A Magnificent Bribe
Cover. Crow Indian [2007]. Artwork: Four Pack 1
Preface
This text is an excerpt from In The Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations [1991] by American activist and author Jerry Irwin Mander [1936-2023].
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Synopsis
In his 1978 bestseller, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Jerry Mander argued that television is, by its very nature, a harmful technology. The trouble with television is not a matter of content, as the current debate suggests, it goes deeper than that. Whether one watches children's programming on public television or violent, late-night crime dramas, the effects are essentially the same, Mander said: the medium itself acts a visual intoxicant, entrancing the viewer and thereby replacing other forms of knowledge with the imagery of its programmers. Television's effects on young children are especially deleterious, Mander insisted, since it infuses them with high-tech, high-speed expectations of life and separates them from their natural environments. We cannot hope to understand television, Mander concluded, without looking at the totality of its effects.
In the Absence of the Sacred, Jerry Mander takes this argument a step further by examining our relationship to technology as a whole. Mander takes issue with the widespread notion that technology is neutral and that only people determine whether its effects are good or bad. 'This idea would be merely preposterous if it were not so widely accepted, and so dangerous,' he writes. Because technologies contain certain inherent qualities, they are not neutral. In the case of nuclear energy, for example, it doesn't matter who is in charge because the dangers inherent in the process are the same: the long- term effects of waste, the safety hazards, the lack of local controls, etc.
The belief that technology is neutral is only one aspect of what Mander calls 'the pro-technology paradigm' — 'a system of perceptions that make us blind and passive when it comes to technology.' It's a cultural mindset that has emerged over time as we've become more and more accustomed to living with technology. It's also a product of the optimistic, even utopian, claims that invariably accompany the introduction of new technology. Another factor contributing to our passivity in the face of technology, Mander contends, is the habit of evaluating it in strictly personal terms. By stressing the benefits of technology in our personal lives - the machine vacuums our carpets, the television keeps us informed, the car gets us around, the computer allows us to work from home, etc. - we make little attempt to understand its larger societal and ecological consequences.
What we need, in Mander's view, is a society-wide debate about the costs of technology - economically, socially, environmentally, and in terms of public health. 'In a truly democratic society,' he writes 'any new technology would be subject to exhaustive debate. That a society must retain the option of declining a technology - if it deems it harmful — is basic. As it is now, our spectrum of choice is limited to mere acceptance. The real decisions about technological introduction are made only by one segment of society: the corporate, based strictly on considerations of profit.'
Mander sees a close connection between the advances of modern technological society and the plight of indigenous peoples around the world. Since the dawn of the technological era, he says, the only consistent opposition has come from land-based native peoples. Rooted in an alternative view of the planet, Indians, islanders, and peoples of the North have not only warned of the dangers of technology, they have also been its most direct victims. Mander illustrates this point with numerous examples, from Hopi-Navajo territory, where the government is forcing people off their ancestral land to make room for coal strip-mining; to Hawaii, where Native Hawaiians are struggling to save their sacred Pele, the islands, from geothermal drilling and destruction caused by bombing by NATO ships; to Death Valley, where the Western Shoshone fight for a reservation even though they never ceded any of their land to the United States, where they struggle against military pressure to keep nuclear missiles from being placed near their homes; and to the Great Plains, where the Lakota people refuse to accept a $300 million federal offer for the Black Hills. 'That technological society should ignore and suppress native voices is understandable, since to heed them would suggest we must fundamentally change our way of life. Instead, we say they must change. They decline to do so.'
According to Mander, we are in the midst of 'an epic worldwide struggle' between the forces of Western economic development and the remaining native peoples of the planet, whose presence obstructs their progress. The ultimate outcome of this conflict is not hard to predict given that the technological juggernaut inevitably chews up the societies that warn that this path will not work. 'Worst of all,' Mander concludes, 'these are the very people who are best equipped to help us out of our fix, if only we'd let them be and listen to what they say.'
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Introduction
'Indians Shmindians'
Telephone call from a New York editor:
Editor:
Mander, you've got two books out there now; they're both selling. Are you working on anything new?
Mander:
Yes.
Editor:
What's the subject?
Mander:
Indians.
Editor:
Indians? Oh God, not Indians. Nobody wants a book about Indians. Indians have been done in New York; they're finished. Indians shmindians.
Mander:
That's the point. The Indian problem is not over. In some parts of the world it's worse than it was here.
Editor:
Indians! Mander, you're some kind of goddamn romantic. Like Brando or somebody.
Mander:
Don't worry, I'll deal with that 'romantic' thing in the book.
Editor:
How's your agent going to sell it? Indian books don't sell.
Mander:
They said that about TV books. Anyway, Indian books do sell. Look at Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and look at Castaneda and Peter Matthiessen's books. Look at Black Elk Speaks. I don't think Indians are a passe subject at all. People do want to know about Indians. The trouble is that people are told mainly about dead Indians. They don't get to hear about what's going on now, or why.
Editor:
What's the title?
Mander:
Maybe I'll use your title.
Editor:
What title is that?
Mander:
Indians Shmindians. It's got a catchy paradoxical ring to it. It's memorable, it's sensational, and it does seem to summarise our cultural attitude.
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Originally, I planned to write two books. The first was to be a critique of technological society as we know it in the United States, a kind of sequel to Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Instead of concentrating on TV, though, it would have focused on the new technological age: 'the information society,' computerisation, robotisation, space travel, artificial intelligence, genetics, satellite communications. This seemed timely, since these technologies are changing our world at an astoundingly accelerating rate. Thus far, most people view these changes as good. But are they?
That our society would tend to view new technologies favourably is understandable. The first waves of news concerning any technical innovation are invariably positive and optimistic. That's because, in our society, the information is purveyed by those who stand to gain from our acceptance of it: corporations and their retainers in the government and scientific communities. None is motivated to report the negative sides of new technologies, so the public gets its first insights and expectations from sources that are clearly biased.
Over time, as successive generations of idealised technical innovations are introduced and presented at World's Fairs, in futurists' visions, and in hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of advertising, we develop expectations of a technological utopia here on Earth and in great domed cities in space. We begin to equate technological evolution with evolution itself, as though the two were equally inevitable, and virtually identical. The operating homilies become 'Progress is good,' 'There's no turning back,' and 'Technology will free humans from disease, strife, and unremitting toil.'
Debate on these subjects is inhibited by the fact that views of technology in our society are nearly identical across the political and social spectrum. The Left takes the same view of technology as do corporations, futurists, and the Right. Technology, they all say, is neutral. It has no inherent politics, no inevitable social or environmental consequences. What matters, according to this view, is who controls technology.
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'That our society would tend to view new technologies favourably is understandable. The first waves of news concerning any technical innovation are invariably positive and optimistic. That's because, in our society, the information is purveyed by those who stand to gain from our acceptance of it: corporations and their retainers in the government and scientific communities. None is motivated to report the negative sides of new technologies, so the public gets its first insights and expectations from sources that are clearly biased.'
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I have attended dozens of conferences in the last ten years on the future of technology. At every one, whether sponsored by government, industry, or environmentalists or other activists, someone will address the assembly with something like this: 'There are many problems with technology and we need to acknowledge them, but the problems are not rooted to the technologies themselves. They are caused by the way we have chosen to use them. We can do better. We must do better. Machines don't cause problems, people do.' This is always said as if it were an original and profound idea, when actually everyone else is saying exactly the same thing.
As we will see, the idea that technology is neutral is itself not neutral - it directly serves the interests of the people who benefit from our inability to see where the juggernaut is headed.
I only began to glimpse the problem during the 1960s when I saw how excited our society became about the presumed potentials of television. Activists, like everyone else, saw the technology opportunistically, and began to vie with other segments of society for their twenty seconds on the network news. A kind of war developed for access to this powerful new instrument that spoke pictures into the brains of the whole population, but the outcome was predetermined. We should have realised it was a foregone conclusion that TV technology would inevitably be controlled by corporations, the government, and the military.
Because of the technology's geographic scale, its cost, the astounding power of its imagery, and its ability to homogenise thought, behavior, and culture, large corporations found television uniquely efficient for ingraining a way of life that served [and still serves] their interests. And in times of national crisis, the government and military find TV a perfect instrument for the centralised control of information and consciousness. Meanwhile, all other contenders for control of the medium have effectively fallen by the wayside.
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'Because of the technology's geographic scale, its cost, the astounding power of its imagery, and its ability to homogenise thought, behavior, and culture, large corporations found television uniquely efficient for ingraining a way of life that served [and still serves] their interests. And in times of national crisis, the government and military find TV a perfect instrument for the centralised control of information and consciousness. Meanwhile, all other contenders for control of the medium have effectively fallen by the wayside.'
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Now we have the frenzy over computers, which, in theory, can empower individuals and small groups and produce a new information democracy. In fact, as we will see in Chapter 4, the issue of who benefits most from computers was already settled when they were invented. Computers, like television, are far more valuable and helpful to the military, to multinational corporations, to international banking, to governments, and to institutions of surveillance and control - all of whom use this technology on a scale and with a speed that are beyond our imaginings - than they ever will be to you and me.
Computers have made it possible to instantaneously move staggering amounts of capital, information, and equipment throughout the world. giving unprecedented power to the largest institutions on the earth. In fact, computers make these institutions possible. Meanwhile, we use our personal computers to edit our copy and hook into our information networks - and believe that makes us more powerful.
Even environmentalists have contributed to the problem by failing to effectively criticise technical evolution despite its obvious. growing, and inherent bias against nature. I fear that the ultimate direction of technology will become vividly clear to us only after we have popped out of the 'information age' - which does have a kind of benevolent ring - and realise what is at stake in the last two big 'wilderness intervention' battlegrounds: space and the genetic structures of living creatures. From there, it's on to the 'postbiological age' of nanotechnology and robotics, whose advocates don't even pretend to care about the natural world. They think it's silly and out of date.
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'Until now we have been impotent in the face of the juggernaut, partly because we are so unpracticed in technological criticism. We don't really know how to assess new or existing technologies. It is apparent that we need a new, more holistic language for examining technology, one that would ignore the advertised claims, best-case visions, and glamorous imagery that inundate us and systematically judge technology from alternative perspectives: social, political, economic, spiritual, ecological, biological, military.'
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Until now we have been impotent in the face of the juggernaut, partly because we are so unpracticed in technological criticism. We don't really know how to assess new or existing technologies. It is apparent that we need a new, more holistic language for examining technology, one that would ignore the advertised claims, best-case visions, and glamorous imagery that inundate us and systematically judge technology from alternative perspectives: social, political, economic, spiritual, ecological, biological, military. Who gains? Who loses? Do the new technologies serve planetary destruction or stability? What are their health effects? Psychological effects? How do they affect our interaction with and appreciation of nature? How do they interlock with existing technologies? What do they make possible that could not exist before? What is being lost? Where is it all going? Do we want that?
In the end, we can see that technological evolution is leading to something new: a worldwide, interlocked, monolithic, technical-political web of unprecedented negative implications.
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Part One
Questions We Should Have Asked About Technology
Modern technology advanced in such tiny increments for so long that we never realised how such our world was being altered, or the ultimate direction of the process. But now the speed of change is accelerating logarithmically. It is apparent that developing a language and set of standards by which to assess technological impact, and to block it where necessary, is a critical survival skill of our times.
Given the celebratory claims of the 1940s and 1950s [and since] concerning the utopia that would result if our society vaulted itself into the new technological age, it's clear that we need some standards of measurement to compare the claims with the results. If even a small percent of the expectations had proven true, we'd be well on the way to becoming the first industrial-technological-scientific paradise on Earth.
Over the last fifty years, new technologies have been advertised as enhancing happiness, freedom, empowerment, health, and physical comfort; or else as reducing toil, while also providing jobs, serving democracy, and making life more beautiful and pleasant. Over time the aggregate of such assertions created our technotopian fantasies of unlimited expectations. We believed them in the 1940s and 1950s, and we still believe them now. But have these promises been realised? And by what standards do we judge the success or the failure of the path we have followed?
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'Over the last fifty years, new technologies have been advertised as enhancing happiness, freedom, empowerment, health, and physical comfort; or else as reducing toil, while also providing jobs, serving democracy, and making life more beautiful and pleasant. Over time the aggregate of such assertions created our technotopian fantasies of unlimited expectations. We believed them in the 1940s and 1950s, and we still believe them now. But have these promises been realised?'
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I suppose that in order to be considered even minimally successful, a society must keep its population healthy, peaceful, and contented. All members should have sufficient food to eat, a place to live, and a sense of participation in a shared community purpose. Everyone should have access to the collective wisdom and knowledge of the society, and should expect that life will be spiritually and emotionally fulfilling for themselves and for future generations. This in turn implies awareness, care, and respect for the earth's life-support systems.
Obviously, anyone could quibble about certain points on this list, or wish to add others, but to me they seem to be a basic minimum. And since it's been for roughly half a century that this technological vision has been aggressively hyped, now is a good time to compare its promise with its performance.
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People who celebrate technology say it has brought us an improved standard of living, which means greater speed [people can travel faster and obtain more objects and information sooner], greater choice [often equated with freedom of choice, which usually refers to the ability to choose among jobs and commodities], greater leisure [because technology has supposedly eased the burden and time involved in work], and greater luxury [more commodities and increased material comfort].
None of these benefits informs us about human satisfaction, happiness, security, or the ability to sustain life on Earth. Perhaps getting places more quickly makes some people more contented or fulfilled, but I'm not so sure. Nor am I convinced that greater choice of commodities in the marketplace qualifies as satisfying compared with, say, love and friendship and meaningful work. Nor do I believe that choice equals 'freedom,' if one defines the latter as a sense that one has true control over one's own mind and experience.
As for leisure, I believe that what passes for leisure in our society is actually time-filling: watching television or buying things. Many writers have argued that given the consequences of automation and robotics, most free time may soon be spent searching for increasingly scarce jobs. And as Marshall Sahlins* and others have pointed out, stone-age societies had more than twice the amount of leisure time we do today, which they used to pursue spiritual matters, personal relationships, and pleasure. Finally, people such as Ivan Illich have said that if you include the time needed to earn money to pay for and repair all the expensive 'time-saving' gadgets in our lives, modern technology actually deprives us of time.
* Marshall David Sahlins [1930 - 2021]. An American cultural anthropologist best known for his ethnographic work in the Pacific - for decades, he studied the history and ethnography of communities in Hawaii, Fiji and other islands in the South Pacific during the period of European contact - and for his prolific contributions to anthropological theory.
In addition to improved standard of living, another argument for the success of the technological path concerns the contributions of modern medicine. There is no disagreeing that modern medicine, though it has not produced eternal life as was predicted by the world's fairs of the 1940s [and now the 1990s], has contributed to longevity. Combined with antibiotic technology, sanitation, and improved diagnostics, modern medicine has improved life expectancy in the technologically advanced parts of the world.
On the other hand, critics such as Illich* argue that modern medicine may be a double-edged sword. By separating people from traditional holistic self-care practices, and by dubious medical interventions with drugs and surgery, modern medicine may cause as much disease as it cures. Other critics suggest that Western medicine cannot be separated from the whole web of technologies that are its parents and children: computers, certain reproductive interventions, biotechnology, and genetics, all of which are problematic in some way. Still others say that length of life is meaningless as compared with quality of life, which, due to increasing pollution and devastation brought on by technological overdevelopment, is now in sharp decline. The trend toward longer life may soon be reversed.
* Ivan Dominic Illich [1926 - 2002]. An Austrian Roman Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, and social critic. His 1971 book Deschooling Society criticises modern society's institutional approach to education, an approach that constrains learning to narrow situations in a fairly short period of the human lifespan. His 1975 book Medical Nemesis argues that industrialised society widely impairs quality of life by overmedicalising life, pathologising normal conditions, creating false dependency, and limiting other more healthful solutions.
But conceding that technology, on the whole, aids longer life and that this is good, what other measurements exist? How else can we assess the impact of the technological path upon happiness, security, contentment, well-being, and a sense of faith in the future? These are very difficult to measure, but some statistics from U.S. agencies may tell us something, at least about the level of personal contentment in this country. Though the figures vary for other Western nations-crime statistics, for example, are far lower in many countries - I think it is relevant to offer these numbers, since the U.S. has been the mecca for technological expansion in this half-century, and we have been its primary missionaries and salespeople, at least until the recent emergence of the Japanese.
• According to figures from the San Francisco-based independent nonprofit National Council on Crime and Delinquency, the rate of criminal activity in the U.S. sharply increased in the period following World War II. By 1989, the national murder rate had reached more than 30,000 per year. If you are a young black man in America, you are more likely to die by homicide than in any other way. If you are a woman, you have one chance in five of being raped in your lifetime, and one chance in three that you suffered sexual molestation as a child.
• 1990 figures published by another independent research group, The Sentencing Project, reported that the U.S. prison population has passed the 1 million mark. That represents a higher per capita rate of incarceration than any country in the world. [South Africa is second; the Soviet Union is third.] If you add to these figures the number of people in the U.S. in juvenile detention or on parole, or in other controlled situations such as halfway houses, the total figure is nearly 1 .5 million.
• As has been widely reported, suicide and drug use in the U.S., especially among young people, are at epidemic levels and growing. [This is also true in most parts of the industrialised world.] In 1990, the National Institute of Mental Health [NIMH] reported that suicide was the third leading cause of death among young people, ages 15 to 24.
• The U.S. Census Bureau's 1988 figures indicated that more than I3 percent of the U.S. population [about 32 million people] is officially classified as living in poverty. The Bureau also said that I7·5 percent lived 'below 125 percent of the poverty level'; that is, at nearly the poverty level. The Harvard-based Physician Task Force on Hunger in America has estimated, based on National Academy of Science standards, that more than 20 million Americans 'are chronically undernourished.'
• The Census Bureau also reported that, as of 1989, 13 percent of the U.S. population [32 million people] had no health insurance.
• The National Coalition of Homeless People estimates that in late I990 about 3 million Americans were homeless.
• According to the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, approximately 27 percent of all Americans are 'functionally illiterate.'
• And the Public Citizen Health Research Group reports that about '25 percent of American hospital beds are filled by mental patients.' The National Institute of Mental Health's Office of Scientific Information reported, in March 1990, that '28 million American adults, over 18 years old, suffer some mental disorder during a given six-month period.' About I6 million suffer 'anxiety disorders,' 10 million suffer 'depressive disorders,' and about 2 million are classified as schizophrenics.
Whatever else can be said about these statistics, they are surely not indications of general contentment, or that human needs are being satisfied.
Of course, some people are doing well. According to the U.S. Federal Reserve, the top IO percent of American families-whose incomes exceed $50,000 per year-own 78 percent of all private business, 86 percent of municipal bonds, 50 percent of real estate, and 72 percent of corporate stock. So much for the egalitarian aspects of rapid technological expansion.
I believe an objective observer - an anthropologist from Mars, perhaps -would conclude that our society is not functioning very well. Considering the violence, self-destruction, drug abuse, insanity, unequal distribution of wealth, and failure to provide freedom from fear, an observer would surely label the whole situation a failure. Can we blame technology for this? Only partly. But given that the promoters of technology claimed it would solve precisely these problems, it is worth noting how short of utopia the machines have left us - and, as we will see, how many problems technology has actually caused.
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'I believe an objective observer ... would conclude that our society is not functioning very well. Considering the violence, self-destruction, drug abuse, insanity, unequal distribution of wealth, and failure to provide freedom from fear, an observer would surely label the whole situation a failure. Can we blame technology for this? Only partly. But given that the promoters of technology claimed it would solve precisely these problems, it is worth noting how short of utopia the machines have left us....'
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Perhaps more to the point are the considerations of environmental degradation [now a worldwide phenomenon] that are unarguably related to the growth of technology. Only within the last decade, just as technical expansion is reaching its zenith, has the world awakened to realise that toxic pollution is out of control, that the world's forest cover is being eliminated, and that the habitats of the remaining species of plants and animals are disappearing. We have seen the emergence of new technology-related caused diseases and a rapid growth in the cancer rate. We have seen major disasters in places such as Bhopal, India; Love Canal and Times Beach; Valdez, Alaska, and the Persian Gulf; Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. And now we are witnessing the first clear planetary breakdown of the earth's life-support systems: air and water contamination, holes in the ozone layer, and global warming, all effects predicted by environmentalists for many years, but ignored in the technological frenzy.
Considering all this, don't we have sufficient evidence to draw some humbling conclusions? Given that technology was supposed to make life better, and given its apparent failure in both the social and the environmental spheres, shouldn't reason dictate that we sharply question the wild claims we have accepted about technology? Lewis Mumford* said that the 'horn of plenty,' i.e., the unlimited material goods that technological society promises, qualifies as a 'magnificent bribe' meant to get us to overlook what has been lost in the bargain. Isn't it time for a society-wide debate on whether the costs-economic, social, health-related, and environmental-are justified, especially as the benefits [speed, leisure, length of life, commodities] are so marginal and perhaps superficial?
* Lewis Mumford [1895 - 1990]. An American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer.
No such debate is taking place, and no such conclusions have been drawn. Bizarre claims as to the alleged benefits of new technologies continue to proliferate. We still hear that new generations of machines will solve the problems left by prior generations of machines. We still hear predictions that a new era of health, comfort, security, leisure, and happiness is just around the corner if only we deepen our commitment to technology.
The operating homilies remain the same: 'You can't stop progress.' '"Once the genie is out of the bottle you cannot put it back.' 'Technology is here to stay, so we have to find ways to use it better.' In reality, these are all rationalisations to cover up a culture-wide passivity; a failure to take a hard look at technology in all of its dimensions, or to draw the obvious conclusions from the evidence at hand.
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Ingredients of the Pro-Technology Paradigm
In The Whale and the Reactor; Langdon Winner calls our current condition 'technological somnambulism [walking in one's sleep or under hypnosis].' He goes on:
The most interesting puzzle in our times is that we so willingly sleepwalk through the process for reconstituting the conditions of human existence .... Why is it that the philosophy of technology has never really gotten under way? Why has a culture so firmly based upon countless sophisticated instruments, techniques, and systems remained so steadfast in its reluctance to examine its own foundations? ... In the twentieth century it is usually taken for granted that the only reliable sources for improving the human condition stem from new machines, techniques and chemicals. Even the recurring environmental and social ills that have accompanied technological advancement have rarely dented this faith .... We are seldom inclined to examine, discuss or judge pending innovations .... In the technical realm we repeatedly enter into a series of social contracts, the terms of which are revealed only after the signing.
Our passivity to the technological juggernaut has been ongoing for millennia. Some find its roots in agriculture and husbandry. Others cite the emergence of patriarchy. And there is surely a case that the scientific revolution, which articulated a mechanistic view of nature and humanity, altered the prevailing views of life and encouraged fascination with and dependence upon the machine. Whatever the historical roots, we are now embedded in a system of perceptions that make us blind and passive when it comes to technology. I think the following factors are major contributors to the problem.
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Dominance of Best-Case Scenarios
The most obvious problem is the manner in which technology is introduced to us. The first waves of description are invariably optimistic, even utopian. This is because in capitalist societies all early descriptions of new technologies come from their inventors and the people who stand to gain from their acceptance. Whether in advertisements, public-relations presentations, or at landmark events such as World's Fairs, the information we are given describes the technologies solely in terms of their best-case use. This is so even when the inventors have significant knowledge of terrible downside possibilities.
It is logical that inventors and corporate and government rnarketers present only idealised, glamorised versions of technology, since they have no stake in the public being even dimly aware of negative potentials - the worst-case scenarios - though negative results are at least as likely to occur as positive results. Nuclear power is the single exception to this pattern. It has had a somewhat rougher road than other technologies because the public was aware of its worst-case potentials from the moment we first heard about it, at Hiroshima. If we had known the worst-case potentials of television, or automobiles, or computers, or pesticides, or robotics, or genetics, doubts might have emerged about those technologies as well, and thus slowed their progress.
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Technology's Pervasiveness and Invisibility
Marshall McLuhan* told us to think of all technology in environmental terms because of the way it envelops us and becomes difficult to perceive. From morning to night we walk through a world that is totally manufactured, a creation of human invention. We are surrounded by pavement, machinery, gigantic concrete structures. Automobiles, airplanes, computers, appliances, television, electric lights, artificial air have become the physical universe with which our senses interact. They are what we touch, observe, react to. They are themselves 'information,' in that they shape how we think and, in the absence of an alternate reality [i.e., nature], what we think about and know.
* Herbert Marshall McLuhan CC [1911 - 1980]. A Canadian philosopher and communication theorist whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory - arguing that modern electronic communications [including radio, television, films, and computers] would have far-reaching sociological, aesthetic, and philosophical consequences, to the point of actually altering the ways in which we experience the world - and who coined the phrase 'the medium is the message.
As we relate to these objects of our own creation, we begin to merge with them and assume some of their characteristics.
Workers on an assembly line, for example, must function at the speed of the line, submitting to its repetitive physical and mental demands. When we drive a car, we are forced to focus our minds and bodily reactions on being at one with the road and the machine: following the curves, moving through the landscape at appropriate speeds. The more we spend our lives in this manner, the more these interactions define the perimeters of our experience and vision. They become the framework of our awareness.
There is a paradox, however. Because technology is now everywhere apparent, pervasive, and obvious, we lose awareness of its presence. While we walk on pavement, or drive on a freeway, or sit in a shopping mall, we are unaware that we are enveloped by a technological and commercial reality, or that we are moving at technological speed. We live our lives in reconstructed, human-created environments; we are inside manufactured goods.
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'Because technology is now everywhere apparent, pervasive, and obvious, we lose awareness of its presence. While we walk on pavement, or drive on a freeway, or sit in a shopping mall, we are unaware that we are enveloped by a technological and commercial reality, or that we are moving at technological speed. We live our lives in reconstructed, human-created environments; we are inside manufactured goods.'
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We do not easily grasp technology from the outside, or, in McLuhan's terms, 'extraenvironmentally.' And once we accept life within a technically mediated reality, we become less aware of anything that preceded it. We have a hard time imagining life before television or cars. We do not remember a United States of mainly forests and quiet. The information that nature offers to our minds and to our senses is nearly absent from our lives. If we do seek out nature, we find it fenced off in a 'park,' a kind of nature zoo. We need to make reservations and pay for entry, like at a movie. It's little wonder that we find incomprehensible any societies that choose to live within nature.
With each new generation of technology, and with each stage of technological expansion into pristine environments, human beings have fewer alternatives and become more deeply immersed within technological consciousness. We have a harder time seeing our way out. Living constantly inside an environment of our own invention, reacting solely to things we ourselves have created, we are essentially living inside our own minds.
Where evolution was once an interactive process between human beings and a natural, unmediated world, evolution is now an interaction between human beings and our own artifacts. We are essentially coevolving with ourselves in a weird kind of intraspecies incest. At each stage of the cycle the changes come faster and are more profound. The web of interactions among the machines becomes more complex and more invisible, while the total effect is more powerful and pervasive. We become ever more enclosed and ever less aware of that fact. Our environment is so much a product of our invention that it becomes a single worldwide machine. We live inside it, and are a piece of it.
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Limitations of the Personal View
Technological change proceeds on so many fronts simultaneously, with new technologies constantly interweaving to create new potentialities, that there is no single focus, no center at which we can direct simple, piercing questions to help us understand how it all works. The scale and complexity of these technologies [such as the worldwide system of 'satellites' and computers that enables banks and development agencies to instantaneously reallocate financial resources anywhere on Earth] make it difficult for us to grasp the big picture in assessing any individual technology. Failing to see how machines connect, we are like the blind man seeking to describe the elephant by feeling its ankle.
Unable to see the whole creature, we tend to define technology on a scale we can manage. We think of it in personal terms, based on our own interactions with it. We use machines in our lives and evaluate them in terms of their usefulness to us personally. The machine vacuums our carpets. The car drives easily and well. The television entertains us. The microwave cooks dinner in a flash. The computer helps us do our work. We make little attempt to fathom the multiplicity of effects that computers or television or microwave ovens or cars may have on society or on nature. Nor do we think about how the technological march is affecting the planet. As a result, we are left with a view of technology's impact that is much too personal and narrow.
It is perfectly natural to view machines this way. I too tend to think of my machinery in personal, visceral terms. I had a 1968 Volvo for fifteen years; it never had a serious breakdown. I wrote the television book on an old Underwood upright typewriter; it was a solid, perfectly performing machine. I now use an old IBM Selectric, also excellent.
When I work with these machines or speak on the telephone or use the copying machine or drive my car, I do not stop and recite the social, political, cultural, or health-related consequences of my actions. I use the machines as anyone does. That's the way the world is right now, though I would prefer it were not. It would be nearly impossible to function if one were constantly questioning a machine's effect in society at large: how it changes power arrangements, who gains and who loses because of its existence, how it affects the global environment.
When we use a computer we don't ask if computer technology makes nuclear annihilation more or less possible, or if corporate power is increased or decreased thereby. While watching television, we don't think about the impact upon the tens of millions of people around the world who are absorbing the same images at the same time, nor about how TV homogenises minds and cultures. When we drive our car we don't think about how pavement suppresses the life beneath it. If we have criticisms of technology they are usually confined to details of personal dissatisfaction. Rarely do we consider the overall political, social, spiritual, or economic effects upon our country or the world.
There is an antidote for this problem: the creation of a truly holistic mode of analysing technology, which would give greater importance to its multidimensional effects rather than its individual benefits.
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The Inherent Appeal of the Machine
In Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television I discussed encounters between animals and certain technologies. The deer becomes fixated at oncoming headlights. The fish stares at the face mask of the diver who spears it. I used these examples because I felt they suggested something of our condition in Western society. We are hypnotised by the newness of the machine, dazzled by its flash and impressed with its promise. We do not have the instinct as yet to be fearful, or to doubt.
Partly, this is a problem with our genetic inclination. For thousands of generations our survival depended upon our keen attunement to the events in our environment. We gave particular attention to unusual or new developments: changes in animal behavior, unusual footprints, extraordinary weather. Perhaps these presented new dangers, perhaps opportunities.
In the relatively few years in which we have accelerated our separation from nature, our genetic and sensory evolution has not been able to keep pace with the evolution of the machine. In our new, techno-oriented habitat, we have not yet noticed that the information of our senses is no longer invariably accurate. Three hundred years ago, if humans saw a flock of birds flying southward, they could count on the fact that the birds were actually doing that, and reliably draw conclusions. But since the introduction of moving-image media, the information of our senses [our eyes, in particular], which we have always believed is accurate ['seeing is believing'], may not be.
The edited, re-created, re-enacted, sped-up, slowed-down, manufactured imagery we see on television or in film is not in the same category of imagery as birds we see in the sky. Failing to make that distinction, we believe what we see in the media is as true and reliable as the unmediated information from nature, which offers great opportunities to advertisers, program directors, and politicians. In giving such trust to media imagery, we are relying upon our genetic inclination to pay rapt attention to, and believe, whatever is new and unusual in our visual plain, just like the deer staring at the headlight.
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'The edited, re-created, re-enacted, sped-up, slowed-down, manufactured imagery we see on television or in film is not in the same category of imagery as birds we see in the sky. Failing to make that distinction, we believe what we see in the media is as true and reliable as the unmediated information from nature, which offers great opportunities to advertisers, program directors, and politicians. In giving such trust to media imagery, we are relying upon our genetic inclination to pay rapt attention to, and believe, whatever is new and unusual in our visual plain, just like the deer staring at the headlight.'
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Similarly, as suggested in the previous section, we assume that by observing a machine's performance personally we can understand its full implications. But the human species has not had sufficient experience, and absolutely no training, to enable us to understand from our own experience the effects the machine might have over time, or on a wider scale. Compounding this problem is the fact that every technology presents itself in the best possible light. Each technology is invented for a purpose and it announces itself, as it were, in these terms. It arrives on the scene as a 'friend,' promising to solve a problem. This machine will move water from here to there. This one will bring down an animal at 400 yards. This will move a boat through water at high speed. This will kill insects that destroy our food. This one will light a city. All of these are attractive possibilities. There is an inherent appeal in the very existence of machines that have such promise.
What's more, the new machines actually do what they promise to do, which leaves us feeling pleased and impressed. It is not until much later, after a technology has been around for a while - bringing with it other compatible technologies, altering economic arrangements and family and community life, affecting culture, and having unpredictable impact on the land - that societies both familiar and unfamiliar with the machine begin to realise that a Faustian* bargain has been made. But by then the situation is difficult to alter. What to do about this? How to counterbalance the apparent appeal of the machine? Practice skepticism!
* Faustian Bargain [n.]. Also called a Deal with the Devil or a Mephistophelian bargain, a Faustian Bargain is a cultural motif exemplified by the legend of Faust and the figure of Mephistopheles, as well as being elemental to traditional Christian belief about the pact is between a person and the Devil or another demon i.e., trading a soul for diabolical favours, which vary, but tend to include youth, knowledge, wealth, fame and power.
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The Assumption That Technology Is Neutral
No notion more completely confirms our technological somnambulism than the idea that technology contains no inherent political bias. From the political Right and Left, from the corporate world and the world of community activism, one hears the same homily: 'The problem is not with technology itself, but with how we use it, and who controls it.'" This idea would be merely preposterous if it were not so widely accepted, and so dangerous. In believing this, however, we allow technology to develop without analysing its actual bias. And then we are surprised when certain technologies turn out to be useful or beneficial only for certain segments of society.
A prime example is nuclear energy, which cannot possibly move society in a democratic direction, but will move society in an autocratic direction. Because it is so expensive and so dangerous, nuclear energy must be under the direct control of centralised financial, governmental, and military institutions. A nuclear power plant is not something that a few neighbors can get together and build. Community control is anathema ['an accursed thing' or 'thing devoted to evil']. Even control by city or state governments is proving impossible, as is now obvious to those locales attempting to block the movement and disposal of radioactive wastes within their borders.
The existence of nuclear energy, and nuclear weaponry, in turn requires the existence of what Ralph Nader has called a new 'priesthood' - a technical and military elite capable of guarding nuclear waste products for the approximately 250,000 years that they remain dangerous. So if some future society, tiring of the present path, should determine to move away from a centralised technological society and toward, say, an agrarian society, it would he impossible. The technical elite would need to remain, if only to deal with the various wastes left behind. So it is fair to say that nuclear technology inherently steers society toward greater political and financial centralisation, and greater militarisation.
Solar energy, on the other hand, is intrinsically biased toward democratic use. It is buildable and operable by small groups, even by families. It does not require centralised control. It is most cost effective at a small scale of operation, a reason why big power companies oppose it. And solar energy requires no thousand-year commitment from society.
So, where nuclear energy requires centralised control, solar energy functions best in a decentralised form. These attributes are inherent to the technologies and reflect the ideological bias of each.
What is true for energy systems is equally true for other technologies. Each new technology invariably steers society in some social and political direction, by its very nature. Each new technology is compatible with certain political outcomes, and most technology is invented by people who have some specific outcome in mind.
As stated earlier, the idea that technology is neutral is itself not neutral, since it blinds us to the ultimate direction in which we are heading and directly serves the promoters of the centralised technological pathway.
Combined with the best-case scenarios that dominate our information sources, and the way we are enveloped by technical reality, and the seductiveness and flash of the machine, and our tendency to think about technology only in personal terms, the idea of value-free technology confirms a formidable pro-technology mind-set. This, in turn, blinds us to the negative evidence at hand that technotopia has already failed and will only create more problems in the future.
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Part Three
The Importance of the Negative View
In the present climate of technological worship, arguing against technology is not popular. Utter the most minor criticism of technology and you run the risk of being labelled a 'Luddite,' an accusation meant to equate opposition to technology with mindlessness. The reference is to an important anti-technology movement in nineteenth-century England. Huge numbers of workers in cottage industries went on a rampage against the introduction of mass-production equipment, particularly within the textile trades. They invaded factories and destroyed machines. The movement was deemed a sufficient enough threat that the death penalty was established for the destruction of technology.
Given that history, it's little wonder people are not eager to be called Luddites, but Langdon Winner has no such resistance. On a recent radio interview he said, 'I am delighted to be called a Luddite. The position of the Luddites was in every way wise and perceptive. They opposed the imposition of a new economic order, which they predicted would destroy their livelihood and traditions, and lead the world in a destructive direction. They were correct. Their resistance should be an inspiration.'
Then Santa Fe psychologist and author Chellis Glendinning threw down the gauntlet in a 1990 Utne Reader article titled 'Notes toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto':
Neo-Luddites are twentieth-century citizens who question the predominant modern worldview, which preaches that unbridled technology represents progress. Neo-Luddites have the courage to gaze at the full catastrophe of our century .... Western societies are out of control and desecrating the fragile fabric of life on Earth. Like the early Luddites, we too are seeking to protect the livelihoods, communities, and families we love .... Stopping the destruction requires not just regulating or eliminating individual items like pesticides or military weapons. It requires new ways of thinking about humanity and new ways of relating to life. It requires a new worldview.
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'Neo-Luddites are twentieth-century citizens who question the predominant modern worldview, which preaches that unbridled technology represents progress. Neo-Luddites have the courage to gaze at the full catastrophe of our century .... Western societies are out of control and desecrating the fragile fabric of life on Earth. Like the early Luddites, we too are seeking to protect the livelihoods, communities, and families we love ....'
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A small number of people, such as Leopold Kohr, E. F. Schumacher, and David Brower, were willing to seek principles by which to assess the whole direction of technology. 'Smallness' rather than 'bigness' was one such idea. The economics of continued technological growth, on a finite planet, came into question ....
But articulating these principles was slow, and meanwhile the juggernaut was growing out of control. With most environmentalists shy about asserting that each struggle was part of a larger, grander issue, each battle was fought as if isolated from the others. So careful were we not to be thought too radical that we rarely exposed the real problem: a system of logic, and a set of assumptions, that led to the problems of dams, pesticides, nukes, growth, and the rest of it. Meanwhile, industry, the media, and the government were all repeating the mantra that technology serves progress and that progress equals more technology. And at each stage of technical development, we fell more deeply into the techno-maelstrom.
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'Holistic' Criticism
I don't think I realised when I began working on Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television in 1973 that the project was really a stab at creating a new holistic language by which to discuss television and other technologies. It did not even occur to me at the beginning to advocate no television, but merely to broaden the terms used to discuss it, so that all possible dimensions of impact could be included: political, social, economic, biological, perceptual, informational, epistemological, spiritual; its effects upon kids, upon nature, upon power, upon health. A totality of effects, hence a 'holistic' viewpoint.
I did place particular emphasis on the negative potentials of television - the worst-case possibilities -since those were absent from most prior analyses. Whatever criticism of television existed at that time confined itself to the very narrow issues associated with the content of the programs, and ignored the effects of television's existence on society. McLuhan had already told us that 'the medium is the message,' but there was little evidence that people understood what that meant.
McLuhan was saying that program content may not be the only problem, or even the principal problem, with television. The mere existence of television, he said, causes society to be organised in new ways. As information is moved through different channels its character and its content change; political relationships, concepts, and styles change as well. Even the human spirit and human body change. Because of the way television signals are processed in the brain, thought patterns are altered and a unique, new relationship to information is developed: cerebral, out-of-context, passive.
The point of my book was not to argue that there are no good programs on television. It was to point out that the consequences of television's existence in our society are far more significant than its program content. Ergo, the medium is the message. An analysis of television that does not deal with the totality of these effects is not sufficient.
To try and make this difficult point, I originally titled the book Suburbanization of the Mind, changing it later to Freewayization of the Mind. Both titles were attempts to suggest what was happening to the way that we think and understand information in the television age; our minds were being channelled and simplified to match the channelled and simplified physical environment-suburbs, malls, freeways, high-rise buildings-that also characterised that period [and continues to do so today]. This effect would take place, I argued, even if the violence and sex shows and the superficial comedies and the game shows were all removed from the medium, because the process of moving edited images rapidly through a passive human brain was so different from active information gathering, whether from books or newspapers or walks in nature. As a result people would become more passive, less able to deal with nuance and complexity, less able to read or create. People would get 'dumber,'" and have less understanding of world events even within an exploding information environment.
The book predicted that a new kind of leader would emerge from this process, one who fit the parameters of the medium, and who understood its language: simple, assertive, without history or context, with style superior to content. A few years later, Ronald Reagan became the personification of that prediction.
After working on that book for several years, my concept of it evolved, and I considered naming it Cloning of the Already Born, in reference to the way television has homogenised culture throughout the world, a tendency not sufficiently noted by media pundits. Television was engaging all of humanity in similar thought patterns, similar experiences, similar imagery, and a similar context of reality, which was poisonous to diversity of culture. Soon, we would all be more alike, that is, more like Americans living in Holiday Inns.
But then when I'd finally finished the first draft, compiling hundreds of negative points about the medium, I felt television was an even more serious problem than I had first believed. I felt strongly that society would be better off without it. This realisation did not particularly startle me. To believe that society would be better off without a certain technology didn't seem a very radical observation. Obviously some technologies are more harmful than they are beneficial, are they not? Yet many people were shocked, even angry, that I would advocate no television. Why were they so upset? What was the big deal?
I looked into the literature about television to find the names of other writers who had also taken a stance against it. I was startled to learn that nearly 10,000 books had been written about television since 1945, but not one of them argued that our society would be better off without it. Why had nobody ever made such a case?
Here was a technology that entered every home in the [World], brought imagery nightly into every brain for many long hours, reorganised family life, community life, political life, human understanding and experience and, through their advertising and their domination of program content, gave corporations an unprecedented degree of centralised power and control. Yet no one had thought to argue that we might be better off without it. Why? Did everyone really believe that TV was great? Definitely not. But everyone was caught up in the narrow idea that the programs were television's only problem; the solution was simply to produce better programs, to slip new ideas into the medium.
There was yet a deeper resistance. Saying no to a technology, any technology, was [and still is] beyond us. Virtually unthinkable. It does not even occur to most of us that we have the right or ability to turn back a whole technology. No precedent and no support exists for it in our culture.
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'In a truly democratic society, any new technology would be subject to exhaustive debate. That a society must retain the option of declining a technology - if it deems it harmful - is basic. As it is now, our spectrum of choice is limited to mere acceptance. The real decisions about technological introduction are made by only one segment of society: the corporate, based strictly on considerations of profit. This is clearly antithetical to the democratic process.'
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In a truly democratic society, any new technology would be subject to exhaustive debate. That a society must retain the option of declining a technology - if it deems it harmful - is basic. As it is now, our spectrum of choice is limited to mere acceptance. The real decisions about technological introduction are made by only one segment of society: the corporate, based strictly on considerations of profit. This is clearly antithetical to the democratic process.
Finally, I decided to put the idea of eliminating television into the title of the book. My hope was that the existence of such a title - and a plausible argument to support it - would make the unthinkable thinkable, and broaden the spectrum of possibilities. That the book has remained in wide circulation after more than a decade suggests that there are more people than one would expect who find such notions, if not acceptable, at least enticing.
My only regret about the title is that it may encourage some people to believe it's possible to separate TV from the rest of the technological system, as if it were some kind of modular unit. Television cannot be removed while everything else remains. To put it into computer terms, the new technologies are 'compatible' with each other, and combine to create the monolith of technological society. Television has a critical role to play, since it is the instrument that sends out the marching orders. It's the organising tool for those who control society, the way the head communicates with the body. It's a training instrument for new consciousness. To speak of eliminating television without mentioning the other pieces of the puzzle - computers, satellites, genetics, and corporations, among others - leaves the picture incomplete. Woven together, these technologies comprise something beyond what any of them are individually. It is this creature, the whole elephant, 'megatech,' that we must find a way of describing, making visible, and criticising. To do this we must understand each technology, in all of its dimensions, as well as how they all fit together.