the Latest which is /A People’s 
History of Civilization/. *feralhouse.com*. He is the host of the weekly 
“AnarchyRadio” show available through his web site at *JohnZerzan.ne*
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