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<h1 class="post-title"><font color="B40431">Techno Madness</font></h1>
<font size="5" color="B40431"> an overview <br>
</font>
<h4>by <a href="https://www.fifthestate.org/fe_author/john-zerzan/"
rel="tag">John Zerzan</a></h4>
<h4>Fifth Estate # <a
href="https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/403-spring-2019/">403,
Spring 2019</a></h4>
<p>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. <span
id="more-13568"></span></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h4>Notes</h4>
<p>1 Raymond Tallis, The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry
into Knowledge and Truth (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2005), p. 282.</p>
<p>2 Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York:
Free Press, 1997 [1893]).</p>
<p>3 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1997
[1966]).</p>
<p>4 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1998), pp. 7-8.</p>
<p>5 Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1957 [1931]).</p>
<p>6 Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 53, 54.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>8 Donna J. Haraway, Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2016), p. 122.</p>
<p>9 Ibid., p. 61</p>
<p>10 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2016), p. 3.</p>
<p>11 M.I. Franklin, Digital Dilemmas (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013), p. 16.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<span style="color: #b40431;">John Zerzan has been a contributor to
the <em>Fifth Estate</em> since the 1970s. He is the author of
eight books, the Latest which is <em>A People’s History of
Civilization</em>. <strong>feralhouse.com</strong>. He is the
host of the weekly “AnarchyRadio” show available through his web
site at <strong>JohnZerzan.ne</strong></span>
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