Thinking about tech: Technological Determinism

Technology changes the world. Technology improves our lives. Just look at the Black Lives Matters movement. Social Media will drive the change of society to finally get rid of racism. It is the power of social media that drives this change.


	Technology marches in seven-league boots from one ruthless, 
	revolutionary conquest to another, 
	tearing down old factories and industries, 
	flinging up new processes with terrifying rapidity.
    
    by Charles A. Beard

The many grave fallacies in the paragraph above show technological determinism in all its reductionist crudeness. Technological determinism is the belief that technology is the main (positive) force that steers the direction of society. It reduces the full complexity of society to a crude [ technology > societal effect ] vision of history and societal change.


	The Medium is the Message

	by Marshall McLuhan

From left to right, Karl Marx's idea, that fast-changing technologies alter human lives, is pervasive and has become embedded in contemporary society. Technological determinism seeks to show technical developments, media, or technology as a whole, as the key movers in history and social change. Because of its pervasiveness I wanted to write about it as a software developer, a creator of technology.

Though I’m aware of technological determinism, sometimes I also catch myself looking at a piece of tech as the definite answer to many problems. And like myself you can catch a lot of techies and non-techies making the same mistake. Don’t even get me started on the projects where the resulting piece of software is supposed to solve all the problems for a certain group, like a magic bullet.

This doesn’t mean that there’s any reason to be pessimistic. Developers that I’ve met are generally not technological deterministic. They’ve heard the discontented human outcries from within companies more than once. The outcries that are often needed to activate those companies to start automating tedious work processes.

Even though it’s such a pervasive worldview, there’s a lot of criticism on technological determinism:

  • First of all, you can take a pessimistic view. The lack of privacy on social media or the threat of nuclear holocaust from nuclear weapons have profound negative effects in society.
  • Reducing the interplay between society, individuals and technology to a cause-and-effect formula does not account for the complexity of our (social) world. (e.g. Saying that twitter has the power to reduce racism, instead of the effort from thousands of people touched by the BLM movement, is a severe lack of recognition of the many lives and factors involved.)
  • There is an implicit notion that those without tech are inferior.
  • There’s a basic question to pose if anything in society can be treated deterministically.
  • Determining that change in society is mainly caused by technology denies the responsibility of humans to shape it.
  • There is no experimental evidence for major deterministic change by technology.

In the end technological determinism is just another view on history and our world. A view that can be contrasted by social determinism, by not determining, by not reducing and many other possibilities. That doesn’t mean that technology can’t be a power unto its own. Social media has added and sometimes altered the interaction between peers, not possible without the tech. Still I hope that at your (next) software project you'll be able to recognize arguments or visions that seem all too close to technological determinism.

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