A tech-attitude taxonomy
I’ve been reading Albert Borgmann lately, and in one essay he describes a set of thinkers he calls “optimistic pessimists” about technology. It got me thinking about how to delineate different positions and postures on technology, particularly digital technology, over the last century. I came up with eleven terms, the sixth one serving as a middle, “neutral” point with five on each side—growing in intensity as they get further from the center. Here they are:
Hucksters: i.e., people who stand to profit from new technologies, or who work to spin and market them regardless of their detrimental effects on human flourishing.
Apostles: i.e., true believers who announce the gospel of new technology to the unconvinced; they win converts by their true faith and honest enthusiasm; they sincerely believe that any and all developments in technology are good and to be welcomed as benefiting the human race in the short-, medium-, and long-term.
Boosters: i.e., writers and journalists in media and academia who toe the line of the hucksters and apostles; they accuse critics and dissenters from the true faith of heresy or, worse, of being on the wrong side of history; they exist as cogs in the tech-evangelistic machine, though it’s never clear why they are so uncritical, since they are rarely either apostles or hucksters themselves.
Optimists: i.e., ordinary people who understand and are sympathetic with thoughtful criticisms of new technologies but who, at the end of the day, passively trust in progress, in history’s forward march, and in the power of human can-do spirit to make things turn out right, including the challenges of technology; they adopt new technology as soon as it’s popular or affordable.
Optimistic pessimists: i.e., trenchant and insightful critics of technopoly, or the culture wrought by technology, who nonetheless argue for and have confidence in the possibility of righting the ship (even, the ship righting itself); another term for this group is tech reformers.
Naive neutrals: i.e., people who have never given a second thought to the challenges or perils of technology, are fundamentally incurious about them, and have no “position” to speak of regarding the topic; in practice they function like optimists or boosters, but lack the presence of considered beliefs on the subject.
Pessimistic optimists: i.e., inevitabilists—this or that new technology may on net be worse for humanity, but there’s simply nothing to do about it; pushing back or writing criticism is for this group akin to a single individual blowing on a forest fire; technological change on this view is materialist and/or deterministic; at most, you try to see it for what it is and manage your own individual life as best you can; at the same time, there’s no reason to be Chicken Little, since this has always been humanity’s lot, and we always find a way to adapt and adjust.
Pessimists: i.e., deep skeptics who see technological development in broadly negative terms, granting that not all of it is always bad in all its effects (e.g., medicine’s improvement of health, extension of life spans, and protection from disease); these folks are the last to adopt a new technology, usually with resentment or exasperation; they hate hucksters and boosters; they are not determinists—they think human society really can make social and political choices about technology ordered toward the common good—but know that determinism almost always wins in practice; their pessimism pushes them to see the downsides or tradeoffs even in the “best” technological developments.
Doomsdayers: i.e., it’s all bad, all the time, and it’s clear as day to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear; the internet is a bona fide harbinger of the apocalypse and A.I. is no-joke leading us to Skynet and the Matrix; the answer to new technology is always, therefore, a leonine Barthian Nein!; and any and all dissents and evidence to the contrary are only so much captivity to the Zeitgeist, heads stuck in the sand, paid-for shilling, or delusional “back to the land” Heidegerrian nostalgia that is impossible to live out with integrity in a digital age.
Opt-outers: i.e., agrarians and urban monastics in the spirit of Wendell Berry, Ivan Illich, and others who pursue life “off the grid” or at least off the internet; they may or may not be politically active, but more than anything they put their money where their mouth is: no TV or wireless internet in the home, no smart phone, no social media, and a life centered on hearth, earth, family, children, the local neighborhood, a farm or community garden, so on and so forth; they may be as critical as pessimists and doomsdayers, but they want to walk the walk, not just talk the talk, and most of all they don’t want the technopoly to dictate whether or not, in this, their one life, it can be a good one.
Resisters: i.e., leaders and foot soldiers in the Butlerian Jihad, whether this be only in spirit or in actual social, material, and political terms (IRL, as they say).
Cards on the table: I’m dispositionally somewhere between #7 and #8, with occasional emotional outbursts of #9, but aspirationally and even once in a while actually a #10.
