Professional Documents
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TECHNOLOGY
J.M. van der Laan
Narratives of Technology
J.M. van der Laan
Narratives of
Technology
J.M. van der Laan
Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Illinois State University
Normal, Illinois, USA
vii
viii PREFACE
NOTES
1. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 are altered and expanded versions of essays I published
previously in the Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society. They are listed
in the Bibliography at the end of this book.
2. Neil Postman, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century: How the Past
Can Improve Our Future, New York: Vintage Books, 2000, p. 44. All sub-
sequent references to secondary literature will appear parenthetically in the
body of the text with the author’s name and/or abbreviated title and page
number. The same is true for online references. They are all keyed to the
Bibliography.
CONTENTS
2 Narrative and Myth 21
4 A Counter-Narrative 75
ix
x CONTENTS
Bibliography 237
Index 257
CHAPTER 1
With the lever and hammer, we increased our strength, with the wheel
and sail our mobility and range of travel, with irrigation and fertilization our
harvests—to name only a few ways technology has assisted and benefited
us. In addition to the physical or material advantages such technologies
provided, others such as the alphabet and writing—not to mention the
number system—enabled us to extend our mental or intellectual abilities
as well. In one of their essays in the voluminous Technology in Western
Culture, Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll Pursell point out that Homo sapi-
ens, or Man the Thinker, is also and “cannot be distinguished from Homo
faber, Man the Maker” (“Importance of Technology” 8).
From simple beginnings—basic tools of wood and stone for hunting,
fire for warmth and cooking, plant materials and animal skins for clothing,
simple structures built for shelter, and pottery for transportation and stor-
age of goods—we progressed over time to more complex tools, clothing,
structures, and so on. This trajectory has often been written shorthand
with the common labels of historical epochs. As Kranzberg and Purcell
observe, “the very terms by which we measure the progress of civiliza-
tion—Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and even Atomic Age—refer
to a developing technological mastery by means of his environment”
(“Importance of Technology” 8). We call our own time the Information
Age, Digital Age, or Age of Technology per se. Implicit in this categori-
zation and taxonomy is the notion of progress and advance of some sort
from stone to copper, bronze, iron, plastic, and silicon. Typically, we have
identified technology with tools and the kinds of tools we use.
Some of the great milestones or turning points in our technological
advance are as fundamental as agriculture, the number system, the alphabet,
and the wheel. The rise of the city could be mentioned here as well. Other
seminal events include the yoke, the stirrup, the mechanical clock, double-
entry bookkeeping, gunpowder, optics for telescopes and microscopes, the
printing press, the steam engine, the railroad, electricity, the telegraph, the
automobile and airplane, radio and television, plastics, antibiotics, the solid-
state transistor, the silicon computer chip, the personal computer, and the
Internet. There are, of course, many more examples I could cite here.
The path leading to our present technological existence is a long one.
The scientific revolution of the European Renaissance launched by the likes
of Copernicus (1473–1553), Galileo (1564–1642), Kepler (1571–1630),
and Vesalius (1514–1564) helped bring the technological world into being
(Winner, Autonomous Technology 5). With the Industrial Revolution of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, humanity took an enormous step
closer to a life characterized, if not determined, by technology. Arnold
THE REALITY OF TECHNOLOGY 3
Gehlen maintains that there have really only been two watersheds in the
history of technology. That is, there were essentially only two transforma-
tions of technology and our relation to it that fundamentally altered the
individual, society, and culture. The first was the transition from nomadic
hunting and gathering to the settled existence of agriculture and domes-
ticated animals; and the second from that form of life to the introduction
and establishment of industrialism or mechanized industry (Gehlen 94).
Wolfgang Schivelbusch considers the Industrial Revolution to be an epoch
already “permeated and even overwhelmed by technology” (170). By the
end of the nineteenth century, we were well underway to the new world
of technology we would come to inhabit in our own time. Today, tech-
nology is extensive, ubiquitous, and pervasive. As Ray Kurzweil observes,
“computers are diagnosing electrocardiograms and medical images, flying
and landing airplanes, controlling the tactical decisions of automated weap-
ons, making credit and financial decisions, and being given responsibility
for many other tasks that used to require human intelligence” (8). We now
use and rely on technology in every sphere of life: from agriculture, energy,
medicine, telecommunications, and transportation to business, education,
finance, politics, and psychology.
Although we rarely, if ever, think about it, we live in a world saturated by
technology. The actual reach and extent of technology is truly remarkable.
David Nye illumines our situation and deserves to be quoted here at length.
“In everyday life,” he writes,
technologies mediate almost all experience from the moment one awakens
until going to sleep at night. Much of what one sees is subtly shaped by the
spectra of light thrown by different types of bulbs and fluorescent tubes.
The air itself is heated, cooled, or dehumidified according to the needs of the
location and the season. What one hears is muffled, amplified, or otherwise
mediated by man-made materials, and a good deal of this sound is transmit-
ted by radio, stereo, television, computer, or telephone. The shape, texture,
and taste of the orange juice, eggs, coffee, and English muffin one eats for
breakfast have been modified by a myriad practices, including the breeding
and feeding of animals, the use of food additives and preservatives, and the
transformation of raw foodstuffs into products at processing plants. When
leaving in the morning, few people directly experience much of the weather;
they see it through the windows of cars, buses, and trains on the way to
school or work, where “reality” is increasingly defined by telephones and
computer screens. (Technology Matters 194)
A PROVISIONAL DEFINITION
So what exactly is technology? How do we at least begin to define it in order
to know what we are dealing with and talking about? When we speak of tech-
nology today, cell and smart phones, computers and the Internet come to
mind immediately, especially because information technology is at the heart
of technology today, but technology includes tools and machines in general
as well as organizational methods and bureaucratic procedures which estab-
lish regularity or order and maximize efficiency. With this chapter, I do not
offer some new theory or philosophy of technology. Other books perform
that service and, to be honest, a truly new theory or philosophy has not been
published in recent decades. The contours of the discussion have remained
essentially the same over the course of the last half century or so. In con-
sequence, I furnish an epitome of what has been written by some leading
minds about technology and its defining features.
Most people today would use technology itself and turn first to the
Internet, Google, and Wikipedia for a definition of the word. So let us do
the same. Wikipedia reports that
The Wikipedia entry continues, but the opening sentences give a sense of
the wide range of meanings technology can have.
The word “technology” acquired its more or less modern meaning
only a few centuries ago. In London in 1704, John Harris published
his Lexicon Technicum: Or, An Universal English Dictionary of Arts and
Sciences in two volumes. This work must be considered the first techni-
cal dictionary. In “The Preface” to the first edition, he relates some of
the areas he covers: besides methods of calculation and measurement, he
documents “the Laws of Motion,” “the Doctrine of Mechanicks, Nature,
and Properties of Staticks,” “the way of Calculation of Automata, or Clock
and Watch-work” (n.p.). He also describes various tools or “Mathematical
and Philosophical Instruments such as “Telescopes, Microscopes, Baroscopes,
Hygroscopes, and the Pneumatick-Engines, or Air-Pumps” (n.p.). Harris
THE REALITY OF TECHNOLOGY 5
already in the late medieval counting houses and in the rise of capitalism
with its bookkeeping, record-keeping, timing, weighing, and measuring
(Pentagon 278). Likewise, double-entry bookkeeping and the invention of
the first modern stock exchange (probably the Dutch East India Company
in 1602) are, in essence, technologies as are the more recent development
of what are called financial instruments (i.e., tools) and the introduction of
algorithms and robo-trading. According to a recent report in the July 2013
“Index” of Harper’s Magazine, 50 % of all “U.S. stock-market activity is
made up of computer-assisted ‘micro-trades’” (13).
The economy, Arthur observes, arises from its technologies, “from the
productive methods and legal and organizational arrangements that we
use to satisfy our needs” (3). If, and according to Max Weber, capitalism
is the voluntary supply and planned division of labor, the rationalization
of production, and the maximization of efficiency and production, then it
is undeniably technological. Today, capitalism rests upon calculations, sta-
tistics, equations, and numbers which produce returns, gains, or losses for
investors. Planning on a grand scale is necessary for the global economy
with production and markets separated by thousands of miles and depen-
dent upon complex systems of transportation and delivery (whether of
material objects or immaterial information). Profit maximization is noth-
ing other than optimal efficiency—the basic feature of any technology.
Besides, the economy, education, law, or politics are all about strat-
egizing, or calculating, for outcomes. Consider, for instance, the No
Child Left Behind and Race to the Top programs in the USA. In the case
of Race to the Top, the creation of standards and standardized testing
plays a key role; teaching and learning are assessed and measured; fund-
ing is determined on the basis of scores related to effectiveness. Thanks
to LEXIS (or LexisNexis), F. Allan Hanson writes, “lawyers are begin-
ning to think of the law as a collection of facts and principles that can be
assembled, disassembled, and reassembled in a variety of ways for differ-
ent purposes” (131). Seen in terms of such components, the law has as it
were been mechanized. Politics has been similarly technologized. It has
become a matter of constant polling, of measuring public opinion, and
of calculating the effects of positions and platforms on voters. One can
argue that educators and politicians alike are technicians, as are attor-
neys and judges, business men and women, economists, farmers, psy-
chologists, pastors, and physicians. As technicians, they seek to engineer
education, the student, the government, the citizen, the legal system,
commerce, the consumer, the economy, agriculture, the mind (psyche),
the congregation (the spirit), and the body.
10 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
happened within the last one hundred years or so. The acceleration and
expansion of technological change and advance have no comparison with
those of any previous time. There has never before been so much, such
widespread, and such powerful technology so rapidly developed and dis-
seminated as there is now.
As already noted, we now rely on technology in all provinces of life:
agriculture (farm machinery, petrochemicals for fuel, herbicides, pesticides,
and fertilizers), business and finance (sales techniques, management, robo-
trading), economics (planning, organization, regulation), education (teach-
ing techniques, smart classrooms, distance learning, online instruction),
medicine (CT scans, MRIs, other assorted machines, pharmaceuticals,
computer-assisted diagnosis), personal relations (online social networks,
texting, Tweeting, Facebooking), politics (polling, public relations tech-
niques, support for technological research and development), and religion
(online worship, social media as new community, growth strategies and
techniques). We are now utterly dependent upon an immense, complex
technological system. Something as low-tech as electricity illustrates this
point. If the power goes out, everything comes to a halt: cooking, heating,
cooling, lighting, telecommunications. With computers down, all office
work stops. In a typical supermarket where the power has gone out, noth-
ing works: no lights, coolers, freezers, cash-registers, or doors. No buying
or selling can take place, since the machines which read the bar-codes,
register the prices, calculate the costs, process the purchase, and dispense
change and receipts do not function without electricity.
In particular, it is the “systemic” nature of modern technology that dis-
tinguishes it from that of the past. Unlike the technology of almost all of
human history, ours now stands out and apart as a vast system. Jünger was
one of the first to recognize its enormous extensions. In Die Perfektion
der Technik (translated as The Failure of Technology, 1946), he writes that
“There is no machine product which does not involve the entire techni-
cal organization, no beer bottle and no suit which do not presuppose it.
Consequently, there is no work process which can be treated as indepen-
dent and isolated from this organization” (8). Because technology deter-
mines the work process at all levels, it pervades and permeates everything:
the economic system, the political system, the educational system, and so
on. While there may seem to be many, separate, individual technologies
in our world today, they actually constitute a vast ensemble of innumer-
able, interconnected technologies that combine to form one great, unified
system. According to Thomas P. Hughes, large systems are “the essence of
12 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
laws for ownership and operation, and, finally, to the gas stations and repair
shops which the automobile also necessitates. These technologies are all
interconnected and coordinated.
Today, information technology—and in particular the computer
with its various byproducts and extensions—stands at the core of this
vast technological system. As Kelly observes, “computers have already
absorbed calculators, spreadsheets, typewriters, film, telegrams, tele-
phones, walkie-talkies, compasses and sextants, television, radio, turn-
tables, draft tables, mixing boards, war games, music studios, type
foundries, flight simulators, and many other vocational instruments”
(295). Of course, they have also incorporated the encyclopedia, the
office memo, the weekly planner, the camera, the television, the cen-
tral governing systems of automobiles, home furnaces and appliances,
medical diagnosis (e.g., IBM’s cognitive system called Watson), and so
on. Today “all technology follows computer technology” (Kelly 159).
So, for example, faster computer chips lead to faster jet engines, higher
corn yields, and faster drug discovery (Kelly 159). The computer is used
for everything to assess and do everything. Technology is so different
today from in the past, and here I mean the time before the initial explo-
sion of mechanized industry, because all our “machines and methods”
exceed “human possibilities” (Ellul, Society 241). That is, they are utterly
beyond human scale and measure.
A TECHNOCENTRIC CULTURE
Technology must arguably be the dominant feature of our civilization
today. In Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, Albert
Borgman presents technology as “the characteristic way in which we today
take up with the world” (35). That is, technology now mediates between
us and everything else, not to mention everyone else. Here, we need only
consider the centrality of the smart phone as we incessantly email, text,
and tweet one another, not to mention google the Internet for answers to
questions. It cannot be denied that we typically and habitually relate to one
another through technology. With Borgman, we might say that contempo-
rary technology even represents for us “an approach to reality” (13), since
we see the world now in terms of our technological devices and methods.
It has become “the decisive current in the stream of modern history” (35).
In Questioning Technology, Andrew Feenberg asserts that technology has
become the medium of daily life and is central to the structure of modern
14 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
UNDERSTANDING TECHNOLOGY
Although it is all around us, technology is now so fully integrated into
our lives that we tend to overlook it. Kevin Kelly realizes that “despite
its power [or even presence in our culture], technology has been invis-
ible, hidden, and nameless” (6). Although—or more likely because—it is
all around us, we barely notice it and are not really aware of it anymore.
Often, when a new technology appears, it is regarded as something amaz-
ing, even miraculous. In the course of time, however, it is absorbed into
the everyday, and we no longer marvel. Technology is invisible, because
THE REALITY OF TECHNOLOGY 19
it is our new environment, our new nature: it is what we live in. For us, it
is like the water fish swim in; it is, so to speak, the “air” surrounding us,
which we breathe and on which our lives depend. We are enveloped by
our technology. As a result, it fades into the background. Although we talk
about it constantly, we take it for granted.
Until the transformation of technology into a vast, autonomous system,
we were generally able to understand how our technology worked, that
is, how it operated or functioned. Whereas before we had to and could
understand how a technology like the hammer and nail or pen, ink, and
paper worked in order to use it, we do not now have to understand how
something like the television or cell phone or personal computer works in
order to use it. Almost everyone has such devices, but who can actually
explain how they work, how the pictures come through the cables and
appear on the screens in color, or how human voices travel through the air
and then are heard in little hand-held objects, or how 0s and 1s produce
everything imaginable on our laptops and tablets? While we know all about
technology, we know next to nothing about it. By and large, we have no
understanding of how our technology works, but we use it anyway. Since
we do not really comprehend what our technology is, nor understand how
it works, we are ill-equipped to make any necessary judgments or decisions
about whether or not to develop, adopt, or use any of it.
In spite of all the increased attention we have given to it, we persistently
misunderstand what technology is, what our relationship to it is, what its
role is in our lives, and what it does or does not do for and to us. Precisely
those issues are what this book with its examination of our narratives about
technology seeks to address and illumine.
As Ellul makes clear, technology now has a reality, “its own substance,
its own particular mode of being, and a life independent of our power of
decision” (Society 93). Technology (or to use his word “technique”) has
become “a reality in itself, self-sufficient, with its special laws and its own
determinations” (134). In The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin
points out that technology shapes and defines reality itself (29). As Allan
Hanson observes, we formerly perceived and understood the world in
human terms. Now, however, “it is presented to us in dimensions defined
by our instruments and the technologies they enable” (140). And, he con-
tinues, “not only the external world, but we ourselves become intelligible
in terms of those instruments and technologies” (140). Technology deter-
mines what is and is not real. When anything does not accord with the
technological order, it soon appears to be unreal; when anything cannot
demonstrate its efficiency, it is perceived to be utterly fantastic (Winner
217). Although he himself rejected the idea, Ortega y Gasset describes
technology as “the one positive thing, the only immutable reality in the
hands of man” (104). There is now no reality outside of technology.
CHAPTER 2
Narrative and Myth
POINTS OF ENTRY
Some of our oldest stories, stories we refer to as myths, have dealt spe-
cifically with technology, most famously the myths of Prometheus, for
example, and of Daedalus and Icarus. First recorded in Hesiod’s Theogony
and then in his Works and Days (from the eighth century BC), the myth
of Prometheus recounts his audacious defiance of Zeus. Against Zeus’
prohibition, Prometheus stole fire, the ur-technology and possession of
the gods, to give to human beings. The myth of Prometheus is one of the
earliest stories we have about technology. From fire—or along with fire—
Prometheus gave human beings what the ancient Greek language termed
technê. According to Aeschylus, in his play Prometheus Bound (from the
fifth century BC), the fire stolen from Zeus was the “source of all arts” (line
7). The Greek word used here by Aeschylus is pantechnon (παντέχνου). In
Aeschylus’ play, Prometheus calls himself didaskalos technês (διδάσκαλος
τέχνης, line 110), “teacher of (or in) every art.” In a sense, he is the father
of all technologies. From Prometheus and his gift of fire, the first or primal
and most basic technology, derive all the other technologies: inventions
(mechanemat [μηχανήματ᾽], line 469), numbers (arithmon [ἀριθμόν], line
459), letters (grammaton [γραμμάτων], line 460), all the arts and sciences,
medicine and metallurgy among them. As the protagonist himself asserts,
“every art possessed by man comes from Prometheus” (line 506). The
acquisition of the forbidden knowledge of fire allowed humans to know
what the gods alone knew and to become like them.
Because Prometheus transgressed Zeus’ command, he was punished by
the god, chained to a rock and made to suffer interminably, as an eagle
came every day to eat his liver, which grew back only to be devoured again
the next day. Prometheus was not the only one punished, however. As
Hesiod tells it, Zeus gave men “as the price for fire an evil thing in which
they may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction”
(Works and Days 7). Indeed, Zeus “bade famous Hephaestus make haste
and mix earth with water … [to] fashion a sweet, lovely maiden-shape”
(7), namely, Pandora who came to possess a jar which contained and
would unleash so many plagues upon humankind. Zeus “made the beau-
tiful evil” contained and then released from her jar “to be the price for the
blessing” of fire—that is, technology (Theogony 123). The myths tell and
warn of granting to human beings the knowledge (abilities or technolo-
gies, in this case specifically, fire) which ought to belong to the gods alone.
It is the story of overreaching and of unintended consequences, as are the
myths of Daedalus and Icarus. Prometheus intended to help humanity,
to benefit humanity, and to improve human existence—precisely how we
look at technology today—but the blessing included a curse. There lies
the essence of the story. That human beings enjoyed technology while
embracing their own destruction remains portentous.
Not unlike the crafty Prometheus, Daedalus whose very name means
“clever worker” was a craftsman and inventor, a maker and technician
in other words, first mentioned by Homer in the Iliad (eighth century
BC). Daedalus was an innovator who gave humanity various technologies.
According to Pliny (in the first century AD), Daedalus invented carpentry,
the saw, ax, and other tools. The oldest myth about him tells of a laby-
rinth he built. It was so cunningly designed that he himself could barely
escape from it. This story warns essentially of the consequences or dan-
gers of one’s own inventions which have unintended consequences and
may do more harm than good—certainly still an issue for technological
innovation.
Most familiar perhaps is the story as told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses
(completed around AD 8) of the wings Daedalus constructed for himself
and his son Icarus. He built them from feathers and wax that gave them
NARRATIVE AND MYTH 23
the ability to fly. What happened to Icarus is well known. His father
warned him not to fly too high or too close to the sun, but he ignored the
admonition and did so anyway. The wax melted, and Icarus plunged to his
death in the sea. Why this happened has a simple explanation: Icarus and
Daedalus had entered the sky, the heavens, the realm of the gods. Icarus
had ascended to and transgressed the realm of the sun-god Apollo—a
realm forbidden to mortals—and was accordingly punished. The old saw
comes to mind that if man were meant to fly, the gods would have given
him wings. But the story also tells, as does that of Prometheus, of techno-
logical innovation as both boon and bane.
The Bible, too, tells in only the briefest terms of the beginnings of civi-
lization, of the domestication of animals, of music, and of technology. It
offers nothing more than a rough outline. In Genesis 4, the anonymous
narrator provides a primeval history of the descendants of Cain, the son of
the first humans Adam and Eve, who murdered his brother Abel. One of
those descendants, Lamech, lived several generations later. According to
the biblical account,
Lamech took to himself two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the
name of the other, Zillah. Adah gave birth to Jabal; he was the father of
those who dwell in tents and have livestock. His brother’s name was Jubal;
he was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe. As for Zillah, she
also gave birth to Tubal-cain, the forger of all implements of bronze and
iron; and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah. (Genesis 4: 19–22, New
American Standard Version)
NARRATIVES BY THE NUMBERS
Although we have myths and narratives about technology from ancient
times, writing about it in its modern sense did not really begin until the
nineteenth century with the advent of large-scale mechanization. Over
the course of the twentieth century, technology came to receive more and
more attention until, at present, we talk and write about technology all
the time and more than ever before. Every week, if not every day, reports
about technological developments and improvements appear in newspapers
NARRATIVE AND MYTH 25
and magazines, on radio and television. So, too, books about technology
have multiplied in recent years.
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks and conferences
occur and are broadcast on a regular basis. My own local NPR station
airs the TED Radio Hour every week. From 2000 to 2013, David Pogue
had a column on technology in The New York Times every Thursday. The
Huffington Post, an online “news aggregator,” similarly devotes a regular
section entitled HUFFPOST TECH to the subject. Both national maga-
zines Time and Newsweek have pages dedicated to technology on their
respective websites. In addition to Time and Newsweek, such magazines
as The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, or The Atlantic Monthly regularly
publish articles about technology. For example, “Thumbspeak: Is Texting
Here to Stay?” by Louis Menand appeared in The New Yorker (October
20, 2008), while “The Robot Will See You Now” by Jonathan Cohn and
“Can Google Solve Death” by Harry McCracken and Lev Grossman were
the cover stories in 2013, respectively, for The Atlantic (March 2013) and
Time (September 30, 2013). Similarly, the November 28, 2014 New Yorker
appeared as The Tech Issue. Stories about technology continue to appear in
those publications. The press and other media in Europe mirror the same
attention to technology. Whether The London Times and The Guardian in
England, Le Monde and L’Express in France, or Der Spiegel and Die Zeit
in Germany, all devote specific columns or web pages to stories about
technology.
In order to discern when a particular interest in and awareness of the sub-
ject began and then increased, I attempted a simple search for books (and
only for books) with the word “technology” (or in the case of French and
German, technique or Technik and technologie or Technologie) in their titles.
I made inquiries at four great national libraries—the Library of Congress,
the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Deutsche
Nationalbibliothek. To search a range of years such as 1750–1800 or
1950–2000 proved impractical, if not impossible—either too unwieldy on
the one hand or too difficult on the other—so I had to narrow the search
parameters. The selection of years to survey—1750, 1800, 1850, 1900,
1950, and 2000—was an arbitrary choice, but it provides a rough measure
of the number of books in question. The survey offers at least a glimpse of
how much interest in technology has changed—decreased or increased—
over the last 250 years or so.
From what I could determine, there were no books in English before
1800 with the word technology in the title. According to Paul Terry,
26 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
my contact person at the British Library, the records show no books held
there with the word technology in the title for the sampled years 1750
or 1800. For the year 1850, there is one title: Technology, or, Library of
Art-Manufactures. Vegetable Kingdom. Series First. Alimentary Substances.
Sugar, The Art of Manufacturing and Refining Sugar, Including the
Manufacture and Revivification of Animal Charcoal, with an atlas, illus-
trative of the machinery and buildings, by J.A. Leon. There is, likewise,
one title for 1900: Chemical Technology or Chemistry in Its Applications
to Arts and Manufactures, an English translation of a book by Friedrich
Ludwig Knapp (in Richardson’s and Watts’ Chemical Technology, vol. 3).
For 1950, however, there were fifty books with technology in the title
and, for 2000, there were 1,974. These numbers reflect scant awareness of
technology as a distinct subject during the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, with a marked increase in attention over the course of the twentieth.
At the Library of Congress, Michelle Cadoree Bradley searched the
records for me and found no listings for 1750–1751 or for 1800–1801.
For 1850–1851, her search returned a total of seven titles, and for 1900–
1901, 128 books appear in the record. For 1950–1951, there were 694
books, and for the year 2000, more than 10,000. At that point, any mea-
surement or collection of data becomes too difficult, because so many
books appear with technology in the title. A search of the records at the
Bibliothèque nationale de France produced no titles with either technolo-
gie or technique for the years 1750 or 1800. The catalog shows one title
for 1800, three for 1850, seventy-five for 1900, 244 for 1950, and then
490 for 2000. Since the German national library was founded in 1912, I
asked Sybille Stahl to sample the years 1912, 1962, and 2012. The search
of the German catalog for the words Technik and Technologie in book
titles produced results similar to those for the French national library. For
Technik, there were forty-six in 1912, 314 in 1962, and 681 in 2012. For
Technologie, there were nine in 1912, ninety-nine in 1962, and 406 in
2012. Each search produced similar results with a similar progression: very
few books at first, a considerable increase in the years sampled for the nine-
teenth century, and, then, a substantial surge at the end of the twentieth
and beginning of the twenty-first centuries.
At my home institution, librarian Angela Bonnell helped me to con-
duct a search of the world’s largest bibliographic database WorldCat, a
global catalog of 72,000 library collections. In German, there were several
titles before 1800. These books began to appear in the last quarter of the
century and give evidence of the emergence of technology as a subject
NARRATIVE AND MYTH 27
of interest, study, and education. (I will discuss these works in the next
chapter.) For the time period from 1800 to 1850, Ms. Bonnell and I
found only three books in English with technology in their titles. One was
Jacob Bigelow’s Elements of Technology, published in Boston in 1829. The
second was Edward Hazen’s Popular Technology, published in New York
in 1846. And the third, by Knapp, was Chemical Technology; or, Chemistry,
Applied to the Arts and to Manufactures (edited and translated from the
German by Edmund Ronalds and Thomas Richardson), published in
London in 1848. Unfortunately and ironically, the search program—the
WorldCat technology, that is—was unable to produce any accurate and reli-
able results for the parameters of dates I set. When I searched for books
published from 1850 to 1900, for instance, or simply for 1900, the search
results included numerous books published long after that date, even as
late as 2003. Each time I repeated the search, the results were different as
well. There were so many false “hits” that the search was utterly unreli-
able. Even so, the investigation was not entirely in vain.
Finally, a search of millions of books in English, French, and German
from 1700 to 2008 containing the word technology/technologie/
Technologie via Google’s Ngram Viewer (cf. https://books.google.com/
ngrams) produced graphs with results I summarize here. From 1700 to
about 1900, the line of the graph for English remains constant and is
virtually flat at the lowest point possible. From about 1900 until 1950,
the line rises gradually but, between 1950 and 1980, spikes dramatically,
continuing in that trajectory through 2000, where it dips down slightly
(by 0.001368%). The results for French are similar although the line rises
slightly around 1830 and stays on a plateau until about 1945, but spikes
between 1952 and 1983, at which time it drops (by 0.001077%). German
shows a slight jump around 1794–1800, a slight rise again around 1872,
some minor ups and downs over the next 65 years, and another jump
from 1937 to 1943. The line on the chart spikes between 1950 and about
1987, then drops (by 0.000785%), but rises again between 1995 and
2008 (by 0.000344%). As with the English and the French graphs, the
line for German never returns to the base, but remains elevated.
The numbers from the national libraries, WorldCat, and Ngram Viewer
all indicate an initial lack of interest in or concern for technology which
next turns into a growing awareness of it and then transitions into an
outright preoccupation with it. There is no doubt that we have devoted
more attention to technology in the last one hundred years or so than at any
other time in human history and that a tally of books about technology
28 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
consist as well of our work and play experiences, our successes and failures,
our beliefs and disbeliefs. Each of us constructs with our own particular
story an identity, a self. The eminent biologist Edmund O. Wilson calls
the self “the central dramatic character of the [brain’s] confabulated sce-
narios” (51). That story is who each of us is. Without it, we are unable to
know ourselves or tell others who we are. In the same way, the stories of
technology reveal its identity, character, and essence.
Various narratives tell about the past, present, and future of tech-
nology—and about its interconnections with humanity. The myths of
Prometheus, Icarus, and Babel mentioned earlier, the famous stories of
Faust and Frankenstein, the latest commercials about smart phones and
Google, and movies about androids and artificial intelligences, all tell
stories about technology. They reveal how we understand it, its place in
our lives, and ourselves as human beings in relation to it. Narratives can
take the form of fiction or non-fiction. They can approve or disapprove of
our technological achievements. For example, non-fictional accounts like
Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants, Brian Christian’s The Most Human
Human: What Talking to Computers Teaches Us About What it Means to
Be Alive, Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age
Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future, or Nicholas Carr’s
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains tell stories about
technology as much as fictional narratives such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave
New World, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2,
or Don DeLillo’s Underworld do. While some narratives mythologize,
others demythologize. In very real ways, these stories about technology
compete for our confidence and allegiance. Whether subtly or overtly,
they teach and inculcate worldviews. Since we use narrative to know our
world and ourselves, an investigation into the stories we make and relate
about technology—which indisputably constitutes the world as we now
experience it—will help us to know better what this world is and what we
are or are becoming in it.
In Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century, Neil Postman claimed that
what is important about narratives is that human beings cannot live without
them. We are burdened with a kind of consciousness that insists on our hav-
ing a purpose. Purposefulness requires a moral context, and a moral context
is what I mean by a narrative. The construction of narratives is, therefore, a
major business of our species; certainly no group of humans has ever been
found that did not have a story that defined for them how they ought to
behave and why. (101)
30 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
NARRATIVE PER SE
The essential link between knowledge and narrative can be discovered in
the history of the word itself. Several scholars have traced the etymology
of the term. Hayden White, for example, has documented the deriva-
tion of the words narrative, narration, and narrate via the Latin gnārus
(“knowing,” “acquainted with,” or “expert”) and narrō (“relate,” “tell”)
from the Sanskrit root gnā or jnā (215, note 2; see also J. Hillis Miller,
Reading Narrative 47). Our word story similarly derives from the Greek
historia and its root eidenai (“to know”), which meant to learn by inquiry
or narrative. According to Wilson, “our minds consist of storytelling”
(51)—that is, “conscious mental life is built entirely from confabulation”
(51).
As Louis O. Mink explains, “even though narrative form may be, for most
people, associated with fairy tales, myths, and the entertainments of the novel,
it remains true that narrative is a primary cognitive instrument” (131). With
narrative, we search for and define who we are and what the nature of our
world is. Narrative, Mink continues, remains “a primary and irreducible form
of human comprehension” (132). James Phelan understands narrative in
similar terms. He describes it as “a distinctive and powerful mode for explain-
ing experience and organizing knowledge” (in Scholes, Phelan, Kellogg,
The Nature of Narrative 286). Hayden White extends the meaning by call-
ing narrative a “metacode, a human universal on the basis of which transcul-
tural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted” (1).
We tend to undervalue or even dismiss stories as something frivolous and at
best entertainment, especially in comparison to the acknowledged value and
importance of technology. Our narratives are anything but insignificant and
irrelevant, however, and those about technology reveal how we understand it
and ourselves as human beings living in its circumstances.
Throughout this book, I use narrative to mean story. After all, as
Robert Scholes observes, “when we speak of narrative, we are usually
speaking of story” (“Language, Narrative, and Anti-Narrative” 210).
Some scholars insist on a distinction between the two terms. In my opin-
ion, the differentiation they desire is not particularly useful. Definitions of
story invariably employ the word narrative, those of narrative the word
story to describe the term in question. The definitions are, in a sense,
tautological. When Scholes defines story as situation–transformation–
situation, and Tzvetan Todorov narrative in essentially the same way as
succession–transformation (more on these characterizations below), clear
NARRATIVE AND MYTH 31
This notion of story he takes from W.B. Gallie’s Philosophy and the
Historical Understanding (1968) and notes that it corresponds to his own
32 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
We know who we are thanks to the story of our selves which we piece
together until it becomes a coherent whole.
All of these descriptions identify actions and events, characters in situations,
succession and transformation as definitive for narrative. To summarize,
narratives are stories in which a narrator relates the actions of a character or
characters which reflect change or transformation. In the narratives exam-
ined here, technology assumes the role of a character. It is itself an agent of
change. In fact, change or transformation typically and especially informs
the stories about technology. The plots are about progress and advance,
innovation and increase, modification and transformation. Depending
on the story, technology appears either as protagonist or antagonist, hero
or villain.
Hayden White asserts further that factual storytelling, which would
include historical accounts or non-fictional expository prose, contains
“the impulse to moralize reality” (14). That is, such storytelling narrates
a morality for a given society. If so, then the narratives about technology
may wonder about, support, or challenge the morality of the social system
technology has given rise to. Ricoeur acknowledges something similar to
White’s notion of moralizing when he writes that narratives require “a
specific understanding that takes the nature of a judgement” (vol. 1, 155).
Indeed, the narratives in question contain implicit judgments about tech-
nology. If finally, as White indicates, narrative has to do with authority
(13), then the narratives about technology are also about its sociocultural
authority.
MYTH, IN PARTICULAR
At this point, we need to return to Louis Mink’s remark that most people
associate narratives or stories “with fairy tales, myths, and the entertain-
ments of the novel.” That comment may be especially true today, when we
look to natural science and even more to technology for the answers and
solutions to all our questions, needs, and problems. In consequence and
as noted earlier, we tend to dismiss stories as unimportant, inconsequen-
tial, trifling, or irrelevant. As a primary cognitive instrument, however,
narratives are anything but trivial. They have as much to tell us as any
natural science or technological invention. Myth, for example, may not
tell a “true” story, but a mythical or fictional story contains “truths” about
being human, being with other humans, and being in the world. To know
whether Prometheus, Pandora, or Daedalus ever actually existed is not
34 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
concern and significance to us. They show us what we hold most dear, also
what we admire, revere, and fear.
With our myths, we have contemplated and described beginnings
(births of the universe and of human beings), ultimate destinations (endings,
deaths, heavens, hells, nirvanas, oblivions), and what lies in between
(the human condition and human relationships). There are numerous
myths, but there are as well certain archetypal patterns which occur again
and again. There are myths of creation and origins; myths of a fall from
grace or loss of innocence; myths of journeys of ascent; myths of tests or
challenges to overcome; myths of a new creation; myths of deliverance, of
salvation, of liberation from suffering, sickness, want, and poverty.
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the famous mythologist Joseph
Campbell provides a sketch of the basic structure and content of all myths
or as he calls it the monomyth: “The hero ventures forth from the world
of common day into a realm of supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are
there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from
this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow
man” (28). According to Campbell, “the basic elements of the archetypal
pattern” for the story of the hero are: “a separation from the world, a
penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return” (33).
In the opinion of Jacques Ellul, “all myths directly or indirectly go back to
the myth of Paradise” (Society 191). In paradise, we live in harmony with-
out want; there is no suffering and no evil there. Another word for such
a place is utopia. Ellul goes on to say that myths “perform the historical
function of religions—they unify experience in a way that is satisfactory to
the whole culture and to the whole personality” (355).
Throughout human history, sacred, exemplary, significant myths have
integrated and unified societies and cultures. They explain how things
happen(ed), why they happen(ed), where we have come from, who we
are, and what our purpose is. Eliade tells us that myth “supplies models for
human behavior and, by that very fact, gives meaning and value to life” (3).
Where myths are living, they “still establish and justify all human conduct
and activity” (5). If we extend the idea of myth to the stories we tell about
technology, we find that they, too, express and inform our beliefs, attitudes,
morals, and behavior.
In the analysis and interpretation of our narratives about technology,
we consequently encounter and discover expressions of our ideologies
and basic convictions, especially those which are, so to speak, “hidden” in
those stories. As Henry A. Murray understood,
NARRATIVE AND MYTH 37
Old and new myths circulate in our culture and are carried either con-
sciously or unconsciously in our minds. We live, feel, think, and act in
terms of these myths, again whether we know it or not.
VARIATIONS ON THE THEMES
While the details and contents vary, there are essentially two kinds of sto-
ries about technology. The privileged and predominant narrative is one of
affirmation and technological optimism or idealism. The authors of this
narrative category are the myth-makers or mythologizers of technology.
They are champions of technology and find models for human behavior,
meaning, and value in it. In a subordinate counter-narrative, dissent and
opposition come to expression. Often labeled technological pessimists,
these authors demythologize the prevailing and authoritative account of
technology. This alternative version disputes the story of technological
progress, success, and beneficence. These two narratives have also been
described in terms of social constructivism on the one hand and techno-
logical determinism on the other, where the former asserts that human
action shapes technology, whereas the latter argues that technology deter-
mines human action. Of course, both labels are reductionist, and both are,
to some extent, true.
A third current, a story of ambivalence, accompanies the other two.
In some cases, it involves apathy about the nature and effects of technol-
ogy on us and our lives. That is, some people think that technology may
now harm more than help us, but as it is impossible to change its course
or curb its power and reach, we might as well just accept it. Typically, the
ambivalent narrative admits to the problems caused by or even inherent in
technology, but calls for better technology which remedies or no longer
causes such problems. This understanding of technology usually masks
a desire to find a way to rescue technology from, and rid it of, its nega-
tive features so that we can enjoy its benefits. In spite of all its criticisms,
40 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
objections, and concerns, this narrative actually aligns with the dominant
story of technological idealism.
The popular narrative of technological affirmation and optimism enjoys
the greatest circulation, credibility, and acceptance. The narrative of dissent
and opposition is, in contrast, unpleasant, unwelcome, and unacceptable.
The ambivalent voices want to be fair, even-handed, and balanced, seeing
both good and ill in technology, but actually end up rationalizing or apolo-
gizing as it were for its flaws and failures. Which of these narratives will be
authoritative; which considered valid, legitimate, true, authentic, and accept-
able; and which invalid, illegitimate, untrue, inauthentic, and unacceptable?
Which of these stories can serve to help us best understand the new universe
of technology, define a social order within it, and determine how to live in
its circumstances? Among others, Alex Goody, Katherine Hayles, Thomas
Hughes, David Nye, Howard Segal, Herbert Sussman, and Wylie Sypher
have done much to trace the outlines and contents of the narratives about
technology. (Hayles traces the development of one particular technological
narrative, specifically how we human beings have come to understand and
accept ourselves first as cyber-organism and then as posthuman. Although
her work parallels mine in certain ways, it charts a different course and,
therefore, does not figure prominently in the following pages.) The present
study provides conceptual refinements and extensions both of their work
and that of others. This book offers a review and analysis of the details and
contents of the competing stories we have told about technology.
An investigation of our narratives about technology offers greater
insight into its role in our lives. David Nye remarks that the meaning of
a specific tool, and by extension technology, in general, is “inseparable
from the stories that surround it” (Technology Matters 3). In his opin-
ion, “tools have always embodied latent narratives” (5). Indeed, “a tool
always implies at least one small story” (5). Like Todorov, Nye identifies
sequence or succession of events and transformation as the key elements
of narrative: “There is a situation; something needs doing” (5). He relates
the basic narrative structure to technology: “to conceive of a tool is to
think in time and to imagine changes” (5). Thus, we find the meaning or
meanings of technology in the stories we have told about it. Kevin Kelly
urges us to listen “to technology’s story” (or stories), and by “divining its
tendencies and biases, and tracing its current direction” seek “to solve our
personal puzzles” (6). The next chapters explore the stories we tell about
technology. They reveal the meanings we ascribe to it, the hopes and fears
we have for it, and the new forms of myth technology has fostered.
CHAPTER 3
POINTS OF DEPARTURE
While the typical reader can, with relatively little difficulty, recognize fiction as
narrative, she or he does not so readily identify non-fiction with stories and
probably even less so when the writing is about technology. Nevertheless,
non-fictional accounts tell stories about technology as much as fictional
narratives do. In the non-fictional discussions of technology, one narra-
tive celebrates and champions technology, another challenges and disputes
that narrative’s claims. These narratives reflect how we have thought and
still typically think about technology. While this chapter examines the nar-
rative of technological idealism, the next considers the narrative of dissent.
Both sample the most significant and representative writing for the two
different storylines. Here (and in the next two chapters), I let the authors
speak largely for themselves, since their own voices best illustrate the
character and content of the narratives in question.
As noted in the previous chapter, writing about technology in its
modern sense did not really begin until the nineteenth century and the
advent of large-scale mechanization and then became a preoccupation in
1
Used with the kind permission of Fujitsu.
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Relatively few early texts concern
themselves with technological promise. Over the course of time, a story
of affirmation developed and ultimately established itself as the dominant
narrative about technology, even as a master narrative or authoritative
myth which unites and provides meaning to society. As such, this narrative
sets the parameters for all discourse about technology.
Studies by Thomas Hughes, Howard Segal, and David Nye have
documented how technological enthusiasm became and still remains the
accepted narrative. Segal found that Americans, more than Europeans,
“have usually been enthusiastic about technology” (Future Imperfect 141),
but the emergence of technological culture and technological enthusi-
asm was not restricted to the USA. As Hughes observes, “Fordism” and
“Taylorism”—in other words, an emphasis on technological systems as
practiced in Henry Ford’s automobile factories and espoused by Frederick
Winslow Taylor in his Principles of Scientific Management (1911)— “spread
throughout Europe” as well (American Genesis 8). Hughes goes on to
note that modern technological culture was actually first defined in Europe
(9). Although he thought that the age of technological enthusiasm had
passed, it has instead persisted and has flourished, especially with the rise
of computers, the PC, Internet, and smart phone. The investments in
computers and communication technologies in US schools alone provide
ample evidence of continued technological enthusiasm.
EARLY IMPULSES
Around the year 1230, Johannes de Sacrobosco, a monk and scholar at
the University of Paris, wrote a treatise entitled De sphaere mundi. In this
work, he conceived of the universe and the earth as a great machine—the
machina mundi—and initiated a long tradition of understanding the world
and the human being in mechanistic terms. That way of thinking appealed
to many, not least of them Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) who in his
notebooks referred to the human body as “this machine of ours” (168).
Likewise, he repeatedly identified planet earth as a “terrestrial machine”
(320, 506). This view of the human being and the world would become
decisive in the centuries to come.
One of the very first books to be published about machines was Jacques
Besson’s Instrumentarum et Machinarum of 1569. This volume reflects
both the author’s and his patron’s—the French monarch Charles IX’s—
great interest in technological innovation. Other early works about machin-
THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE 43
ery that fall into the same category as Besson’s include Agostino Ramelli’s
Diverse et artificose machine of 1588, Vittorio Zonca’s Novo teatro di machine
et edificii of 1607, and Georg Andreas’ Theatrum machinarum novum of
1662 (cf. Knoespel 101). The very idea of the “Theatrum” brought special
attention to technology. The word meant a place for viewing something and
put technology itself, essentially for the first time in history, on display. With
such publications, a new understanding of and fascination with technology
manifested itself and set the course for future attitudes.
According to José Ortega y Gasset, “technology properly speaking,
technology in the fullness of its maturity, begins around 1600, when man
in the course of his theoretical thinking about the world comes to regard
it as a machine” (117). He connects the rise of modern technology to the
work of Galileo Galilei and Christiaan Huygens and credits them with the
establishment of “the mechanical interpretation of the universe” (117).
With them, Lewis Mumford includes Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes
Kepler, since their revolution in astronomy reconceived the cosmos as “a
mechanical system capable of being fully understood by reference solely to
a mechanical model” (Pentagon 33).
René Descartes’ landmark Discourse on Method (1637) remains one of the
most influential books of the modern era. Although it is not a work about
technology per se, it contributed much to a technological orientation. In
this work, he reiterated the notion of the human body as “a machine,” but
one “which, having been made by the hands of God, is incomparably better
arranged, and possesses in itself movements which are much more admi-
rable, than any of those which can be invented by man” (34–35). Of even
more importance, however, is the “method” Descartes advances which fuses
“mathematical and mechanical modes of reasoning” (Mumford, Pentagon
77). This method is itself thoroughly technological in nature.
Of similar interest is Thomas Hobbes tremendously influential
Leviathan of 1651. While a treatise on government and statecraft, it also
contains famous and forceful statements about the human being and soci-
ety. Like Descartes, he conceives of the human being in mechanistic terms.
“For what is the beast but a spring,” Hobbes asks, “and the nerves but
so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels giving motion to the
whole body” (19). The image of the mechanical clock is clearly evident
here. Such a mechanistic, or technological, way of seeing things, including
the human being, was widely accepted. The renowned scientist Robert
Boyle described the human being in analogous terms. In 1663, he wrote:
“a humane Body it selfe seems to be an Engine, wherein almost, if not
44 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
more then almost, all the Actions common to Men, with other Animals,
are perform’d Mechanically” (27–28). The universe, the planet, and the
human being were all understood as entities governed by the principles of
mechanics. This new worldview soon came to be authoritative.
ENLIGHTENED VIEWS
The importance of the European Enlightenment for the formation of
our ideas about economics, politics, philosophy, and so much more can
hardly be overstated. Moreover, it informed how and what we think about
technology. The conception of the human being as mere machine found
expression again in Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s famous L’homme machine
of 1748. It builds on the view of Descartes and others that animals are
automata. It gives voice once more to the by then widespread clockwork
paradigm: “the human body is a watch,” the heart “the mainspring of the
machine” (141). In a mechanistic, clockwork universe, the human being
must necessarily also be understood as machine.
Only a few years after La Mettrie published that book, one of the most
significant and influential works of the century appeared. It was Denis
Diderot’s and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopedie ou dictionnaire
raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–1777). Although the
famous French encyclopedia contains no entries for technique or technol-
ogie, it dealt “with the present-day systems of learning and technique,
explaining in each case general principles, likewise methods and routines”
(Cazamian 258). In fact, the Encyclopédie itself led to “the creation of the
‘Enseignement Technique,’” that is, technical education (Cazamian 258).
As d’Alembert indicates in the “Preliminary Discourse” (1750), he
and Diderot took inspiration from Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Locke, and
Newton, from the authors of the mechanistic worldview (http://quod.
lib.umich.edu). The “mechanical arts,” the encyclopedists explain, would
constitute one of three main categories covered in their publication. The
Encyclopédie would accordingly concern itself especially with technological
knowledge. Their great work served not only as a sourcebook of informa-
tion about technology, but also as a mirror of how the Enlightenment
viewed and valued it.
Preoccupied with systematization, organization, and classification, the
eighteenth century was the age of encyclopedias and dictionaries. Zedler’s
Universal Lexikon (64 vols. 1732–1754), the Encyclopedia Britannica (3 vols.
1768), and the French Encyclopédie (17 and 11 vols. 1750–1772), not to
THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE 45
new instruments, machines, and looms can add to man’s strength and can
improve at once the quality and the accuracy of his productions, and can
diminish the time and labour that has to be expended on them. The obsta-
cles still in the way of this progress will disappear, accidents will be foreseen
and prevented, the insanitary conditions that are due to the work itself or to
the climate will be eliminated. (187)
might call technical methods” as the means to perfect both education and
the sciences (197). Technological progress, he predicts, will mean “the
end of infections and hereditary diseases and illnesses” (199). With the
elimination of all diseases, Cordorcet believed, as technological optimists
still do, that “the average length of human life will for ever increase” (200)
and essentially make us immortal.
If we take only German publications at the end of the century as a
measure of engagement with technology, we discover a remarkable num-
ber of books written specifically about the subject. As noted in Chap. 1,
one of the first books about technology was Beckmann’s Introduction to
Technology (my translations here and following) in 1777. In the next quar-
ter century, a number of other volumes appeared in short order, indicat-
ing a specific orientation and trajectory. The list includes a technological
dictionary in 1781 by Johann Karl Gottfried Jacobson, an introduction to
the study of technology in the same year by Benedict Franz Johann von
Hermann, Technology, or the Mechanical Arts in 1782 by Johann Samuel
Halle, another Introduction to the Study of Technology in 1785 by Johann
Gottlieb Cunradi, a textbook about technology in 1787 by Georg Friedrich
von Lamprecht (which relates the term to handicrafts, factories, and manu-
facturing), another textbook in 1790 by Karl Gottlob Rössig, yet another
educational book called Humanity and God: Or Elementary Instruction
in Technology and the Science of Administration (Menschheit und Gott) in
1795, a volume on Technologie in 1796 by Friedrich Ludwig Walther, and a
book in 1800 by Carl Philipp Funke about natural history and technology
for teachers. At least three points become clear from this publication
history: (1) technology was plainly emerging as a new topic of special inter-
est; (2) it was understood both in terms of machines and management; and
(3) it had become a particular field and subject of study and instruction.
Indeed, technology itself had become something distinctly identifiable and
had assumed an important role in the culture of the time.
of the wager and public opinion concerning the technology, The Times
reported that “The engine is the favorite. The extraordinary effects of
mechanical power is already known to the world; but the novelty, singular-
ity and powerful application against time and speed has created admiration
in the minds of every scientific man” (quoted in Jennings 128). At the
very start of the century, technology enjoys the admiration of all who want
to be considered enlightened, forward-thinking, and scientific.
In 1829 in Boston, Massachusetts, the Harvard professor Jacob
Bigelow published his Elements of Technology and, with this work, set the
tone for technological optimism in the USA. His book considers the dif-
ferent kinds of technologies then extant: from writing and printing to
heating, ventilation, locomotion, machinery, metallurgy, and glass mak-
ing, to name only a few. He gives voice to the great pride we take in our
technology: “we accomplish what the ancients only dreamt of in their
fables; we ascend above the clouds, and penetrate into the abysses of the
ocean” (4). Like Condorcet, he speaks only of improvements, advantages,
rewards, and advancement (6). According to Mark Greenberg and Lance
Schachterle, Bigelow’s book initiated “the distinctive American faith in
technology as a source of progress” (“Introduction” 15).
A popular actress of her time, but also author, memoirist, and friend
of Henry James, Fanny Kemble wrote a remarkable letter to a friend in
1830 which recounts her experience with George Stephenson on a test
run of the Liverpool & Manchester railway, which he built. In it, she cel-
ebrates the new steam locomotive as well as the wagons, carriages, tunnels,
bridges, and other grand feats of engineering linked to the railroad. She
opens her remarks with an exaggerated show of emotion: “A common
sheet of paper is enough for love, but a foolscap extra can alone contain a
railroad and my ecstasies” (in her Records of a Girlhood, 1878, quoted in
Jennings 172). Her descriptions transform the machine whose wheels are
its feet, pistons its legs, and coal its oats into an animate being. It was for
her a “snorting little animal” which she “felt rather inclined to pat” (in
Jennings 173–174). She calls it a “magical machine,” and “no fairy tale
was ever half so wonderful” as what she saw that day (in Jennings 174).
Her letter reflects an infatuation with the whole technological system. And
she reveals, technological enthusiasm did not belong solely to men, but
to women also.
Besides Bigelow, an American mathematics-teacher-turned-lawyer
named Timothy Walker promoted the technological worldview. He felt
it necessary to mount a “Defence of Mechanical Philosophy” (1831) in
48 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
We will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing
with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-
plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their
smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun
with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-
chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enor-
mous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose
propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthu-
siastic crowd. (http://www.italianfuturism.org)
violent powers, but technology, he rightly saw, would saturate minds with
a dazzling enchantment” (85).
Futurismo contained a certain longing for destruction which would
liberate humanity from the past, purify society, and then usher in a new,
better existence. In another manifesto concerning the Ethiopian colonial
war of 1935–1936, Marinetti declared war beautiful, “because it initiates
the dreamt-of metallization of the human body” (as quoted by Benjamin
in his Kunstwerk (1936); also in Modernism: An Anthology 576). With
its fascist tendencies and passion for war, Futurismo eventually lost cred-
ibility, but its desire for a cyber-organism or transhuman has continued to
appeal and find acceptance. However horrible the two world wars proved
to be, they did not dim any hopes for blessings to come from technologi-
cal advance.
So many others have discussed Frederick Taylor and his Principles of
Scientific Management (1911) that I will not devote much space to it here.
Suffice it to say that his book and principles had enormous effect and
have shaped thought up to the present. As James Worthy noted in Big
Business and Free Men, Taylor defined employees as mere “component
parts of a mechanism” (65). Taylorism, as his theory and methods came
to be known, minimized “the characteristics of workers that most sig-
nificantly differentiate them from machines” (Worthy 67). Taylor’s “one
best method” (Principles 25) exemplifies non-material or human technol-
ogy, and it gives voice to the fundamental principle of efficiency. His own
words reveal the order of values which his principles entail: “In the past
the man has been first; in the future the system must be first” (Principles
7). His notion that every aspect of work should and could be measured
for maximum productivity penetrated every sphere of life—not only busi-
ness and industry, but also education and life in the home. Still in debt
to Taylor, companies today keep track of employees by means of digital
monitoring.
Although now all but forgotten, three works from around 1930 dem-
onstrate the pervasive thinking of the time. Men and Machines (1929)
by Stuart Chase, Romance of the Machine (1930) by Michael Pupin, and
Successful Living in this Machine Age (1931) by Edward Filene. Their works
celebrate technology and its potential benefits. “With his machines,” Chase
writes, the human being “sees and hears and lifts and runs as no living
organism has ever dreamed of doing. He stands enormous, fantastic and
alone; outside the laws of living organisms, a control switch in his hand.
Power unlimited; sensitiveness unbounded” (9). It is the technological
52 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
promise: extraordinary power and a life without limits. For these authors,
technology could fulfill and realize whatever human beings could imagine.
According to Thomas Hughes, the narrative of technological affirma-
tion started to wane by and during the 1960s and 1970s. He perceived an
increase in criticism of technology and thought that the era of technologi-
cal enthusiasm “was passing into history” (American Genesis 1). He was
incorrect in that view, however, as publications since that time bear witness.
Writing in the 1960s, exceedingly popular authors like Arthur C. Clarke,
Teilhard de Chardin, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster Fuller did
much to legitimate and reinforce technological idealism. They preached a
technological gospel, informing audiences of the bright future technology
was to usher in.
Well known for his science fiction work, Arthur C. Clarke published an
influential book of non-fiction in 1962, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry
into the Limits of the Possible. The subtitle already alerts readers to a key
theme in the dominant narrative—limits and limitlessness. He expresses
the commonly held view that “at the present rate of progress, it is almost
impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved” (11).
What he specifically envisions for the future is not so important as his
attitude toward technology in general. Like previous and subsequent tech-
nological optimists, Clarke sees a future of unlimited abundance, thanks to
technology. “The time may come,” he observes, “when the twin problems
of production and distribution are solved so completely that every man
can, almost literally, possess anything he pleases” (171). As readers will
realize, Clarke’s theses are not new. He envisions improvements and solu-
tions in economies, education, legal proceedings, politics, and the pro-
duction of all manner of goods with the result that all of humanity will be
better off.
In Clarke’s opinion, technology will continue to alter human beings
and bring about an evolution into other forms of existence. “The machine
is going to take over” (229), he writes, and welcomes that eventuality. He
accepts and embraces the changes technology will necessarily bring, even
“The Obsolescence of Man” as the title of one chapter reads. Because
he considers humans to be “living machines” (236)—like so many of his
predecessors—Clarke has no objection to uniting the organism with the
mechanism. For him, the human organism is in fact a poor specimen,
made of “poor materials” and, therefore, “handicapped” (236) by its
“limitations” and “defects” (237), which can however be corrected, over-
come, and eliminated by technology.
THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE 53
Thanks also to his popularity, the French Jesuit priest and philosopher
Teilhard de Chardin has had considerable influence as well. His techno-
logical enthusiasm comes to expression especially in The Future of Man
(1964). For him, “all the machines on earth, taken together, tend to form
a single, vast, organized mechanism” (160). He identifies that vast mecha-
nism with “the thinking center of the Noosphere” (160)—a concept he
coined and describes as “a stupendous thinking machine” (168). This
Noosphere is “outside and above the biosphere, … an added planetary layer,
an envelope of thinking substance” (151). He insists that we must see “the
machine as playing a constructive part in the creation of a truly collective
consciousness” (161). Like Clarke, he posits a merger of the organic and
mechanical. He envisions a “grandiose machine-in-motion” (177), involv-
ing all of humanity and the universe itself in which freedom of choice and
action will only be “everywhere heightened” (177). Emphases may shift
in the course of time, but the claims for technology and the envisioned
outcomes remain the same.
For these idealists, technology becomes destiny. De Chardin considers
“the growth of generalized technology and mechanization” (226) an inevi-
table and salutary development for humanity. He conceives of a huge unified,
technological system which fulfills all hopes and bestows limitless blessings.
What has really let loose the Machine in the world, and for good, is that it
both facilitates and indefinitely multiplies our activities. Not only does it
relieve us mechanically of a crushing weight of physical and mental labor;
but by the miraculous enhancement of our senses, through its powers of
enlargement, penetration and exact measurement, it constantly increases the
scope and clarity of our perceptions. It fulfills the dream of all living crea-
tures by satisfying our instinctive craving for the maximum of consciousness
with a minimum of effort. (227)
decades to come. McLuhan dealt with the new and emergent technologies
of that time, in particular with what he called the electric and electromag-
netic, which have since developed into electronic and digital technology.
As he defines them, “all technologies are extensions of our physical and
nervous systems to increase power and speed” (90). While he sees tech-
nology as physical and mental enhancement, he also recognizes the confu-
sion and disruption for the individual, society, and culture caused by new
technology. In spite of what, at first glance, looks like objections raised
against technology or like warnings about the threats it poses to humanity,
McLuhan’s book supports and promotes technological idealism.
Like Clarke before and others to follow, McLuhan envisions and
accepts a union of the human organism with the technological mechanism.
“Having extended or translated our central nervous system into the elec-
tromagnetic technology,” he writes, “it is but a further stage to transfer
our consciousness to the computer world as well. Then, at least, we shall
be able to program consciousness in such wise that it cannot be numbed
nor distracted by the Narcissus illusions of the entertainment world that
beset mankind” (60–61). McLuhan considers the programming of our
consciousness a means to escape the ills of our mass media. His hopes for
the computer are likewise exceptional: it promises “a Pentecostal condition
of universal understanding and unity” (80). In other words, the computer
brings revelation and renewal for all.
The next wave of technology—electric technology, and computers in
particular—will put aside mechanical modes of work, freeing humanity
from the fragmentation and subservience they caused. Thanks to “electricity
and automation,” McLuhan announced,
What McLuhan envisioned has been realized to large extent in the per-
sonal computer, Internet, smart phone, and new social media.
The subject of much publicity and known best for his geodesic dome,
“Bucky” Fuller became immensely popular and influential largely because
of his innovative designs, but also for his worldview. In Synergetics:
Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), Fuller elaborates his theories.
THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE 55
HIGH-TECH IS HERE
By the 1980s and thereafter, the criticism of technology continued and
even increased, but the champions of technological idealism held their
ground and even prospered. In spite of Florman’s apprehension and
concern, technological enthusiasm never diminished and actually gained
momentum and potency, thanks especially to the computer and digital
revolution. At the same time, writing about technology increased as well.
Alvin Toffler and John Naisbitt are two professional forecasters whose
books “predict” the future and promote technology. Although their best-
selling books sometimes warn about the apparent dangers of technology,
they actually celebrate the benefits of technological progress. Beginning
in 1970, Toffler’s trilogy of books about the future began to appear. He
published Future Shock in 1970, The Third Wave in 1980, and Powershift
in 1990. Future Shock is ostensibly about being prepared for the changes
and innovations of the future. Though technology may growl, he reas-
sures readers, it is not to be feared. Indeed, “important new machines …
suggest novel solutions to social, philosophical, even personal problems”
(29). Although he talks about taming technology or recommends “the
conscious regulation of technological advance” (428), he nevertheless
advocates the need for “not less but more technology” (429). Like
Florman, Toffler acknowledges the side effects and potential hazards
technology brings with itself (429), but, all the same, calls for increased
reliance on technology.
THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE 57
The Third Wave is also about changes to come. Toffler sets hope
for humanity in a third technological revolution which will evolve into
a “dramatically new techno-sphere” (164). The technologies of the
“Third Wave” are, to large extent, electronic or digital, that is, essen-
tially computer-related. In this new existence, everything improves: work,
education, family life, politics, the economy, and the self. “As we grow
more familiar with the intelligent environment,” he writes, “and learn to
converse with it from the time we leave the cradle, we will begin to use
computers with a grace and naturalness that is hard for us to imagine
today. And they will help all of us … to think more deeply about our-
selves and the world” (189). With Powershift, Toffler concludes his tril-
ogy by describing the transfer and transformation of economic, political,
and social power. As a priority for the new redistribution and diffusion of
power, he lists “the speedy universalization of access to computers, infor-
mation technology, and the advanced media” (369). All three books posit
the need to develop and employ technology more than anything else for
our benefit in the years to come.
What is noteworthy about these books and others like them is that they
have sold very well and speak to a huge audience. (Naisbitt boasts on the
dust jacket of his 1999 volume that his books have sold over fourteen
million copies.) Like Toffler, Naisbitt published a series of interconnected
books which focused on the future and on technology: Megatrends: Ten
New Directions Transforming Our Lives (1982); Megatrends 2000: Ten
New Directions for the 1990s (1990, written with Patricia Aburdene); and
High Tech/High Touch: Technology and Our Search for Meaning (1999,
written with Nana Naisbitt and Douglas Philipps). In Megatrends, Nasibitt
envisions the age of bio-technology and the triumph of the individual over
the collective through high-tech computers, cell phones, and fax machines.
There, he introduced the idea of “high tech/high touch” which is his for-
mulation for not necessarily balancing, but accepting and adopting new
technologies. “High touch” humanizes technology, making it acceptable
to us. According to him, “high touch” is the needed “human response” to
technology (39). He believes that the more technology we have acquired,
the more human has been our response. Replete with too many platitudes
and commonplaces, this book belongs to the “self-help or personal growth
movement,” as he himself indicates (40). In spite of any warnings about
technology he may offer, Naisbitt presents it as the means to grow and
fulfill our potential, to become more sensitive and more human. In the
second book, Megatrends 2000, as in the first, he presents the next round
58 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
optics, and the Foveon sensor. Like Toffler and Naisbitt, Gilder has an eye
to the future and a believer’s faith in a technological providence.
Marvin Minsky co-founded MIT’s artificial intelligence (AI) labora-
tory in 1959. In The Society of Mind (1985), he restates the mechanis-
tic view of the universe and everything in it, this time emphasizing the
mechanistic character of the human brain. For Minsky, the human brain
is “a vast, unknown mechanism” and human beings themselves “won-
derful machines” (30). His 2006 book, The Emotion Machine, conveys
the same idea in its title. That book looks forward to the day when we
will be able to build machines with an AI which achieves a consciousness
akin to that of human beings. While Minsky advocates for AI, Howard
Rheingold has been a particular proponent of cyberculture. He has long
been interested in expanding and enhancing human abilities and intelli-
gence through technology and, in 1991, published Virtual Reality—one
of the first books on the subject. He, too, eagerly looks forward to the
application of coming technologies. His 2012 book Net Smart: How to
Thrive Online deals with ways that digital media empower human beings
and also offer opportunities to make them more mindful or thoughtful.
Together with Gilder and Toffler, Esther Dyson and George Keyworth
published a piece in 1994 praising and encouraging the benefits of digital
technology. They called their manifesto “Cyberspace and the American
Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age.” According to them,
“cyberspace is the land of knowledge, and the exploration of that land can
be Civilization’s truest, highest calling. The opportunity is now before
us to empower every person to pursue that calling in his or her own
way” (http://www.pff.org). They are evangelists for the postindustrial
“Third Wave” of technological development. As they see it, the benefits
are patent and real: “putting advanced computing power in the hands of
entire populations will alleviate pressure on highways, reduce air pollu-
tion, allow people to live further away from crowded or dangerous urban
areas, and expand family time.” They assure us that this technological
development democratizes, equalizes, liberates, connects, and unifies the
citizens of the nation.
That technology will improve everyone’s life is, moreover, a view
held and expressed by “most elected pubic officials,” writes David Nye
(Technology Matters 96). Whereas Ronald Reagan invoked “the David
of the microchip” to topple “the Goliath of totalitarian control” in a
speech at the Guildhall in London in 1989 (in “Reagan Urges ‘Risk’”),
Bill Clinton called for “modern computers in every classroom” at the San
60 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
“the machine” and to use “its system-making abilities to bring forth life”
(246). In her vision, technology becomes not only a life-form, but also the
source of other forms of life.
Research and development devoted to AI and cybernetics has long
encouraged interest in a human–machine hybrid. Richard Landers gave
expression to such ideas as early as 1966 with Man’s Place in the Dybosphere,
an optimistic anticipation of such a synthesis. Landers envisions the end
of human authority and welcomes the advent of a machine-dominated
world. As humans become more machine-like, he notes, machines will
become more like humans. The desire to be superseded by machines is
nowhere stated more simply than in Hans Moravec’s Robot: Mere Machine
to Transcendent Mind (1999). Moravec has no qualms about creating a
race of robots which will supersede, replace, and eliminate human beings.
In his opinion, “by performing better and cheaper, the robots will displace
humans from essential roles. Rather quickly they could displace us from
existence” (13). Like Clarke, he remains unperturbed and even optimistic
about this prospect. “I am not as alarmed as many by the latter possibil-
ity,” writes Moravec, “since I consider these future machines our progeny,
‘mind children’ built in our image and likeness, ourselves in more potent
form” (13). Paradoxically, they “will embody humanity’s best chance for a
long-term future,” although Moravec advises human beings “to bow out
when we can no longer contribute” (13).
Closely related to this type of thinking is the interest in post- or trans-
human forms of existence as exhibited in the work of Donna Haraway, Ray
Kurzweil, and Rosi Braidotti. In 1985, Haraway published her provocative
essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism
in the Late Twentieth Century.” She hopes to construct a “political myth
for socialist-feminism” (157) and embraces “the possibilities inherent
in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine
and similar distinctions structuring the Western self” (174). For her,
bio-technology and microelectronics are key. She wants to use high-tech
culture to challenge what for her are problematic dualisms: “self/other,
mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/
appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive,
right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man” (177). Haraway
already identifies the mechanism with the human organism: “The machine
is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible
for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible
for boundaries; we are they” (180). Although she speaks of boundaries,
62 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
she seeks their abolition. With the imagery of the cyborg, she takes the
mechanistic worldview to its logical conclusion.
Few have been so optimistic and enthusiastic about technological
beneficence and possibility in recent years as Ray Kurzweil. A computer
scientist, inventor, and director of engineering at Google, Kurzweil has
written several books about technology. In The Singularity is Near: When
Humans Transcend Biology (2006), he lays out his blueprint for a future
“human-machine civilization” (5). When this Singularity—the complete
merger of humans and machines—occurs, he expects a techno-sapiens to
emerge. Such a being will “transcend these limitations of our biological
bodies and brains” (9). Transcendence, the ancient and enduring dream
to leave human imperfection behind and to overcome all limits, stands at
the center of his own vision for humanity. Because human DNA is, in his
view, a “machinery … essentially a self-replicating nanoscale replicator”
(207), a transition from the organic to the mechanical, from the biological
to the technological, is a reasonable, realistic, and unproblematic proposi-
tion. As he tells it, there is nothing at all to fear, nothing but improvement
and fulfillment lie in store for us.
For Kurzweil, nanotechnology is the next great source of unprecedented
and immeasurable benefits. According to the National Science Foundation,
he reports, “nanotechnology has the potential to enhance human perfor-
mance, to bring sustainable development for materials, water, energy, and
food, to protect against unknown bacteria and viruses, and even to dimin-
ish the reasons for breaking the peace” (226). Such claims have informed
the narrative of technological idealism for centuries. Technology provides
health and wealth, security and well-being. Ultimately, Kurzweil’s story is
about immortality. It is the story of the fountain of youth on the one hand
and the return to paradise on the other. The solution is “to overcome our
genetic heritage” (371) and to become first “cyborgs” (377) and then, at
some point, entirely and only cyber.
Kurzweil admits that nanotechnology might have harmful conse-
quences. Self-replicating nanobots may pose a threat, for instance, but we
will devise “a nano-technology immune system” (400), involving the use
of self-replicating nanobots and have it in place beforehand. He believes
that even the danger of some particular individual’s malicious intent will
be ended by “technologies based on nanobots” (403). The very technology
which could endanger us will be employed to protect us.
Rosi Braidotti follows in the footsteps of Haraway and, in The
Posthuman (2013), develops an argument for transforming the human
THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE 63
He, as it were, professes a faith in the technium. Writing about the Internet,
he becomes numinous: “its boundaries are unknown, unknowable, its
mysteries uncountable … It knows so much … It makes me bigger …
It is a steadfast benefactor” (323). Kelly essentially deifies the technium.
For him, but also for all of us, his book asserts, the technium “contains
more goodness than anything else we know” (359). Kelly finds fulfillment
in technology. It satisfies him in ways that nothing else can or does. The
answer to the question implicit in his title is that technology gets whatever
it wants, and it wants more of itself.
Brian Christian, author of The Most Human Human: What Talking
with Computers Teaches Us about What it Means to be Alive (2011), par-
ticipated in the 2009 Loebner Prize competition—a yearly Turing test
designed to evaluate how “human” our computers might be, which in
a way also examines how human we still are. For him, “the most central
questions of being human” are about meaning and relations with other
human beings “within the limits of language and time” (13–14). Such
assertions notwithstanding, the Turing test is undeniably about human
relations with AIs. According to him, our relations with machines can
serve as a constructive model for our relations with each other. He writes
that “the story of the progression of technology doesn’t have to be a
dehumanizing or dispiriting one” (14), but something quite the contrary,
something positive, full of promise and hope. From his interaction with
AIs during the Loebner competition, he concluded that “we fail—again
and again—to actually be human with other humans” (32). As he sees it,
technology offers the solution and can help bring us back to ourselves and
our humanity.
Christian thinks that the human being and computer “are symbiotes”
which “need each other,” “keep each other honest,” and “make each
other better” (14). Even though he sees how we fail to be human with
each other, how we have altered our most human behaviors and capaci-
ties to correspond to the ethos and modalities of our technology, he does
not believe that we have been dehumanized. Technology poses no grave
threats to our humanity, even when machines reach a stage where they
simulate human consciousness. While some voices raise concern about AI,
Christian thinks that “fears over AI would seem to miss the point” (85).
In his opinion, technology obeys not only its forms and structures, but
also its human inventors: “as soon as the machine exists, it is playing the
part assigned it by its designers” (132). In other words, technology is
firmly and safely under our control. He suggests that we “think of the
66 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
the world has ever seen” (25). Characteristic of this book is a vocabulary
of “more,” “better,” and “than ever.” With the aid of the Internet, he
claims, we can all now be whatever we would like to be: “artists or philoso-
phers or singers or photographers or commentators or reviewers” (25).
Questions of talent or ability are of no concern, since technology makes us
all remarkably able and talented. With the coming of the Internet, Marx’s
famous words seem at last to have found their fulfillment: “where nobody
has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in
any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus
makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow,
to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening,
criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter,
fisherman, herdsman or critic” (The German Ideology 47).
According to Reese, paradise awaits us all, and we will reach a state of
perfection. In this perfect world to come, everyone will have access to
everything: knowledge, healthcare, wealth, peace, and freedom. Ignorance
will end, because anyone who has access to the Internet “can obtain any
knowledge they need” (30). In such a world, “in the not-too-distant
future,” he declares, “no one will have to work. No one!” (149). Instead,
everyone will be busy seeking “personal excellence” (149). Reese recalls
the pronouncements of all the technological idealists who have gone
before him. Food will be free, disease will end, work will end, war will
end. The World Wide Web, Reese assures, is “a force for truth, connect-
edness, understanding, and communication” (258). Finally, “everyone in
the world will learn English, because it will be the language of the Internet
and thus the language of the world” (266). It is the story of the tower
of Babel in reverse. We have come full circle. Technological advance and
change, Reese assures us, “will come at no cost to our humanity” (283).
Jeremy Rifkin’s recent book The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet
of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (2014)
once again presents the same or similar utopian perspectives and visions
as found in the work of so many others discussed here. In particular,
Rifkin advances ideas previously promulgated in Toffler’s The Third Wave
such as the notion of the “prosumer,” someone who is both producer
and consumer. Thanks to technological innovation and advance, Rifkin
maintains, everyone will be connected with everyone and everything via
an Internet of Things. When this super-intersection occurs, it will result in
a postcapitalist economy of “nearly free goods and services” (4). A new
economic system made possible by technology will liberate “the human
68 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
race from toil and hardships” and free “the human mind from a preoccu-
pation with strictly pecuniary interests to focus more on the ‘arts for life’
and the quest for transcendence” (7). His thesis is simply a reformulation
and reiteration of old ideas. It is a utopian vision, but one which all tech-
nological utopians have maintained is not utopian, because it will indeed
be realized—for Rifkin within the next 50 years.
Rifkin celebrates the computerization of every aspect of life, whether
it is regulating vehicular traffic, managing fauna, flora, and the weather,
assessing soil, water, and air quality, or even monitoring individual human
bodies. In a word, everything will transform into something smart. Beside
smart phones, we will have smart cars, smart education, smart agricul-
ture, smart medicine, smart cities, and so on. The Internet of Things
will ensure “the well-being of the Earth as a whole” (13). This huge,
integrated, global “intelligent network” is “a single operating system”
(71). It may be a bit scary, but “it’s also exciting and liberating,” Rifkin
reassures us (77). According to him, not to mention Kevin Kelly and the
many others like him, it establishes and promotes sharing, collaboration,
transparency, sustainability, and equality. It will be a near-perfect world of
efficiency and abundance. Once again, whatever downsides there might
be really do not matter and really need not be addressed, since the ben-
efits are so great. The only threats to the wonderful future for humanity
made possible by the Internet of Things are climate change and cyber-
terrorism—both products of our technology. Fortunately, as Rifkin tells
it, the Internet-of-Things infrastructure itself offers the best solution to
climate change (cf. 291) and best protection against cyber-terrorist attacks
(cf. 294–295). That is, technology saves us from the problems it created.
Rifkin resurrects the old utopian idea that technology will free us from
burdensome labor, will provide us with all we need to survive, and allow
us to engage in more fulfilling intellectual and artistic activity.
This survey of technological idealism closes with a look at an Open
Letter published online in January 2015 by the Future of Life Institute.
This institute defines itself as a “research and outreach organization work-
ing to mitigate existential risks facing humanity” (http://futureoflife.org/
about). The letter bore the modest title “Research Priorities for Robust
and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence.” Its publication by this institute sug-
gests that it speaks to an existential risk posed by AI. The intended audi-
ence is unclear, but it was endorsed by many researchers at Google, MIRI
(the Machine Intelligence Research Institute), IBM, MIT, and a long list
of other computer scientists at universities around the world—the very
THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE 69
CONTOURS OF A MYTH
According to David Nye, a “master narrative of technological ameliora-
tion” (18) emerged in the USA in relation to the ax, mill, canal, railroad,
and dam. These technologies represented progress and optimism. At the
core of this story lies a belief in the power of technology to transform the
world. For example, the seemingly simple ax cut the trees that made the
log cabin and cleared the forest for the farms and fields that transformed
the landscape that made a country and a nation. Technological founda-
tion narratives, that is, narratives about technologies that “created” and
“made” America what it is, ultimately became “a national myth of origins”
(Nye, America 292).
Subsequently, the automobile, assembly line, motion picture, airplane,
and radio of the early twentieth century acquired special significance simi-
lar to the ax, mill, railroad, and dam. The new technologies represented
“fluidity, … movement, communication, replication and simulation”
(Nye, America 292). They all suggested a “new kind of equality, new
constructions of the self, and new ways to obliterate the past and start
anew” (292). In recent years, digital technology has likewise become a
signifier of special meaning and assumed a key role in the narrative of tech-
nological idealism. For example, computers and the Internet represent
speed, immediacy, connectedness, intelligence, sophistication, freedom,
and equality. While specific technologies have specific meanings, technol-
ogy, in general, conveys a set of meanings and values such as efficiency,
reliability, improvement, liberation, and power. The dominant narrative is
really about technology itself, technology as the sum of all technologies
and all the meanings they contain.
A master narrative about improvement by means of technology is hardly
restricted to the USA. It spans the globe. This narrative of technological
idealism enjoys almost universal acceptance and is an almost all-powerful
myth that explains the natural order of things. It tells us how and what
the human being and the world are: they are nothing without technol-
ogy and are themselves machines. This narrative places technology at the
center of everything and ascribes to it the attendant paramount value and
meaning which the center of everything has. Technology is something, if
not exactly sacred, certainly exemplary, extremely significant, and essential
for our society and culture (cf. Chap. 2 and Eliade’s definition in Myth
and Reality). As Lewis Mumford explained, technological advance and
expansion has been accompanied and “furthered by an ideology that gave
THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE 71
precedence and cosmic authority to the machine itself.” That ideology has
come to convey “universal meanings and commands,” requires “obedi-
ence,” and “its imperatives have the dynamic force of a myth” (Pentagon
157). This myth tells us what is necessary for our survival, development,
and happiness. Myth, Henry Murray points out, has the “power to gen-
erate conviction and orient behavior” (“Possible Nature” 344). Above
all, myth provides meaning, and the myth in question tells us meaning is
found in technology.
For many ages and generations, Murray observes, myths
A Counter-Narrative
EARLY WARNINGS
Beside the narrative of technological idealism, a counter-narrative of dissent
exists. It protests the veracity and authority of the dominant narrative.
The authors of this narrative challenge the story of technological prom-
ise and benefit. They warn that technology poses a serious threat to the
individual, society, and environment. The following pages offer a sample
of the most significant and representative voices critical of technological
enthusiasm in works of non-fiction.
From ancient times through the Middle Ages and the Early Modern
Era up until the eighteenth century, technological change was relatively
slow and minor. Technology had not disturbed the ordinary and regular
patterns of life. When it could no longer be so readily integrated into the
culture, first in the nineteenth and then in the twentieth century, technol-
ogy began to cause concern as never before. To be sure, there had been
objections to and even prohibitions of technology in earlier times, but
they were relatively few. In the Middle Ages, for instance, use of the cross-
bow was banned, because it was considered a weapon of mass destruc-
tion. It, moreover, threatened to upset the whole order of society, since it
allowed a peasant to be as deadly as any nobleman.
Act (1827). Since that time, the word Luddite has become a stereotype
and has been used by technological enthusiasts to disparage and dis-
credit as benighted anyone injudicious enough to identify any problems
associated with technology or technological advance. But Luddites then
and now object to very real technological peril.
Before 1800, there was not much awareness of something called tech-
nology, and even in the nineteenth century, as Thomas Hughes reports,
“only a minority of writers … protested against the majority infatuation
with the machine and the prospect of a technological age” (Changing
Attitudes 335). Because there is relatively little written at that time in
opposition to technological idealism, the work of a few writers stands out.
In 1819, for example, the English Romantic poet Robert Southey visited
New Lanark in Scotland, a model village built by David Dale for workers
in the local cotton mills. Southey’s host was the utopian socialist Robert
Owen, Dales’ son-in-law and manager of the mills since 1800.
A presentation by the children of the village left Southey with a trou-
bling impression. They “turned to right or left, faced about, fell forwards
and backwards, and stamped at command … with perfect regularity” (as
quoted in Jennings 157). Such behavior reminded him of nothing so much
as the mechanisms in the nearby factories. “I could not but think that these
puppet-like motions might, with a little ingenuity, have been produced by
the great water-wheel, which is the primum mobile of the whole Cotton-
Mills” (in Jennings 157). Southey finds much about the place disturbing.
He heard Owen call the workers “human machines” which he “liter-
ally believes them to be” (in Jennings 157). Moreover, Owen’s “system,
instead of aiming at perfect freedom, can only be kept in power by absolute
power” (in Jennings 158). As Southey indicates, the technological system
imprisons the human being. Owen’s imagined technological utopia anni-
hilates “individuality of character and domesticity” as well as “the power of
human society, and the grace” (in Jennings 158). Perceptions of domina-
tion, social destruction, and dehumanization inherent in a technological
order loom large in this account.
Not long after Southey wrote about New Lanark, the Scottish writer
Thomas Carlyle published “Signs of the Times” (1829). Well known for
his histories, satirical fiction, and essays, Carlyle gives expression in this
piece to the apprehension many Europeans felt in the face of the nascent
Industrial Revolution. He chose “the Mechanical Age” as the “single epi-
thet” for his time (442). According to him, Mechanism, that is, technology,
had established a new, pernicious order defined “by rule and calculated
78 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
Once included into the production process of capital, … the means of labour
passes through a series of metamorphoses until it ends up as the machine, or
rather as an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery; automatic
merely means the most complete, most adequate form of machinery, and
alone transforms machinery into a system). That system is set in motion by
an automaton, self-moved motive power; this automaton consists of a large
number of mechanical and intellectual organs, with the workers themselves
cast in the role of merely conscious members of it. (Outlines 82)
CONCERN MULTIPLIES
It is really only in the twentieth century that overt criticism of technology
commences in earnest and begins to increase in volume and intensity. In
1924, the anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir was perhaps the first to
speak of technological idealism as an “illusion.” “There can be no stranger
illusion—and it is an illusion we nearly all share—than this,” he writes,
that because the tools of life are today more specialized and more refined
than ever before, that because the technique brought by science is more
perfect than anything the world has yet known, it necessarily follows that we
are in like degree attaining to a profounder harmony of life, to a deeper and
more satisfying culture. (94–5)
80 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
of the machine comes nearer and nearer” (1357), he reasons. For Wiener,
any effort to overcome the organism in favor of the mechanism, to replace
the human being with the machine, invites disaster.
About the same time, Martin Heidegger, the famous, but also infamous
German philosopher, published “The Question Concerning Technology.”
Because of his association with National Socialism and its perverse ideology,
his intellectual contribution has been problematic. Even so, he has remained
remarkably influential, and his insights into the nature of modern technology
have some validity. In this 1954 essay, he presents technology as the domi-
nant force in the modern world. He argues that technology has transformed
the physical world into a “standing reserve” (Bestand) and that it creates
a “frame” (Gestell) which encompasses everything, including the human
being. Technology endangers and objectifies human beings by transforming
them into a mere reserve waiting to be used at will. Technological enframe-
ment renders human beings impotent. “Everywhere we remain unfree and
chained to technology,” he observes, “whether we passionately affirm or
deny it” (4). The problem is further complicated by the notion of neu-
trality: “we are delivered over to it [technology] in the worst possible way
when we regard it as something neutral: for this conception of it, to which
we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of
technology” (4). In spite of such insights, his actual position proves elusive.
The question of his title receives no clear answer.
During the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse inspired both students and politi-
cal activists. With One Dimensional Man (1964), he contributed as well to
the critique of technology. According to him, technology serves one pri-
mary purpose: “to institute new, more effective, and more pleasant forms
of social control and social cohesion” (xv). The key issue for him is the
domination of the human being by technology. “Unfreedom,” he writes,
is “a token of technical progress” (1). Technological rationality, he argues,
“becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truly totalitar-
ian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state
of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe” (18). Nothing
and no one escapes the totality of technology, as it “engulfs the public
and private existence in all spheres of society” and then as “a medium of
control and cohesion” incorporates and integrates all members of society
into the technological framework (23). Ultimately, technology “circum-
scribes an entire culture; it projects a historical totality—a ‘world’” (154).
It asserts itself as our only reality, for it “absorbs all spheres of culture”
(166), and domination emerges as its most salient feature.
A COUNTER-NARRATIVE 83
displaced both the natural world and the diverse symbols of human culture
with an environment cut solely to the measure of the machine. This ideol-
ogy gave primacy to the denatured and dehumanized environment in which
the new technological complex could flourish without being limited by any
human interests and values other than those of technology itself. (vol. II, 24)
For Mumford, as for other critics, the term myth has a twofold meaning.
On the one hand, it is a powerful narrative, a worldview, which orients
humanity toward and unites it around technology. On the other hand, he
uses the term to signify a fiction, a tall-tale, a false reality which deceives
humanity.
According to Mumford, the mechanical world picture removes the
human being from consideration, since technology creates and then
institutes values indifferent to, even at odds with, human needs and prob-
lems. “Purely mechanical forms are superimposed upon every manifesta-
tion of life, thereby suppressing many of the most essential characteristics
of organism, personalities, and human communities,” he declares (II, 37).
Our overwhelming affirmation of technology has, moreover, “drastically
lessened man’s own sense of his worth and his significance” (II, 126).
Mumford identifies technological idealism as an “ideology,” one that gives
“precedence and cosmic authority to the machine itself,” one that conveys
A COUNTER-NARRATIVE 85
While once significant and influential, Ellul’s critique has passed out of
mind and all but faded into obscurity. Few know or pay attention to him
today. Others dismiss his analysis and insights outright as negative and
pessimistic. The same is true of Mumford and his efforts to demythologize.
All of which gives evidence of the power and primacy of the narrative of
technological idealism.
His book The End of Nature (1989) documents the greenhouse effect and
the global change of climate occasioned by our technological way of life.
As he reports, scientific research attributes such radical changes to man-
made, technological activity: chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs, now banned)
used as refrigerants, propellants, and solvents destroy the earth’s protec-
tive ozone layer and allow too much of the sun’s radiation to reach the
planet’s surface; sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide released mostly by coal
power plants and automobiles cause acid rain, damaging forests and soil;
and carbon dioxide and methane emissions produced by our industrializa-
tion of manufacturing and farming along with massive deforestation trap
energy and heat up the planet. All of this is the product or by-product of
technological “progress.” As McKibben explains, “we have done this to
ourselves, by driving our cars, building our factories, cutting down our
forests, turning on our air conditioners” (45). For him, the end of nature
occurred, when we altered the climate. “We have changed the atmo-
sphere, and thus are changing the weather. By changing the weather, we
make every spot on earth man-made and artificial” (58). Nothing has not
been touched and changed by our technological transformation of the
planet’s climate.
Like Berry, he rejects the idea of infinite progress and the belief in tech-
nological improvement as the only answer to the problems we face—in
this case, global climate change (152–4). Also, like Berry and Carson,
McKibben identifies control and domination by technological means and
without regard for the condition of the environment as problematic and
damaging in theory as in practice. “The logic of our present thinking,” he
notes, “leads inexorably in the direction of the managed world” (172).
That technological way of thinking, he insists, has to change (189). He
does not trust in technological solutions to problems caused by techno-
logical civilization such as desertification and oceanic inundation, crop
losses and the loss of potable water. A technological response in the form
of cloned redwoods, engineered rainfall, or genetically modified animals is
one answer, but a poor one, he maintains. It gives us an artificial world—
a mere shadow of the real, natural one. The better answer, he advises, is
to make “technological adjustments” (213)—that is, to “limit ourselves
voluntarily” (214) in our use of technology. However, and as McKibben
realizes, the choice to do so is unlikely.
In 1969, Victor Ferkiss undertook an investigation of Technological
Man and attempted to distinguish between The Myth and the Reality, as
the title and subtitle indicate. Ferkiss understood that “the nature of
A COUNTER-NARRATIVE 91
freedom and identity” changes in the face of “the new powers being devel-
oped by modern technology” (31). Thanks to technological advances,
he observes, a person can alter identity, appearance, even gender. We can
likewise decide what we want our children to be and look like. “But,” he
asks, “if you can be whatever you want to be, how will you distinguish the
‘real’ you from the chosen?” (31).
In his view, technology transformed society and the individual within
it into a mechanism,
This analysis harks back to both Marx and Southey, but also intersects
with Mumford’s concept of a megamachine consisting of human compo-
nents (more about the megamachine in Chap. 6).
A fully technological society, Ferkiss feared, would become sensate,
hedonistic, and leisure-oriented—not thoughtful, productive, and high-
minded as so often imagined and affirmed. The importance of the family
would decline; sexual life would become more promiscuous and open;
concepts of male and female would alter and shift; privacy would decline;
alienation would increase; rationality would reign supreme in the work-
place; and personal life would become more individualistic and the will
more irrational (172–3). What he thought or hoped would not occur has,
to large extent: mass culture thanks to electronic media; religion and art
adapted to new technologies; changed concepts of gender; the erasure of
the private sphere; and science essentially inseparable from technological
instruments like the computer modeling it employs. Ferkiss did not rec-
ognize such a reality around him, but saw it as a possibility he wished to
prevent.
Much like Norbert Wiener, Joseph Weizenbaum was a pioneer in
computer science and what would come to be known as artificial intel-
ligence (AI). His computer program ELIZA became famous for its appar-
ent ability to carry on conversations with human interlocutors. Although
Weizenbaum set the stage for subsequent research and development of
AI, he became an outspoken critic of the ills inherent in the computer
revolution. In Computer Power and Human Reason (1976), he asserts the
92 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
know best what they themselves have made, that the things we make are
under our control, and that technology is essentially neutral, merely a
means to an end, the benefit or harm it brings dependent on how we use it
(25). He takes issue with the premise that technology primarily and char-
acteristically benefits humanity. Like his predecessors, he finds no evidence
that technological change has enhanced “human freedom, dignity, and
well-being” (52). With reference to John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New
Industrial State, Winner argues that “a society propelled by imperatives
of technology is increasingly closed, inertial, inflexible, and isolated from
any true conception of human needs” (105). According to Winner, “effi-
ciency, speed, precise measurement, rationality, productivity, and technical
improvement become ends in themselves applied obsessively to areas of
life in which they would previously have been rejected as inappropriate”
(229). As an end in itself, only technology matters. Its values supplant all
others and distort human judgment.
Wise or unwise use of technology is another illusion Winner dismisses.
Following Ellul, he points out that “technological transformation occurs
prior to any ‘use,’ good or ill, and takes place as a consequence of the con-
stitution and operating design of technological systems” (225). In other
words, how technology is used is predetermined by technology itself.
In accord with the assessments of Wiener and Weizenbaum, Winner also
notes that “technical systems, once built and operating, do not respond
well to human guidance” (227). They have or assume their own trajectory.
“That one employs something at all far outweighs (and often obliterates)
the matter of how one employs it” (320).
In 1982, the philosopher John Searle published a piece in The New York
Review of Books entitled “The Myth of the Computer.” The article exam-
ines “a theory of the mind based on artificial intelligence (AI),” one which
defines minds merely as “computer programs of certain kinds” (http://
www.nybooks.com). According to this theory, human-like minds will
come to exist in machines like computers. Like Weizenbaum, Searle denies
such claims. A computer, he writes,
can simulate the formal properties of the sequence of chemical and electri-
cal phenomena in the production of thirst just as much as it can simulate
the formal properties of anything else—we can simulate thirst just as we
can simulate hurricanes, rainstorms, five-alarm fires, internal combustion
engines, photosynthesis, lactation, or the flow of currency in a depressed
economy. But no one in his right mind thinks that a computer simulation of a
94 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
five-alarm fire will burn down the neighborhood, or that a computer simulation
of an internal combustion engine will power a car or that computer simula-
tions of lactation and photosynthesis will produce milk and sugar.
Searle attacks the persistent notion that humans and the universe are
nothing but machines. For him, the strong AI position is preposterous.
It is a mistake to think that “if a computer can simulate having a cer-
tain mental state then we have the same grounds for supposing it really
has that mental state as we have for supposing that human beings have
that state.” It is a “mythological conception of digital computers,” he
explains. Even so, many continue to credit the illusion and equate the
simulation with the reality of human consciousness.
The title of Stephen Hill’s book The Tragedy of Technology: Human
Liberation versus Domination in the Late Twentieth Century (1988) says
much already about his concerns. Like me, he discusses a dominant
narrative which he calls the “technology text” (9). Using Heidegger’s
concept of enframement, Hill asserts that technology limits “horizons
within which social action is enacted and cultural meanings are con-
structed” (9). In his opinion, culture is now so fully aligned with the
pervasive technological system that non-human meanings have over-
taken and supplanted human meanings. Human points of reference
such as difficulty, difference, imprecision, ambiguity, or error have been
replaced by those of technology such as ease, efficiency, regularity, and
infallibility. Because technology “mediates our life-world experience
according to technological design parameters” (41), it restricts our abil-
ity to see anything outside of the technological framework, severely
limiting choice and freedom.
Although Hill holds out hope for bringing technology back under
human control, the possibility seems unlikely. Like Ellul, he knows “choice
is only likely to be practical within the constraints that are imposed by the
technical frame that already exists, and upon which contemporary society
depends” (235). In a society enframed and governed by technology which
only moves into the future, never into the past, we lose “a consciousness
of the continuity of human purpose, and a consistent morality and wis-
dom” (238). Only “what is practical within constrained technical param-
eters … rather than … that which is ‘inefficiently’ human” matters (238).
As a result, human interests and concerns go begging.
The educator and media critic Neil Postman dispelled the pretense
that one technology—television—could educate, democratize, inform,
A COUNTER-NARRATIVE 95
they include the following: technology will solve crime; it will improve
education; it will promote equality; and it will solve whatever prob-
lems technology itself creates. Alvaro De Miranda, for example, exam-
ines governmental policies and reports of the European Union, the G-1
nations, and the USA which promise socioeconomic equality thanks to
Information Communication Technologies. He found “no evidence that
ICTs will make any contribution to closing the socio-economic divide”
(36). Richard Sharpe, in turn, refutes the “perpetual myth of the open
and free Internet” (49) and the idea of the Internet as “a common neutral
platform on which ideas can flourish” (49). As he reveals, the Internet is
hardly neutral and ideas do not flourish there, because certain individuals
and corporations have proprietary rights to the technology in question,
and their search engines determine what information even makes it onto
the first page of any Internet search, beyond which most people rarely ven-
ture. The Internet search engines and sites are likewise hardly “free,” since
“Yahoo, Google, and others charge to place certain sources of information
higher than others” (51). Internet users, he points out, have “the false
impression of the consumption of free goods and services in a networked
world of equal power” (52). Other contributors to the volume contradict
claims that Closed Circuit Television helps fight crime or that posthuman
configurations take human existence to a better, higher level.
Nicholas Carr has been writing about technology for several years, most
recently in The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (2014). In that book, he
investigates the effects of turning more, even everything, over to algo-
rithms, computers, and robots. Carr documents what we lose by handing
our work over to machines and continues an analysis begun in The Shallows:
What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (2010). That book created quite
a stir when it was first published, and I concentrate on it here. Basing his
argument on published data from extensive research, much as Bauerlein
did, Carr negates assertions that computers and the Internet have helped
make us more intelligent and creative. According to Carr, that technologi-
cal combination restructures our brains and leaves us with devolved cogni-
tive abilities, if not outright impairment. When we turn over certain mental
tasks to machines, he determined, we give up invaluable mental skills. (For
an analysis similar to Carr’s, see Digitale Demenz [Digital Dementia, 2012]
by the German brain researcher Martin Spitzer.)
Like Bauerlein and Birkerts, Carr contrasts online activity with “the
book’s ethic of deep, attentive reading” (71). The superficial, shallow
reading done online drastically changes how we read and think, and does
A COUNTER-NARRATIVE 101
more to empty than fill the mind. Whereas the medium of the book focuses
attention, the Internet scatters it; it “fragments content and disrupts our
concentration” (91). Rather than enrich us, the Internet impoverishes us.
It actually represents “a technology of forgetfulness” (192). The more we
rely on the Web with its “capacious and easily searchable artificial mem-
ory,” the less we need to remember and the less we need any memory—
the very foundation of knowledge and intelligence (194). Above all, Carr
warns, “the great danger we face as we become more intimately involved
with our computers … is that we’ll begin to lose our humanness, to sacri-
fice the very qualities that separate us from machines” (207).
A pioneer of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier published You Are Not a
Gadget: A Manifesto in 2010. Like Wiener and Weizenbaum, he has an
expert’s knowledge of technology and takes issue with a number of incor-
rect assumptions. For example, the dominant narrative tells us that tech-
nology increases our freedom and enhances our humanity. He exposes
a world not of independence, but of technological confinement. “The
interlocked software designs of the internet” have now become so fixed
and determinative, he writes, “that we might never be able to fully get rid
of them, or even remember that things could have been different” (13).
Lanier considers the hopes and dreams of people like John von
Neumann, Ray Kurzweil, and Marvin Minsky pure “fantasy” (24). As
Lanier points out, their plan for a future human–machine civilization,
where our biology merges with our technology, makes people obsolete
(27). In such a world, the human element will not survive. He rejects as
well “a new philosophy: that the computer is evolving into a life-form that
can understand people better than people can understand themselves”
(28). In his view, technological superiority is a false premise.
He was one of many who hoped “that a connected world would cre-
ate more opportunities for personal advancement for everyone” (81). Such
digital idealism, he came to realize, has not produced a wonderful world of
opportunity, where anyone who wants it can find self-fulfillment, prosperity,
and well-being (cf. 88–9). Although he has hope that the digital revolution
can still manage somehow to enhance our humanity (108), most of his book
shows how such technology has diminished us. In his experience, “people
have often respected bits [i.e., binary digits] too much, resulting in a creep-
ing degradation of their own qualities as human beings” (119). Especially
incisive is Lanier’s conclusion that digital culture is “comprised of wave after
wave of juvenilia” (182). Advanced technology paradoxically nurtures imma-
turity. “At the end of the road of the pursuit of technological sophistication
102 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
AMBIVALENCE
At this point, readers might want to assert that there are more than two
main narratives about technology, that there is a narrative of ambivalence
or even indecision. To ambivalence here, I attach the sense of contradic-
tion as well. A certain amount of contradiction certainly appears in both
the dominant and the counter narratives. While many of the critics cited
here reserve optimism for bringing technology under human control and
direction, some of the technological enthusiasts discussed in the previous
chapter acknowledged inherent flaws in the nature of technology. For the
technological enthusiast, however, the virtues of technology always out-
weigh the vices. The ambivalent person, in comparison, hopes that the
vices can be overcome so that the virtues can be enjoyed. Ambivalence
reflects a desire to reconcile technology and humanity, but the reconcili-
ation invariably means concessions to technology in favor of technology.
Among the ambivalent are also the apathetic. They, too, align in the end
with the dominant narrative. There are many who now think that technol-
ogy does more harm than good, but as it is impossible to change its course
or curb its power and reach, we might as well just accept it. These voices
are essentially silent. Their position is one of passivity, resignation, and
acceptance of the status quo. Although aware of undeniable technological
ills, the apathetic make do, because technology is, they believe, here and
here to stay. There is nothing anyone can do to change it. This attitude is
a fatalistic response to technological dominion.
At the heart of the ambivalence lies a belief that technology is neutral,
neither good nor evil. Rather, it all depends on how it is used. Carlyle,
for example, thought that “properly reemployed,” technology would
serve “not just material improvement but also spiritual uplift” (Segal,
Technological Utopianism 82). Some authors in this category actually
delineate the problematic aspects of technology, even offer devastating cri-
tiques, but in the end reserve hope for its positive potential. As previously
noted, Marx firmly believed that technology would ultimately liberate
A COUNTER-NARRATIVE 109
BLASPHEMY
If we wish to determine what a particular person or society holds dear or
sacred and values above all else, we need only identify what most occupies
his or her time and attention. There can be no doubt that technology
with all its expressions, but especially the personal computer, smart phone,
and Internet, has captivated us and even become something sacrosanct.
Citizens of the technological society cannot, must not, and dare not criti-
cize technology which by definition is its very foundation. Technology is
its most important and revered possession, its summum bonum, indeed, its
only and most sacred reality. To pass judgment would be to blaspheme.
Because technology is so pervasive, so useful, so amazing, so fascinat-
ing, and so treasured, any criticism, any dissenting point of view, is exceed-
ingly hard to permit and accept, if at all. Because technological idealism
operates as the dominant narrative, as the myth which organizes and uni-
fies society and provides cultural meaning, the counter-narrative is tanta-
mount to heresy or worse, sacrilege. When someone attacks the dominant,
authoritative myth, she or he violates deeply held convictions. He or she
runs the risk of scorn and condemnation. Any objection to technology is
perceived as aberrant. Although not discredited, the counter-narrative is
nonetheless objectionable and readily dismissed. It is a message no one
really wishes to hear. Although new publications bolster the counter-
narrative, technological idealism continues to rule the day.
CHAPTER 5
Literary Narratives
FIRST THOUGHTS
This chapter offers a survey of literary engagements with technology.
Selection was necessary and invariably omits stories some readers might
prefer to have seen included. The choices are, I hope, representative and
illustrative of literary milestones from different times and cultures. While a
few of the texts do not appear to deal with technology per se, they never-
theless reveal the decisive role of technology in the background of related
events. The emphasis here falls less on critical analysis of each text—which
extends far beyond the scope of this chapter—than on the presentation of
those texts and their contents with additional, albeit limited commentary.
Chapters 6 and 7 are devoted exclusively to the critical interpretation of
two particular stories—Faust and Frankenstein—because they hold such
key positions in the literary tradition of works about technology.
Literary narratives (or fiction) about technology have a long and equivo-
cal trajectory, reflecting our own ambivalent relationship to it. Cautionary
tales have been with us since the myths of Prometheus, Icarus, and Babel.
Such narratives have been especially concerned with the disastrous effects
and consequences of technology. Often, this type of story has been one
THE ANCIENTS
Because I have already discussed the ancient stories about technology in
Chap. 2, I refer to them here only briefly. There is no question that the
Greek myth of Prometheus is a warning about audacity, presumption, and
knowledge. As Langdon Winner observes, “Aeschylus’s treatment of the
legend … emphasizes the importance of technology in Prometheus’s crime
against the gods” (334). The theft of fire “was in its primary consequence
the theft of all technical skills and inventions later given to mortals” (334).
But the story is not entirely negative as concerns the advent of technol-
ogy. The comments in Aeschylus’ play suggest that, while Prometheus was
punished for his rebellious act, humanity benefited immensely from the gift
of technology. The fire was the foundation of all subsequent technology.
114 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe
to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this
invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use
it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, pro-
duced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discour-
age the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir
not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance
of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruc-
tion and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the
most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but
only appear wise.
With this story, Socrates exposes the inherent problem with a specific tech-
nology, indicates the way technologies change us, in this case, for ill, and
reveals how we attribute benefits to technology which mask significant
problems. His critique could be applied today to our use of Google to
find answers to everything that we never need remember and from which
we need learn nothing, because we can and will simply repeat the Google
search, should we need or wish to know it again. Likewise, Google lends the
appearance of knowledge and wisdom, while hiding our actual ignorance.
One other old story deserves attention as it gave expression to a dream,
which runs like a red thread through the literary narratives about technol-
ogy: the inanimate object we wish to make human. The story is most famil-
iar in the version provided by the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC–AD 17/18) in
his Metamorphoses. According to this story, the sculptor Pygmalion carved a
statue of a woman with which he then fell in love. His wish that the statue
come to life so that they could wed was granted by the goddess Aphrodite.
Although Ovid gave the animated statue no name, it has since come to be
known as Galatea. The quest to animate the inanimate found subsequent
expression in the development of automata and, most recently, has taken
shape in the invention of AIs and the fabrication of humanoid robots. The
story reveals how we come to be enamored of our own creations and how
we desire to create something in our own likeness, something artificial
which simulates being human, even if it is a machine. It also reveals our
anthropomorphic projections onto our technological creations. We readily
endow these devices and machines with human qualities.
116 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
ENLIGHTENMENT
Although the so-called Age of Reason generally favored technological
advance, most writers of literary fiction did not much concern themselves
with the topic. They were typically more interested in such subjects as
humanity and inhumanity, freedom and necessity, tolerance, equality, and
human happiness. Because technology had not yet presented itself as a
pressing matter, whether as boon or bane of existence, it makes an appear-
ance in only a few works of eighteenth-century imaginative literature.
One of the most popular books of the time tells the story of a man
shipwrecked on a desert isle. Daniel Defoe’s novel, The Life and Strange
Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), is in a sense a story of
humanity’s technological ingenuity. Robinson Crusoe begins with primi-
tive circumstances and transforms them through technological means into
a version of civilization. The hero of the story is, in essence, an engineer.
He recapitulates the history of technological advance: he excavates a cave
to serve as a dwelling, he builds table and chairs, he devises a calendar to
calculate his time on the island, he plants and cultivates crops, he molds
earthenware, and he domesticates wild animals.
118 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
a man eminent for his knowledge of the mechanick powers, who had contrived
many engines both of use and recreation. By a wheel, which the stream
120 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
turned, he forced the water into a tower, whence it was distributed to all
the apartments of the palace. He erected a pavilion in the garden, around
which he kept the air always cool by artificial showers. One of the groves,
appropriated to the ladies, was ventilated by fans, to which the rivulet that
ran through it gave a constant motion; and instruments of soft musick were
played at proper distances, of which some played by the impulse of the wind,
and some by the power of the stream. (17)
The striving of the mechanic more and more to imitate the human produc-
tion of musical tones or to replace them by mechanical means is in my opin-
ion a declaration of war against the spiritual principle. That hostile power
triumphs all the more splendidly, the more some merely apparent forces
are arrayed against it. For that very reason, the most perfect machine of
this kind, measured in mechanical terms, is for me the most contemptu-
ous, and a simple hurdy-gurdy which only seeks a mechanical achievement
in its mechanicalness is still always preferable to Vaucanson’s flutist and the
harmonica girl. (371–2)
The lights in the great factories, which looked, when they were illuminated,
like Fairy Palaces—or the travellers by express-train said so—were all extin-
guished; and the bells had rung for knocking off for the night, and had
ceased again; and the Hands, men and women, boy and girl, were clattering
home. Old Stephen was standing in the street, with the old sensation upon
him which the stoppage of the machinery always produced—the sensation
of its having worked and stopped in his own head. (52)
Dickens depicts “not only the physical suffering, but also the psychologi-
cal hazards brought by the machine” (Sussman 44). The world of the
machine has so fully absorbed the human being that he has entirely identi-
fied himself and his activity with that of the factory machinery.
Roughly contemporaneous with Hard Times, The Tragedy of Man by
the Hungarian writer Imre Madách appeared in 1861. This play reviews
human history in fifteen scenes. The two main characters, Adam and
Lucifer, travel across time and space to witness key events in the Garden of
Eden, ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, the Middle Ages of the Crusades,
Prague of the Scientific Revolution, Revolutionary Paris, and London of
the Industrial Revolution. In the twelfth scene, Madách’s protagonist and
antagonist visit a world of the future, where science and technology reign
supreme and have wreaked havoc on the earth. For this stage of humanity,
LITERARY NARRATIVES 125
wherever precision is required man flies to the machine at once, as far prefer-
able to himself. Our sum-engines never drop a figure, nor our looms a stitch;
the machine is brisk and active, when the man is weary; it is clear-headed &
collected, when the man is stupid and dull; it needs no slumber, when man
must sleep or drop; ever at its post, ever ready for work, its alacrity never
flags, its patience never gives in; its might is stronger than combined hun-
dreds, and swifter than the flight of birds. (182)
of a Mephistophelean pact with Edison, the inventor will solve the problem
and transform the object of Ewald’s affections from a drab reality into a
splendid ideal. It is a new version of the ancient myth of Pygmalion and
Galatea and a precursor to Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives (1972).
The resulting invention is Hadaly—“a magneto-electric entity” (59), “a
direct rebuke to the complacency of ‘Nature’” (60), an “Imitation Human
Being” (61)—the perfect woman. While Edison realizes that his invention
“could well lead to tragic consequences,” he nevertheless moves forward
with the terrifying explanation and excuse that “only our ignorance shields
us from terrible responsibilities” (62). Ignorance justifies technological
research and development, whatever the costs may be.
The android Hadaly (Persian for “Ideal”) will “merit the name HUMAN
more than that living specter whose sorry so-called ‘reality’” (68) caused
Ewald so much pain and sadness. Her existence questions the difference
between artificial and real. She, or it, is “perfection” (84), because it is a
machine. Edison seeks to prove to Ewald that the android is not only as
good as, but better than and preferable to, any human being. According to
Edison, no reasonable person can argue against technological innovation
and advance (164). Even though she is a machine, Edison declares her
“Humanity at its best” (215). Ewald also understands the dangers associ-
ated with their radical experiment. He knows that “he was involved in an
adventure far darker and more serious than he had anticipated” (202). Yet,
he cannot decline or say no to the technological promise; he desires and so
accepts the artificial person as better than the real one.
Any discussion of literary narratives about technology must take
Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888) into
account. It was immensely popular and is still in print. In this Rip van
Winkle story, Julian West falls asleep in 1887 and awakens in the won-
derful world of 2000, a world not necessarily characterized by machines,
although they play a significant role in that world without problems,
but a world made virtually perfect by virtue of near total planning and
organization. In this utopian vision, technology eliminates inefficiency,
inequality, immorality, and urban blight (Segal, Future Imperfect 102).
In coincidence with Mercier’s Paris of the twenty-fifth century, Bellamy’s
twenty-first-century Boston boasts “the complete absence of chimneys”
(Looking Backward 28), because the twentieth century found a new
source of energy. Although the nineteenth century had created terrible,
“oppressive and intolerable” social conditions, it nonetheless produced
“a prodigious increase of efficiency” (37) and resulted in a “logical evolution
128 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
For a moment Étienne stood still, deafened and blinded. There were
draughts blowing in from all sides and he was frozen. Then his attention
was caught by the shining steel and copper of the engine, and he went across
to have a look at it. It was set back some twenty-five meters from the shaft
and on a higher level, and so securely built into its brick cradle that, even
when going at full speed and exerting all its four hundred horse-power, the
huge, perfectly oiled crank rose and fell without a sound and not the slight-
est tremor could be felt. (38)
There were buttons and switches everywhere—buttons to call for food, for
music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button … . There was the but-
ton that produced literature. And there were of course the buttons by which
she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained noth-
ing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world. (http://archive.
ncsa.illinois.edu)
Gubbio is a camera operator for the film studio Kosmograph. Each day, he
turns the crank of his camera and transfers to film the images of actors and
actresses in their various roles. Each night, Gubbio enters his thoughts,
observations, and conversations from the day into his journals, which con-
stitute the novel. The details of plot are perhaps less important than how
Gubbio understands the technology he operates and how it defines or
swallows him and any others it touches.
In the opening chapter, he records his response to the critical question
in the technological age. A gentleman asks him: “Couldn’t you be elimi-
nated, replaced by some piece of machinery?” (6). Gubbio answers:
in time, Sir, they will succeed in eliminating me. The machine—this machine
too, like all the other machines—will go by itself. But what mankind will do
then, after all the machines have been taught to go by themselves, that, my
dear Sir, still remains to be seen. (6)
suggests on its knock-kneed tripod a huge spider watching for its prey, a spi-
der that sucks in and absorbs their live reality to render it up an evanescent,
momentary appearance, the play of a mechanical illusion in the eyes of the
134 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
public. And the man who strips them of their reality and offers it as food
to the machine; who reduces their bodies to phantoms, who is he? It is I,
Gubbio. (68–9)
In the same way spiders make webs and webs catch a spider’s prey, the
technology catches us in its net and then sucks the life out of us. But the
human being, here Gubbio, as a function of the technology, is complicit.
Although little known today, Sophie Treadwell’s play Machinal (1928)
was a great success in its day. The Nick Hearn edition I use here first
appeared in 1993 and since then has been reprinted at least 15 times, tes-
tifying to the play’s continued popularity. It is the story of a young woman
whose life goes from bad to worse and ends with her execution by electric
chair. In 1931, the author renamed her drama The Life Machine, a bitterly
ironic reference to the form of execution. The protagonist, known only
as the Young Woman, works in an office as a stenographer and operates
a typewriter. That simple machine defines her and circumscribes her life;
she exists in a lifeless mechanized world of switchboard, adding machine,
typewriter, and manifold machine.
When a co-worker, the Stenographer, says “I’m efficient” (3), she
asserts her value in the technological order. The Young Woman in con-
trast is inadequate and culpable, because “she’s inefficient,” as the
Stenographer and Filing Clerk announce (7). There is no worse or more
grievous offense in the world of technology. Even the stage directions,
Goody notes, emphasize “the mechanisms which permeate the world and
function metonymically in showing the alienation and denaturalization of
the Young Woman’s life” (81). Noises of machines, office machines, rivet-
ing machines, an electric piano, telegraph, and airplane provide the sounds
in the background throughout the play.
The Young Woman marries her boss, but comes to loathe and then mur-
der him. She is prosecuted and sentenced to death. The stage directions
for the courtroom scene read: “The words and movements of all these people
except the YOUNG WOMAN are routine—mechanical” (60). Everyone
except the Young Woman has from the start been mechanical in their
speech and in their work; they have all been reduced to machines them-
selves. At the execution, a reporter worries about one particular machine,
the electric chair: “Suppose the machine shouldn’t work!” To which
another responds: “It’ll work!—It always works!” (82). The “machine”
never fails. The message of the play is that technology always works, and
when it does, it kills.
LITERARY NARRATIVES 135
Snow Crash (1992) were trailblazing novels of this new direction in science
fiction. While Gibson’s story is more critical than Stephenson’s, both
depict a world where technology dominates existence. As Goody observes,
“all identity in Gibson’s cyberpunk writing is constructed through tech-
nology” (40). In Neuromancer, Goody recognizes “the post-human cel-
ebration of the technological transformation of the human” (15). For
David Nye, however, “Gibson’s heroes accept an entirely technological
world, but they resist powerful institutions that control most of cyber-
space” (Technology Matters 207). Snowcrash openly celebrates an existence
where humans live in, out, and through virtual worlds and avatars. Also in
the cyberpunk vein, the young adult novel Feed (2002) by M.T. Anderson
offers a more troubling vision of life engulfed by technology. The story
depicts a world not so unlike our own in a near-future, where people are
wired in to an all-encompassing information/entertainment system which
at the same time furnishes and eliminates meaning in their lives.
Science fiction has been technophiliac, technophobic, or indecisively
somewhere in between. Given increasing anxiety and concern about
environmental conditions and the proliferation of digital technologies,
science fiction stories “which focus closely on controversies regarding the
goodness or badness of technology have inevitably increased in number,
and will presumably continue to do so” (Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
1204). Whether hopeful or gloomy, science fiction consistently explores
the differences between natural and unnatural, real and artificial, human
and inhuman.
THE NOVEL
This chapter concludes with a look at the modern/postmodern novel.
These narratives are not science fiction, but more or less realistic sto-
ries about technology in ordinary lives. Although Hans Castorp is an
engineer in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) and life in
New York City mechanizes individuals like the characters Jimmy Herf
and Ellen Thatcher in Manhattan Transfer (1925) by John Dos Passos,
technology does not figure prominently as a theme in such works.
However, the novels of two other mid-twentieth-century writers—Kurt
Vonnegut in the USA and Max Frisch in Switzerland—each look closely
at technology in contemporary life. While the former portrays life in an
uncaring technological system, the latter depicts the life of an individual
devoted to technology.
140 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
Vonnegut’s first novel Player Piano appeared in 1952 and was origi-
nally marketed as science fiction fantasy, but the story is hardly fantastic or
unrealistic as far as the science and technology is concerned. There is no
space travel, there are no aliens to contend with, and there are no robots
as assistants or enemies. The title refers to the once popular automatic or
self-playing musical instrument which eliminates the human being in the
production of music. The protagonist Paul Proteus, an engineer, lives and
works as a factory manager in the fictional town of Ilium, New York in the
not too distant future. Ilium is populated by three groups: managers and
engineers, workers, and machines. The factories in Ilium have replaced
most of the human employees with machines, and that automation of
everything possible leaves the laboring citizens without work and without
meaning. The fundamental problem is that the technological structures
of large-scale planning—whether by corporations or governments—domi-
nate and control all spheres of existence, and that automated machines and
computers replace all human beings, whether worker or manager. As Paul
reveals, “machines and organization and pursuit of efficiency have robbed
the American people of liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (314).
The machinist Rudy Hertz was one such worker whose activity had
been “recorded” and then transferred to a machine. It is not only his
actions, however, but also his being which are at stake. “Now, by switch-
ing in lathes on a master panel and feeding them signals from the tape,
Paul could make the essence of Rudy Hertz produce one, ten, a hundred,
or a thousand of the shafts” (11). Not only the human being had been
replaced, but as Goody indicates, “the very essence of what it means to be
human” had been replicated by a machine (152).
In Paul’s world, a big computer called EPICAC XIV runs literally
everything. The name alludes to ENIAC, the first programmable, elec-
tronic, digital general-purpose computer developed at the University
of Pennsylvania between 1943 and 1946. This computer can “consider
simultaneously hundreds or even thousands of sides of a question utterly
fairly.” It was “totally free of reason-muddying emotions”; “never for-
got anything”; “in short, EPICAC XIV was dead right about everything”
(Player Piano 117). EPICAC XIV has essentially taken over everything for
human beings. It decides
how many everything America and her customers could have and how much
they would cost. And it was EPICAC XIV who would decide for the com-
ing years how many engineers and managers and research men and civil
LITERARY NARRATIVES 141
servants, and of what skills, would be needed in order to deliver the goods;
and what I.Q. and aptitude levels would separate the useful men from the
useless ones. (118)
Yet, Paul knew that such machines “devaluate human thinking” (15).
A small group of dissidents called the Ghost Shirt Society attempts
to resist the oppressive conditions created by the totalizing technological
order. In a meeting of the Society, Ludwig von Neumann, a political sci-
ence professor who had been replaced by machines, reads from the group’s
manifesto: “I deny that there is any natural or divine law requiring that
machines, efficiency, and organization should forever increase in scope,
power, and complexity, in peace as in war. I see the growth of these now,
rather, as the result of a dangerous lack of law” (301). The Society accord-
ingly calls for laws to regulate and limit technological expansion. As the
dissidents point out, “without regard for the wishes of men, any machines
or techniques or forms of organization that can economically replace men
do replace men” (301). The Society objects to an “intemperate faith in
lawless technological progress” (302) and to technology gone out of con-
trol. As his name suggests, Paul Proteus transforms from a man working
in and adapted to the technological system to one fighting against it.
In the end, the rebellion of the Ghost Shirt Society fails, humans have not
taken back control of machines or their lives, and machines continue to
govern all of life.
While Player Piano employs satire to tell its story, Homo Faber (1957)
by Max Frisch makes use of tragic irony. The Latin of the title—man the
maker in English—plays with the name of the protagonist Walter Faber
who like Paul Proteus is an engineer. Frisch’s novel follows the unraveling
of Faber who believes that, thanks to technology, everything in life can be
engineered, organized, regulated, and controlled. He sees the world and
his life in it only through the lens of technology, which means everything
can be described, measured, managed. As a “Techniker” or technician,
he calculates everything using equations of probability (25) in order to
control all outcomes.
On a flight across Mexico, the airplane he has taken must make an
emergency landing in the desert. Briefly stranded there, he is cut off from
advanced technology, which makes him most uncomfortable. When
surrounded by technology—the airplane, its motors, an electric razor,
a camera, loudspeakers, a streetcar, a map, a clock, a typewriter—he
feels at ease and at home, also in control. Everything he does is mediated
142 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep
the people distracted … secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs
of technology … by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques ….
The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—it
was only staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies,
Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by
the ruling elite. (529–30)
This is my computer. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My com-
puter is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it, as I must master my
life. Without me, my computer is useless. Without my computer, I am use-
less. I must use my computer true. I must compute faster than my enemy
who is trying to kill me. I must outcompute him before he outcomputes
me. I will. Before God, I swear this creed. My computer and myself are
defenders of this country. We are masters of our enemy. We are the saviours
of my life. So be it until there is no enemy, but peace. Amen. (104–105)
system. Like Eric Parker, Nick Shay is thoroughly immersed and at home
in the technological environment:
You feel the contact points around you, the caress of linked grids that give
you a sense of order and command. It’s there in the warbling banks of
phones, in the fax machines and photocopiers and all the oceanic logic
stored in your computer. Bemoan technology all you want. It expands your
self-esteem and connects you in your well-pressed suit to the things that slip
through the world otherwise unperceived. (Underworld 89)
Russo identifies connectedness as one of the key themes of the novel, but
also “the essence of the technological environment, from waste contain-
ment and recycling down to the tightest meshes of electronic communi-
cation” (Future 227). While the technological system connects everyone
with everything, it at the same time increases “disconnectedness on the
human level” (Future 230).
At the end of the story, Nick Shay lives in semi-retirement outside of
Phoenix, Arizona, a place made habitable for suburbanites only by the
technological construction of artificial environments. The subtitles of the
last two sections of the “Epilogue,” Keystroke 1 and Keystroke 2, anchor
the ending in technology. Shay sits before his computer, surfs the web,
and enters cyberspace, where “there is no space or time” (Underworld
825). At this juncture, DeLillo links our perceptions of technology to a
mystical, quasi-religious reality, revelation, and transcendence: “All human
knowledge gathered and linked, hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this
fact referenced to that, a keystroke, a mouse-click, a password—world
without end, amen” (825).
Next, Shay visits the H-bomb home page and connects the conclu-
sion to a remark made earlier in the novel: “All technology refers to the
bomb” (467). DeLillo uses the atomic bomb in the same way Pynchon
used the V-2 rocket in Gravity’s Rainbow. In each story, technology
fundamentally correlates with devastation and destruction. As DeLillo’s
narrator explains, “everything in your computer, the plastic, silicon and
mylar, every logical operation and processing function, the memory, the
hardware, the software, the ones and zeroes, the triads inside the pixels
that form the on-screen image—it all culminates here” (825). That is, all
technology culminates in the atomic bomb and annihilation. On-screen
images of a nuclear detonation suggest a divine glory to Shay, but there
is no “Internet nirvana” for him (Russo, Future 241). On the contrary,
148 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
all its meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments …, its whisper of
reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement
or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence, the tone of hail
and farewell, a word that carries the sunlit ardor of an object deep in drench-
ing noon, the argument of binding touch. (827)
LAST THOUGHTS
We have been writing about technology for centuries, shaping our concep-
tions of it, stating and restating what we think it is or ought to be. Without
doubt, many more stories could have been included in this chapter. In
association with Swift’s Academy of Lagado, for instance, readers might
think of Voltaire’s technical utopia, El Dorado, in Candide. Hauptmann’s
Thiel might likewise remind readers of the negative manifestations of rail-
way technology in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The sampling presented here
can only offer a glimpse and give a sense of what has been written.
Over the course of time and across cultures and languages, the response
to technology in imaginative literature has vacillated between celebration
150 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
1
Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984, 36. Use of Clarke’s comment as epigraph in this
chapter is reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Scovil Galen Ghosh
Literary Agency.
instead merits salvation, speaks to us still. For many readers, Goethe’s Faust is
a hero of modern individualism (cf. Ian Watt). This Faust appeals to modern
sensibilities, because he strives unceasingly, shapes the natural environment
according to his will, creates a world by means of technology, and is appar-
ently rewarded for it all. He is a model and paragon of self-fulfillment. But
we must take a closer look at the text and what it says.
Goethe worked on Faust for six decades and only completed the second
part in 1832, the year of his death. The last two acts of the play, but espe-
cially the final one, focus on technological action. Faust is, of course, the
story of the man who having studied and learned everything there was to
study and learn turned first to magic, but disappointed then to the devil
to learn even more. Faust entered a wager with the devil Mephistopheles
in order to gain the knowledge (and experience) he had not been able to
attain by other means, a knowledge beyond the ken of men, the forbidden
knowledge of omniscience and omnipotence.
Near the end of the play and still in search of satisfaction, the aged Faust
hatches a new plan: to wrest land from the sea. “To complete the greatest
deed,” he declares, “One mind suffices for a thousand hands” (Hamburg edi-
tion, lines 11509–10; my translation here and following). It is the voice of the
technological mastermind, a sentence uttered at the dawn of the Industrial
Age, a sentence composed by an author whose own life encompassed both
the advent of James Watt’s steam engine and its application to railway loco-
motion. At the same time, Faust remains the voice of the Renaissance and
Reformation which saw the advent of that simple, yet magnificent and culture-
transforming technology—the printing press—a radical change in orientation
which arguably presaged the future of technology per se, even the status and
role of technology today. By virtue of its simplification of production and
revolutionary replaceable parts, the printing press could be said to eventuate
in Henry Ford’s auto-assembly line. So, too, Faust’s voice heralds a latter-
day Age of Technology, for his great project ushers in a world created and
governed by technology and its mechanisms. As Lewis Mumford writes, “an
inventive mind,” like Faust’s, was able “to grasp the essential problem—that
of mobilizing a large body of men and rigorously coordinating their activities
in both time and space for a predetermined, clearly envisioned and calcu-
lated purpose” (Pentagon 191). With his exclamation about the deed and his
mind, Faust gives expression to the technological imperative: whatever can be
thought, can and should be done. His great deed, technological in nature,
promises him meaning and fulfillment. With its conclusion, Faust presents a
version of what Richard Stivers identifies as “our major myth today: techno-
logical utopianism” (Technology as Magic 41).
FAUST AND TECHNOLOGICAL FULFILLMENT 153
At the end of the play and his life, he reiterates that view to the visiting
apparition Care, asserting that the here and now is enough for him: “What
does he [man] need to stray into Eternity for!” (11447).
Faust’s monumental land-reclamation project, his great deed, epito-
mizes the project of modernity, for his undertaking depicts the grand,
even grandiose application of instrumentalized reason to nature and soci-
ety. His project likewise reflects the use of reason as instrument, as tool. As
nothing more than the means to an end, such reason equates with tech-
nology itself. In Faust’s world, reason has become both the technique to
conquer the natural environment as well as the source of the technological
plans and tools and means to do so. In particular, Faust illustrates the
eventual and actual culmination of modernity in an all-embracing devo-
tion to and reliance on technology as ultimate and sole source of meaning.
MAGIC
In human history, magic was a precursor to technology. In fact, as Jacques
Ellul observes, “magic is the first expression of technique” (i.e., technology;
Society 25). Ortega y Gasset likewise connects technology and magic:
“All primitive technology smacks of magic,” he writes (144). It is “noth-
154 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
ing but a kind of technology, albeit a frustrated and illusory one” (144).
And so it was for Faust. His diabolical magical power already has a dis-
tinctly “technological flavor” (Pacey 185). Magic did not produce the
results he desired, however, hence the turn or transition to technology
itself. That Faust’s final destination would be the technological is apparent
already at the outset of the play where he resorts to alchemy and magic,
for both are at the most basic level attempts to reorganize or transform the
world in which we live, to acquire and exercise techniques or powers over
the natural and even supernatural realms.
Whether in the form of his alchemistic and occult studies or of
Mephistopheles’ assistance, magic facilitates Faust’s struggle to trans-
gress and even dictate the law, be it natural or moral. Faust had turned to
magic and then accepts Mephisto’s diabolical help, because they seemed
the antidote to his limitations and impotence as a mere human being.
Alchemy and magic historically and characteristically “involve the pros-
pect of power—over people, over death, over natural laws” (Haynes 11).
In Faust, first alchemy, and then magic, offers, as it always has, to over-
come powerlessness and to grant god-like, supernatural powers. The word
magic itself expresses potential ability. As Marcel Maus explains in his
authoritative work on the subject, the words for magic in many languages
“contain the root to do” (19). Etymologically, the word magic derives
from the Indo-European stem magh, meaning to be able to, and is related
to maghti, meaning might or power (Henrichs 608). Significantly, the
German word for magic—Zauber—also has the etymological meaning of
action, and action, after all, is Faust’s great preoccupation.
In the long Faust tradition as well as in Goethe’s version, magic and
technology go hand in hand. Faust’s transition from magic to technology
is really a continuation of what he had been doing all along. When he
accordingly says—
—we need to recognize a certain irony, since he does not really leave off
the practice of magic as he moves into technology, for the latter takes up
where the former left off.
With respect to that passage, Géza von Molnár, like so many Faust
scholars, mistakenly takes Faust at his word, believing he has indeed made a
FAUST AND TECHNOLOGICAL FULFILLMENT 155
and Faust’s are different in their particular details, in their essence or spirit
they converge. To be sure, technology had not yet reached the stage of
actual autonomy in the early nineteenth century, but the future autonomy
of technology was inherent in the nascent Industrial Revolution. Indeed,
that idea is already embedded in Faust.
Though Faust may live and work in a pre- or early industrial age, the
last act of the play depicts the dawn of a technological culture. Faust is
the archetype of the technocrat, the technological mastermind, the indi-
vidual who employs, relies on, and finds ultimate meaning in and through
technology. He is the architect of a realm based on and maintained by
technology. As noted, technology in Faust is not so much a matter of
machines or of the sophistication of the tools used as it is a matter of a
general technological orientation and modus operandi. In a sense, instru-
mentalized reason itself institutes the technological order of things. The
technologies in Faust may not yet be actualized in complicated and fright-
eningly powerful machineries, but the motives of the technological mind
are already there and the programs of action are already present (Claussen
and Segeberg 40).
In passing, let me note that Segeberg thinks it reasonable to iden-
tify the “fiery-blazes” which the kind old woman Baucis reports and
deplores—“Towards the sea flowed fiery-blazes, / By morning, it was a
canal” (11120–30)—as the fires of early nineteenth-century steam shov-
els (“Resultate” 20). Whether or not Goethe intended for us to imagine
such a machine does not really matter all that much, since technology
encompasses both machines and techniques. One manifestation of tech-
nology is the technological apparatus. Another is the manipulation of
human resources through planning, organization, and administration,
which especially holds true for Faust. His great project is not possible
without planning and organization on a grand scale. Faust employs all the
necessary techniques of the engineer for the mass mobilization of labor
(Segeberg, “Technikers Faust-Erklärung” 236). His own words expose
the organizer, engineer, indeed, the technician at work:
However it is possible,
Get laborers—hordes of them,
Encourage them through pleasure and severity,
Pay them, entice them, conscript them! (11551–4)
the work for Faust in the same way taskmasters did for the Pharaohs. Like
them, Faust creates a megamachine, a human–machine, a machine where
humans function as its parts, parts moreover which are expendable and
replaceable.
Certainly, other forms of machine were available to Faust, whether
conceived of as a man of the sixteenth or early nineteenth century. Wind
and water mills both provided power sources in those centuries, and the
eighteenth had seen the advent of the steam engine. While Goethe saw
the implementation of the steam engine, he also witnessed the emergence
of modern administrative bureaucracy, a non-material technology, some-
thing of which his first novel, the international best seller, The Sorrows
of Young Werther (1774) gives intimations. Werther’s sorrows result
not only from his tragic love life but also from his duties as secretary to
a demanding ambassador. The doomed hero chafes under the yoke of
the constraints and mindlessness of tasks he performs mechanically (see
Goethes Werke, vol. 6, 60–64). He resists such conditions (albeit in vain),
because he senses how they violate the inner wholeness of the human
being. Subsequently, Goethe embodied the paradigmatic, all-powerful
administrator and oppressor in a very different character, namely, Faust.
More important than steam, wind, or water, however, was the power
Faust finds in and generates from organized, forced human labor. In the
ancient megamachine, Mumford identified the same goal Faust came
to seek: “The desire for life without limits was part of the general lift-
ing of limits which the first great assemblage of power by means of the
megamachine brought about” (Pentagon 203). That desire is reproduced
in Faust’s great project, indeed, in his very nature. He knows no limits;
in fact, his will is to accept none and to go beyond any that exist. When
he at last decides on his final course of action, one in which he sets out to
conquer the wind and the waves, he says as much: “Here my mind dares
to transcend itself; / Here I would like to do battle, this I would like
to vanquish” (10220–1). He expresses the essence of the technological
mindset.
to wield immense power: power over the forces of nature, over land and
sea, but also and necessarily over human beings. While Faust is thrilled by
conquering nature and the elements, by altering the environment, and
by creating a new “world,” he may be thrilled just as much by the power
he has over his workers: “How the clink and clank of the shovels amuses
me! / It is the multitude which is enslaved to me” (11539–40). We must
always remember that technology enables and enhances the exercise of
human power by design (Jonas, 81, italics added for emphasis). Indeed, it
allows for the enormous increase of human power (Jonas 81). It results as
well in increased human power “in permanent activity” (83).
In that definition, we again recognize Faust and remember his resolute
assertion: “Only he earns life and liberty, / Who daily has to conquer
them” (11575–6). The exercise of power—evident in his word to con-
quer—becomes permanent and perpetual as it must occur daily. Faust
himself relates the exercise of power to the techniques of organization and
engineering:
From beginning to end, Faust’s entire story recounts the attempt to escape
discontentment and to find meaning in any way possible. Ultimately,
he thinks he finds satisfaction and fulfillment in his great project and in
technology. He finally finds meaning in taming the tide, in technologi-
cally engineering nature, and in dreams of engineering a future society.
As Stivers indicates, however, “technology can only organize a society at
the level of logic and power” (Technology as Magic 138). What is more,
it “renders a common morality obsolete; consequently, the various social
groups … are engaged in a relentless struggle for power and possessions”
(138). In his vision for the future, Faust in effect condemns the inhabit-
ants of his realm to lives of perpetual torment and turmoil.
Faust discovers that technology provides him with more meaning than
nature ever could. Indeed, Faust considers the “forces of the untamed
elements” pointless and “purposeless” (10219), in a word, meaningless.
162 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
The mighty waves rule full of motive power, yet in Faust’s opinion they
accomplish nothing at all, they produce no meaning: “Wave after wave
rules there with might, / Each one crashes and pulls back, and nothing is
accomplished” (10216–17). It is only through the technological transfor-
mation of nature that meaning arises for Faust. In the end, only the tech-
nological intervention, not nature, offers any meaning to him. Above all,
as in the ancient world, “the whole structure produced by the megama-
chine had immeasurably greater significance” (Mumford, Pentagon 208)
and meaning than ordinary life, as Faust himself believes and concludes.
Although Faust seeks meaning, the two events which most any other man
would deem exceedingly meaningful, the conceptions and births of his
two children, prove meaningless to him. And as the first scenes of the play
revealed, intellectual and academic pursuits afforded neither joy nor satis-
faction. For Faust, only the act of technologically taming nature institutes
direction and meaning in the world.
As Ellul has argued, technology is now regarded “as the only solution
to collective problems (unemployment, Third World misery, pollution,
war) or individual problems (health, family life, even the meaning of life),
and because at the same time it is seen as the only chance for progress and
development in every society” (Bluff xvi). In the same way, technology is
the answer Faust finally discovers to all his problems, indeed, even to the
meaning of life itself. In effect, Faust looks to technology to solve both
his woes and the woes of humanity. A regime of technology becomes the
agent of remedy, purpose, even salvation.
BLINDNESS
According to Horkheimer, “human toil and research and invention is a
response to the challenge of necessity” (153). But what real need or pur-
pose defines Faust’s great project? There is no necessity and no meaning
for it. The work becomes a matter of work for the sake of work alone. For
him, it is simply the challenge of the challenge and the amplification of
power. Since it has no meaning—except to empower Faust—all that toil,
research, and invention becomes an end in itself. The angelic epithet in
the final scene of the drama—“Whoever never ceasing strives, / Him we
can redeem” (11936–7)—implies a salvation for a work ethic void of any
meaning except work ad infinitum and ad absurdum.
Only in the technological experience does Faust find meaning and satis-
faction, but what he actually achieves once again is not true, but what can
FAUST AND TECHNOLOGICAL FULFILLMENT 163
only be called false, meaning (cf. Ellul, Ethics of Freedom 461–9). After all,
the story closes with Faust lost in an illusion. He believes he has subdued
nature and controlled the sea, but all of Faust’s construction has only paved
the way for destruction by the sea. As Mephisto explains in an aside,
What meaning does Faust then actually find? He has only superhuman
effort which is nothing but pitiful and tragic, since he finds meaning and
fulfillment in an illusion, even a delusion.
Faust’s loss of sight proves especially revealing with respect to his
technological accomplishments. Typically, his physical blindness has been
understood to result in an even more perceptive inner insight. A more
careful reading suggests, however, that his blindness is not only physi-
cal, but intellectual and spiritual as well. To be sure, Faust conceives ever
grander schemes for his world, but he is utterly blind to the trouble with
his investment and trust in a technological mastery of the natural world.
The eyes which want to see the infinite actually see nothing (Michelsen
355). Faust suffers here from a different, but very specific form of tech-
nological and scientific blindness (Segeberg, “Diagnose und Prognose”
72). He deceives himself concerning his project and its future beneficial
contribution to humanity. While undeniably magnificent in its concept
and scope, Faust’s project is nevertheless fraught with inherent problems
so grave as to undermine entirely its real value. The fifth and final act of
the drama confronts us with the terrible destructive and murderous power
of technology (Emrich 52).
In truth, the sounds of the work Faust hears at the end of the play
(since he cannot—in every sense of the word—see it) are the excavation
of his grave, not the expansion of his system of dykes, drainage ditches,
and canals. A terribly mistaken Faust thinks his throng of laborers is at
work on his great project (11539–40), but it is Mephisto’s lemures, night-
walking spirits of the dead, obeying another order altogether: “Dig an
elongated square” (11528). In other words, the technological progress
164 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
FACING THE FACTS
In an essay on Goethe’s view of technology and civilization, Alfred Zastrau
discussed and documented Goethe’s interest and involvement in various
technological undertakings. In particular, he delineated Goethe’s response
to the steam engine, noting that Goethe did not blindly endorse the machine
age. As mentioned in the previous chapter, one of his most poignant and
oft-quoted remarks about technology appeared in his novel Wilhelm Meisters
Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years). It expresses fear in the
face of a technological juggernaut which will cause devastation like a great
storm (Goethes Werke, vol. 13, 429). The character who utters the words
foresees the destruction to be unleashed by mechanized industry.
According to Zastrau, Goethe realized that technology and civiliza-
tion can destroy the human being, both in regard to the individual and
society (155). At the conclusion of his study, Zastrau quotes his colleague,
Hermann Muckermann, and issues a solemn warning: “When the present
generation separates their efforts from and makes them independent of
the total order of values, they endanger themselves and the value of their
work” (156, my translation). The insight neatly characterizes Faust, for
he dissociated his efforts from the total order of values, made them inde-
pendent, and absolutized his efforts and his project. In consequence, he
endangered the very value of his great deed. As Arnold Pacey reminds us,
there is a Faustian bargain, a deal with the devil, “in almost every major
technological project” (189).
Faust reflects the technological mind which finds its work in itself so
important and interesting that it takes no account of its potentially dan-
gerous consequences. Faust’s technological enterprise—his great proj-
ect—is so much larger than life that it supersedes any ordinary morality
and moves Faust beyond any mundane concern for good or evil. When
Care as a specter visited him in his room, she had no power over him. “But
your power, oh Care, stealthy and great, / I will not acknowledge,” he
declares (11493–4). Seeing Faust figuratively blind to care, Care literally
blinds him. In the same way, an inanimate machine has no worries and no
concern for what it touches and transforms, Faust has no feeling or con-
cern about what he undertakes and does. The technological mastermind
has himself become a machine, incapable of caring.
As if writing with Faust in mind, Jonas illumines the perils inherent in
and intrinsic to Faust’s and every technological undertaking. “Not only
166 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
when technology is malevolent, that is, used for evil purposes, but also
when it is benevolent and is implemented for its actual and most legitimate
purposes, technology has a threatening side per se, which in the long run
could have the last word” (Jonas 82, my translation). The comment casts
light on Faust’s accomplishments and vision for the future. Jonas stresses
the point that we enormously influence the lives of millions elsewhere and
in the future (and who have no say in what is done) with what we do here
and now (84).
Technology supposedly and ideally (and as we still tend to believe
today) brings peace and prosperity, security and democracy, precisely those
values typically assigned to Faust’s Great Deed and his new world order.
Faust dies before the project is completed and before he and the audience
know whether his hope is true and his faith in technology justified. We do
not know whether technology would have brought all the blessings Faust
imagined it would. Or do we? Certainly, we know it brought the destruc-
tion of innocent people and of countless slave-like workers employed by
Faust to carry out his orders.
Like Marcuse, Mumford and Ellul have identified the technologi-
cal enterprise as intrinsically one of domination and oppression. As we
belong to an age utterly enamored by and dependent on our technolo-
gies, the statement may well be hard for us to comprehend. As magic
once did, technology now enchants us, casts a spell over us, bewitches us
(cf. Lee Worth Bailey’s Enchantments of Technology). Even the seemingly
most benign technological intervention involves power and domination.
To create a simple garden or cornfield, for instance, a prairie or forest
had to be seized, even destroyed. The production of our now ubiquitous
electricity, whether thanks to the coal mine, nuclear power plant, hydro-
electric dam, or wind turbine, exacts huge ecological and human costs.
Certainly, Faust’s final technological undertaking validates the judgments
of Marcuse, Mumford, and Ellul. As Faust himself makes plain, he had to
possess even the little plot owned by the poor wife and husband, Baucis
and Philemon, because the linden trees they had were not yet his and so
thwarted his dominion of the entire world. “The few trees, not my own,”
he grumbles, “Ruin the possession of the world for me” (11241–2).
According to Otto Ulrich, the power of technology produces asym-
metries and inequities in society and in opportunities, in life’s chances, so
that some rule and some serve. The few determine the fate of the many
(see Ulrich 9). In other words, the new world order envisioned by Faust
will not and cannot be some kind of egalitarian community, rather power
FAUST AND TECHNOLOGICAL FULFILLMENT 167
relationships will determine the conditions of life, and the few will decide
not only the employment, but also the use, activity, and value of the many.
Indeed, Faust’s new society is built on a premise of conquest and domination.
To repeat his own dictum:
CONTEMPORARY CONNECTIONS
In the past, science fiction has often foreshadowed scientific discovery
and technological advances, sometimes by centuries, as does Shelley’s
novel. Science fiction authors characteristically conceive and describe
strange worlds and unbelievable events in order to address real questions
or problems, either current or in the offing. In many instances, the far-out
story turns out to be not so far-fetched at all, as it actually comes to pass
sometime after its publication. Frankenstein is a good example, where
body parts are assembled and a new breed of human being is engineered.
Shelley’s science fiction proves surprisingly intuitive or prescient.
At the time of Frankenstein’s publication, the very idea of building a
being from scavenged body parts and of such a creature’s real existence could
hardly be conceived or received by the average reader as anything but a fic-
tion. Even so, the author’s husband Percy Bysshe Shelley alluded already to
the possibility of the reality in the preface attributed to his wife Mary, but
which he wrote for the 1818 edition of the novel: “The event on which this
fiction is founded,” she (he) explains, “has been supposed by Dr Darwin and
some of the physiological writers of Germany as not of impossible occur-
rence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious
faith to such an imagination” (Frankenstein 31). The preface refers here to
Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), grandfather of the more famous Charles,
a renowned physician, physiologist, chemist, engineer, and botanist—an
eminent techno-scientist in his own right (Florescu 360).
The reference to the “physiological writers of Germany” probably indi-
cates Konrad Dippel (1673–1734), the alchemist, physician, and chemist
who was born at castle Frankenstein near Darmstadt, Germany and who
invented the dye known as Prussian blue. In all likelihood, the preface
refers here as well to Georg Frank von Frankenau (1644–1704), a name
suggestive of Frankenstein, who studied the regeneration of plants and
animals (Florescu 361), wrote a lexikon on herbs (Kräuter-Lexikon), and
(here is an added curiosity) was apparently the first to publish something
about the Easter rabbit. Mary Shelley was certainly familiar with the work
of Humphry Davy (1778–1829) as well whose paper “On Some Chemical
Agencies of Electricity” (1806) proved to be one of the seminal works of
nineteenth-century science. When she conceived of Frankenstein, Shelley
had actually been reading the 1812 edition of Davy’s Elements of Chemical
Philosophy (Florescu 358). She knew enough of the contemporary scientific
world to send her protagonist to study, conduct, and complete his experi-
172 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
LITERAL AND FIGURATIVE
As far as the science or scientific fact in science fiction is concerned, let me
note that I do not care to analyze or determine the extent to which Shelley’s
story is scientifically accurate or not. More important and more instructive
are the motives underlying the fictional techno-scientific research of the
protagonist on the one hand and on the other the trajectory of his fictional
experiments toward subsequent techno-scientific fact. Nevertheless, the
constructed reality of the text points to a future far beyond the date of
its first publication. Shelley’s vision of frightening techno-scientific pos-
FRANKENSTEIN AND TECHNOLOGICAL FAILURE 173
PROHIBITION AND TRANSGRESSION
The themes of the novel proper are as old as the myth of Prometheus
whose name the subtitle invokes and who, against Zeus’ prohibition, stole
fire from the gods and gave it—what the ancient Greeks called technê or,
in this case, all the arts, sciences, and technologies—to human beings.
Besides its preoccupation with the unquenchable thirst not only for
knowledge but for forbidden knowledge (also at the center of the story of
174 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
endeavor: “None but those who have experienced them,” he reports, “can
conceive of the enticements of science” (70).
The story spells out Frankenstein’s scientific studies and activities, not to
mention his technological skills. “I made some discoveries in the improve-
ment of some chemical instruments” (71), he remarks, and “became
acquainted with the science of anatomy, but that was not sufficient” (71).
“Not sufficient” subtly alerts us to a basic technological premise, to the
conviction that there is never an end point in the advance of such discov-
ery, invention, and innovation. Next, he became “capable of bestowing
animation upon lifeless matter” (72), and then he “began the creation of
a human being” (73). In a sense, his project bears much resemblance to
the latter-day techno-sciences of cloning and genetic- or bio-engineering.
(On this subject, see Andrew Kimbrell’s book, The Human Body Shop: The
Cloning, Engineering and Marketing of Life.) Frankenstein wanted in fact
to create “a new species” (73). Victor Ferkiss acknowledged “the almost
complete genetic control” of human beings already in 1969 (99), an ability
which could result in the actual creation of such a new species of human-
oid as imagined in Frankenstein. The question Ferkiss poses—“what is to
prevent this from happening”—implies the answer: “nothing” (99). He
laments that we have been entirely unable “to provide a framework for
ordering and assimilating the new discoveries that enable man to affect
his own biological nature” (199). That is, we have placed no restrictions
on what we can or cannot, may or may not, do. We find in Frankenstein
contemporary parallels to our recent expansion of genetic modification of
plants and animals which even permits the splicing of species.
discover that they have received tissue and bone carved from looted corpses,
not least the cadaver of Alistair Cooke, the late and erudite host of PBS’s
“Masterpiece Theatre.” (3)
And how were those corpses provided? By “rogue” funeral homes, a lat-
ter-day, sanitized version of Frankenstein’s “charnel-houses.”
Like most of us, Frankenstein believes implicitly and unshakably that
techno-scientific advance is inherently and implicitly good—very good
actually, even the best—for humanity. As he puts it, “when I considered
the improvement which every day takes place in science and mechanics
[we might well say bio-technology now], I was encouraged to hope my
present attempts would at least lay the foundations of future success”
(73). Indeed, bio-technology as conceived and employed by Frankenstein
is designed to take human beings to a new level beyond themselves, just
as bio-engineering or nanotechnology or cybernetic-organic (cyborg)
research is now designed to do as well.
For example: although Diana Bowman, Graeme Hodge, and Peter Binks
report in a 2007 article about nanotechnology and Michael Crichton’s
novel Prey that “the few data now available [for nanotechnology] give
cause for concern” (441), they nevertheless still affirm that “these new
technologies continue to show the potential to advance human well-being
and society” (442). They sound like Victor Frankenstein. In addition,
they acknowledge that “some nanomaterials appear to have potential to
damage skin, brain, and lung material, to be mobile or persistent in the
environment, or to kill micro-organisms (potentially including ones that
constitute the base of the food web)” (441; quoted from Balbus, Denison,
Florini, and Walsh 65). As many readers may know, nanomaterials are
used for cosmetics, nutritional supplements, and even clothing. Bowman,
Hodge, and Binks sum up the problem as a lack of governmental oversight
and regulation, but that hardly gets to the core of the problem.
Technology is understood and believed to provide improvements and
to supply solutions to problems of human existence. But as the story
shows, and as Jacques Ellul and others have so often pointed out, the
actual results are typically and characteristically the exact opposite. In The
Technological Bluff, he lists four trenchant propositions:
• Third, its harmful effects are inseparable from its beneficial effects.
• Fourth, it has a great number of unforeseen effects. (39)
TECHNOLOGICAL HUBRIS
Frankenstein, like many a latter-day technological idealist, fails to foresee
any negative results and is completely blind to the possibly catastrophic
consequences of his grand research plan and project. While the scientist
and technologist may have intimations or reservations about the project, it
is only after the fact, after the experiments, after the inventions and inno-
vations have been carried out and realized, that they are sometimes able
to recognize the danger and the damage. Only after having finally accom-
plished what he set out to do can Frankenstein then see clearly enough to
discern exactly what he had been engaged in and done: “now that I had
finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and dis-
gust filled my heart” (Frankenstein 77).
As the novel shows, the techno-scientific enterprise produces monsters
instead of enhanced human beings. Frankenstein may succeed in the
creation of a creature in his own image—“a being like myself” (73), as he
tells it—but the creature he creates is, he discovers and admits, nothing
other than a “monster” (78). Because the creature is made in the image
of the creator, we discover that Frankenstein himself must be a monster
as well, for the creature reflects the image of the creator. At one point in
the story, Frankenstein describes the monster as his “own spirit let loose
from the grave” (95). The monster, too, recognizes that he is a reflection
of his maker. “God, in pity,” he laments and at the same time accuses
Frankenstein, “made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image;
but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very
resemblance” (147).
Eventually, Frankenstein’s outward appearance actually reveals the
monstrousness previously hidden within. Like the monster, he becomes
178 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
of techno-scientific progress and with his last breath declares: “I have been
blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed” (231).
Entirely missing from Frankenstein’s consciousness is the understand-
ing and realization that the results of his researches and experiments were
catastrophic, even monstrous. He fails to come to an awareness like that
of J. Robert Oppenheimer who oversaw the development of the atomic
bomb or Robert A. Lewis, the copilot of the “Enola Gay,” the plane from
which the bomb fell on Hiroshima. Reflecting later on the event, Lewis
eerily compared the reality to a scene from science fiction: “It was the
actual sight that we saw that caused the crew to feel that they were a part
of Buck Rodger’s 25th century warriors” (Gruson 8). When the bomb
fell on Hiroshima, exploded, and the city disappeared, Lewis wrote in his
logbook “My God, what have we done?” (Malnic 1). Similarly report-
ing his response to the successful detonation of the first nuclear weapon,
Oppenheimer recalled quoting a verse from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I
am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” (see an excerpt of the 1967
NBC television documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb, produced
by Fred Freed, where Oppenheimer speaks these words; at www.atomic
archive.com). Yet, how often do we fail to arrive at such insight? And
how much more often do we not suffer instead from the same hubris
and conceits, from the same mistaken confidence, as Frankenstein? Francis
Crick—who along with James Watson famously discovered the structure
of the DNA molecule—exemplifies the persistence of that hubris and van-
ity. According to Lewis Mumford, Crick remarked at a symposium that he
desired the freedom “for experimentally altering the human genes, even
though by bad luck he might, on his own admission, produce monsters”
(Mumford, Pentagon 289).
LEGACIES
So where are we today, almost two hundred years after the publication
of the novel Frankenstein? While Frankenstein built a being out of sal-
vaged body parts, liver, lung, kidney, and even heart transplants are now
commonplace and life-saving interventions. Beside such major organs, we
now harvest corneas, tendons, skin, and bones. Thanks to advances in
surgical procedures, we are now able, under favorable circumstances, to
attach or reattach various appendages and more. Perhaps the most aston-
ishing of such surgeries occurred when a human face was transplanted,
first partially in 2005 and then fully in 2010. The use of pig arteries in the
180 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
but for the first time scientists have created an organism controlled by com-
pletely human-made DNA. Using the tools of synthetic biology, scientists
from the J. Craig Venter Institute installed a completely artificial genome
inside a host cell without DNA. Like the bolt of lightning that awakened
Frankenstein, the new genome invigorated the host cell, which began to grow
and reproduce, albeit with a few problems. (http://www.nbcnews.com)
In 1818, Frankenstein pointed far beyond its own time to ours. Now,
we would do well to look at our time and beyond, ahead into the distance,
to consider where bio-medicine, bio-engineering, and medical technology
are leading next. To date, a human–machine interface has seemed rela-
tively innocuous and benign. While the mechanical pacemaker has been
around for so long now that we take it for granted, the mechanical heart
is another matter. In 2013, a man in France received the first permanent,
fully implantable artificial heart. Manufactured by Carmat, it consists
of both synthetic and animal tissue, a “biomembrane,” “two miniature
motorised pump sets,” an “integrated electronic device,” as well as sen-
sors and a microprocessor (http://www.carmatsa.com). Now the advent
of nanotechnology promises a revolution in implantable, cooperative
mechanical devices for the human body. The ability to build at the atomic
level or nanoscale allows for previously impossible and formerly unbeliev-
able modifications of the human being.
Current research is not only exploring the union of human being and
machine in cyber-organisms or cyborgs, but also the development of
robots and “intelligent” thinking machines. Consider recent advances in
AI and Watson, the supercomputer which had its debut on the television
game show “Jeopardy.” In February 2011, the computer competed with
the two biggest, human winners ever to play the game. Watson was not
infallible, but exceedingly accurate and fast, and the winner.
According to the IBM website, Watson “consists of 90 servers,” is “the
right combination of hardware and software,” and enabled by hundreds
of custom algorithms (www.ibm.com/Watson). It is the latest expression
of what IBM calls DeepQA technology. This technology, developed in
cooperation with Columbia University and the University of Maryland,
“applies advanced data management and analytics to natural language in
order to uncover a single, reliable insight—in a fraction of a second.” As
IBM envisions this technology, it will deploy “across industries such as
healthcare, finance and customer service.”
In an IBM promotional video, the program director for Healthcare and
Life Sciences Research Joseph Jasinski asserts that we would never “replace
a trained doctor” with a Watson. Watson would only ever be physician’s
assistant. Such pronouncements are either ingenuous or naïve. While Jon
Iwata asserts that “Watson is a very necessary advance” (http://tran-
scriptvids.com), David Ferrucci declares that “it is irresistible to pursue
this” (http://spectrum.ieee.org). Iwata is senior vice president for IBM
Marketing and Communications, Ferrucci Research Staff Member and
182 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
MISCALCULATION
As individuals and a society, we must decide what knowledge is or should
be off limits or forbidden us. We must think seriously about how science
and bio-technology might go horribly wrong. Richard Lewontin has spo-
ken of this possibility and illumines the dangers of unforeseeable damage
in his discussion of DNA implantation. “Even if it were our intention only to
provide properly functioning genes to the immediate body of the sufferer,”
he writes in Biology as Ideology, “some of the implanted DNA might get
into and transform future sperm and egg cells” (70). Any miscalculations
of the effects of the implanted DNA, he goes on to explain, “would be
wreaked on our descendants to the remotest time” (70).
The humanoid engineered by Victor Frankenstein literally has a life
of its own and completely surprises Frankenstein, when it “returns to
him as an autonomous force, with a structure of its own, with demands
upon which it insists absolutely” (Winner 313). Frankenstein depicts
how our technological creations turn on us and undermine human con-
trol and mastery (Mitcham and Casey 59). Indeed, the monster is the
last “man” standing. Frankenstein dies, but the technological creation
survives.
While Frankenstein is the literary example of horrible miscalculation,
there are plenty of other real-life instances of such grievous error. Typically,
however, we thoughtlessly go our merry way in celebration of our latest
technological accomplishment, only to discover later what great damage
we have done, at which point we again forge ahead optimistically with the
next generation of technological innovations, even thinking those new
technological advances will solve the problems caused by our old or still
extant technologies. We tend to believe that there are no limits to human
knowledge or to technological innovation and advance. Faust believed it,
Frankenstein believed it, but their stories and ours tell us over and over
again that there are limits after all, that we are not able to, or should not,
know everything, and that when we nevertheless seek to know and do
such things, we wreak havoc.
The man in charge of research for the first atomic bomb, J. Robert
Oppenheimer, typified the scientific–technological enterprise. “When you
see something that is technically sweet,” he said, “you go ahead and do
it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your
technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb” (see In
the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer 81). That is also exactly the way it
184 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
was with Frankenstein. By his own account, his earliest researches into
the “hidden laws of nature” left him with a “gladness akin to rapture”
(Frankenstein 57). For him, the prospect of discovery and innovation was
exceedingly sweet. Only after he had had his technical success did he begin
to worry about what to do about what he had done. And that is the way
it remains with techno-science.
MONSTROSITIES
According to Brian Stableford, the Frankenstein story has become “a
central myth of the kind of technophobia which argues that modern man
is indeed doomed to be destroyed by his own artifacts (and that such a
fate, however tragic, is not undeserved)” (46). Stableford does not agree
with this “myth” and both wishfully and mistakenly thinks it “unlikely in
the extreme that a book which Mary Shelley elected to call The Modern
Prometheus was planned as an assault on the hubris of scientists” (49).
Closer attention to the text entirely precludes such an interpretation. What
if, Stableford asks, while completely ignoring the story as written, “the
scientific miracle that Victor Frankenstein had wrought had been allowed
to be a miracle indeed, and the resurrected man no monster at all?” (56).
The simple answer is: the so-called miracle was indeed a monster! Let us
not forget that Frankenstein fled aghast from the repulsive being he had
made. Like Frankenstein himself, Stableford still hopes for and wants to
believe in technology as the only kind of salvation humans might find “to
redeem themselves from every kind of earthly damnation” (56).
The name Frankenstein has by now become “a cultural short hand for
science out of control” and “the experiment-gone-wrong” (Lederer and
Ratzan 463, 464). Indeed, Frankenstein serves as our “model of the irre-
sponsible scientist” (Aldiss 354). Having done so, we invest the fictional
character with a certain reality. We conveniently make Victor Frankenstein,
now more than a symbol, the poster child and whipping boy for all tech-
nological irresponsibility, and so free our techno-scientists and ourselves
from any real responsibility, since none of us would or could ever be as
monstrous as a Frankenstein. The ethical questions raised in the novel
that should concern scientists, engineers, and ordinary citizens fade away,
because the story transforms into social consciousness, devolves into the
grotesque and ridiculous, and retains only shock value (Black 329).
We regard the science fiction, the Frankenstein, scenario as fiction and
fantasy (cf. Ellul, System 112). Hence, we can think that it is not going to
FRANKENSTEIN AND TECHNOLOGICAL FAILURE 185
happen and certainly not to us. Even so, Frankenstein might yet be res-
cued from such irrelevance. It is no longer merely fiction and fantasy. It
has happened, and it does happen. When taken seriously and as something
more than mere entertainment, Frankenstein discredits technological uto-
pianism with its dream of limitless human improvement, advancement,
and progress. Shelley’s novel shows technological idealism to be the fan-
tasy, the real science fiction.
I conclude these considerations with some final thoughts about the
word monster, a key word in Frankenstein and of considerable, yet subtle
significance. It derives from Anglo-Norman and Middle French by way
of Old French and classical Latin (see The Oxford English Dictionary).
Initially, in twelfth-century Old French, the word had the sense of “prod-
igy” or “marvel,” but within a hundred years it took on the meaning
of a “disfigured person” or “misshapen being,” both of which apply to
Frankenstein’s creation. The earlier Latin monstrum had similar conno-
tations and could mean “portent, prodigy, monstrous creature, wicked
person, monstrous act, atrocity” which likewise describe Frankenstein and
his undertaking. The etymological root of the word, the verb monere,
at the core of the word monster, meant “to warn.” And that is where
Frankenstein leaves us: with a portent and a warning about monstrous acts
and atrocities undertaken in the name of scientific–technological progress
and benefaction.
CHAPTER 8
AN OVERVIEW
Today, the stories with which most people are likely to be familiar come in
the form of motion pictures. The cinema has frequently dealt with tech-
nology, often as the subject of science fiction films. For example, Metropolis
(1927) by Fritz Lang, Modern Times (1936) by Charlie Chaplin, Alphaville
(1965) by Jean-Luc Godard, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by Stanley
Kubrick, Brazil (1985) by Terry Gilliam, or Gattaca (1997) by Andrew
Nichol present a disturbing picture of a dystopian world dominated and
controlled by technology, even when comic as in the case of Chaplin’s and
Gilliam’s films.
Two of the earliest films to depict the human being in a technological
environment and to address the clash of the human with the machine (or
vice versa) are Metropolis and Modern Times. In Metropolis, technology
comes into sharp focus as oppressor of humanity on the one hand and as a
powerful temptation on the other. While dehumanized workers labor in a
bleak technological underworld at machines which power the city, a privi-
leged elite rules above in indolence, comfort, and luxury. Of particular
interest, an inventor constructs a robot and gives it the external feminine
form of a real woman named Maria who had preached the reconciliation
of the workers and rulers. Indistinguishable from the human being, the
activated machine steps forth in a night club as an alluring, seductive, and
irresistible femme fatale. The episode culminates in an exotic and erotic
dance in and by which she completely captivates her audience. Even as she
embodies all that is lascivious, she at the same time incarnates technology
per se. She seduces humanity into the acceptance of technology, of the
simulation, as substitute for a real human life. The machine–woman only
exacerbates the existing antagonisms; she even urges the workers to rebel
and destroy the machines which leads to the destruction of the entire
city along with its technological foundation. The movie impressed Adolf
Hitler so much that in 1933, when the Nazi Party came to power, he had
his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels approach Lang and ask him to
make films for the National Socialists. Lang (whose mother was Jewish
and whose wife was an ardent member of the Nazi Party) fled the country
immediately (Prouty 743).
In Modern Times, Chaplin focused attention on a worker oppressed by
the technological system. Playing that worker himself, Chaplin struggles—
in character as the Little Tramp—to keep up with the pace of mecha-
nized, conveyor-belt production. The Tramp has acquired a physical tic
from the mechanical action he continuously performs on the assembly
line. Technology demands faster and faster responses from the human
laborer, until he is literally sucked into the machine which resembles noth-
ing so much as a medieval rack for torture. Technology tyrannizes the
protagonist. He is dehumanized and ultimately physically “swallowed into
the mechanisms of the factory process, becoming, literally, a cog in the
machine” (Goody 149). Chaplin shows us a man who is overwhelmed by
the technological circumstances. Technology triumphs, man loses.
Ironically, these stories about technology in motion pictures are them-
selves a thoroughly technological product. While motion pictures have a
long ancestry, it approached its modern form at the end of the nineteenth
century. From its beginnings, cinematography has been an art especially
indebted to the machine. As discussed here in Chap. 5, Luigi Pirandello
examined that very feature of film already in 1915 with his novel Shoot!
The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator. In the course
of time, it has developed and changed in step with technological advance,
employing new technologies as they arrive, and has become an ever more
sophisticated technology itself. The first mechanical cameras required an
operator to turn the crank in order to film the action, but before long
came to be fully automated and powered by electricity. At first black and
MOVIES, MACHINES, AND HUMAN BEINGS 189
white and silent, then with sound and next in color, transitioning from
celluloid nitrate film stock to acetate to polyester and on to the current
digital medium, filmmaking continues to change with the times and
technology. Sound reproduction proceeded from early sound-on-disk to
sound-on-film and of late to Dolby technology and digital recordings.
Cameras and lenses also evolved over time to permit close-up, zoom,
wide-angle, and 3-D photography. Tinted lenses added yet other dimen-
sions to the cinematic process and product. Today, filmmakers have moved
their art away from actual physical into technological scenes and sets with
computer-generated imagery (CGI). As they rely more and more on
CGI, moviemakers use virtual simulations to construct the fantasy world
of motion pictures. The presentation and viewing of films likewise requires
technological devices such as increasingly sophisticated projectors, screens,
and loudspeakers in the movie theater.
Other films like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) or Steven Spielberg’s
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) are ambiguous and ambivalent: technol-
ogy threatens, but at the same time appeals to and attracts us to itself.
As Rosi Braidotti indicates in her book about posthuman existence, cinema
makes manifest the “mixture of fear and desire for technology” (108). In
Blade Runner and A.I., the technological environment looks menacing,
but the beautiful woman and little boy, both androids, elicit our sympathy.
Humans appear insufficient and unsatisfactory in this context. Compared to
machines, humans are physically, emotionally, and intellectually weak; they
are flawed, unreliable, troublesome, even duplicitous, whereas machines
and robots are not. In Scott’s film, the woman automaton is innocent,
vulnerable, and sincere. In Spielberg’s, the human beings are emotionally
and ethically inferior to the little boy android.
Many science fiction films do not treat technology as a topic in the same
way as those I mention above. For instance, the several Star Trek movies
(beginning in 1979 through 2013, with another scheduled for release in
2016) along with a number of Star Wars films (launched by George Lucas
in 1977, with a recent variation on the theme shown in 2015) have agendas
which have little to do with technological blessings or curses. Instead, tech-
nology serves more as props which establish the other- and future-world-
liness of the tales these movies tell. Probably the most serious treatment of
technology as threat to humanity is found in the Borg plot of the television
show Star Trek: Next Generation (second season, 1988), the motion picture
Star Trek: First Contact (1996), and then in subsequent Star Trek films and
TV episodes. The Borg are a race of cybernetic organisms, or cyborgs, trans-
190 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
A TERMINATOR AND A MATRIX
From such an abundance of stories, I have chosen two representative
and illustrative film trilogies for special consideration. At first glance,
they appear to challenge the technological order, but close examination
reveals an entirely different message. Without doubt, many other films
MOVIES, MACHINES, AND HUMAN BEINGS 191
1
Subsequently, I will refer to these films in abbreviated form as T1, T2, T3, M1, M2, and M3
192 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
remarks in M1, “as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became
our civilization, which is, of course, what this is all about: evolution.”
In each movie trilogy, there is a resistance movement intent on a rever-
sal of circumstances and on a reassertion of human independence and
preeminence. That is, humans have to conquer and defeat technology so
as to bring it back under human control and direction. Each trilogy like-
wise concentrates the hope and future existence of humanity on a messiah
figure. In T1, that person is John Connor, whose initials, J.C., sugges-
tively summon up the name Jesus Christ. In M1, it is the computer hacker
known as Neo. His name is an anagram for one, but he is not just anyone,
he is the One. As the resistance fighter Trinity says, “Morpheus believes
he’s the one,” that is, the one chosen to lead and save the human race.
When another character shows up at Neo’s door to buy some illicit com-
puter programs, he ironically tells Neo, “You’re my savior, man, my own
personal Jesus Christ.” Both John Connor and Neo are reluctant heroes,
reluctant saviors, but both eventually accept their calling to save human-
ity. In one movie, and in accord with messianic Christian motifs, Neo rises
from the dead and miraculously brings Trinity back to life as well. The title
of one sequel, Terminator Salvation, makes a similar theme explicit.
In sum, each film series presents the life-and-death struggle between
man and machine. Who will win the war between machine and man is
decisive for the fate of all humanity. At the outset—in the first Terminator
and Matrix, that is—it is suggested that this great war is under way and
waged so that human beings will remain on earth, continue to be human,
and reestablish a world in which humanity governs itself and machines,
and directs the course of technology. According to Gale Anne Hurd, the
producer of T1, the film was supposed to be “tech noir”; that is, it was sup-
posed to expose “the dark side of technology” (in the video documentary
Other Voices: Creating the Terminator). In both the first Terminator and
Matrix, the humans decisively defeat the machines, indicating hope for
human survival. Or so it seems. If we are not careful, we might think that
that is what these films are about and how the conflict is resolved. But we
would be very wrong to think so. That story is completely subverted and
actually inverted by the time the third film in each trilogy concludes.
REVERSALS
Initially, the message of the films appears straightforward: Machines are
bad, humans are good, and humans have to take back control of the
world. Humans must conquer the machines or face annihilation. Almost
MOVIES, MACHINES, AND HUMAN BEINGS 193
it was suddenly so clear: the Terminator would never stop, it would never
leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him or get drunk and
hit him or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be
there, and it would die to protect him.
Neo’s meeting with the Oracle, a program from the machine world in
the physical form of a woman who wishes to help humanity, further points
to an impending human–machine interface and union. “I’m interested in
one thing, Neo,” she says, “the future, and believe me, I know the only
way to get there is together” (M2), that is, machine and humanity joined
together. Agent Smith, the machine, actually acknowledges a new and
peculiar link to Neo, the man. “Then you’re aware of it?” Smith asks. “Of
what?” Neo answers. “Our connection,” Smith replies. Something hap-
pened when Neo destroyed Smith in the first Matrix. As Smith explains
it, “perhaps some part of you imprinted onto me, something overwritten
or copied” (M2). In any case, Smith is now more than machine. He has
acquired some human elements, thanks to his encounter with Neo. “I’m
no longer an agent of the system,” Smith says. He has become autono-
mous. “Because of you, I’m changed, I’m unplugged, a new man, so to
speak, like you, apparently free” (M2). Of course, only apparently free,
since no one is free in a world of technology. Tellingly, Smith also calls
himself a “man.” At this point, Smith thrusts his hand into Neo’s chest in
order to assimilate Neo into himself, but the time is not yet right for the
merger, and Neo stops it.
Although he does battle with the Matrix and with actual machines—
typically with assorted opponents computer-generated by the Matrix itself,
but in particular with versions and multiples of Agent Smith—Neo ulti-
mately saves humanity and brings the century-long war at last to an end.
In the third film, he surprisingly establishes peace and harmony not by
mastering, but by merging with the machine. In the final struggle between
Smith and Neo (symbolically between necessity and freedom), between
machine and human being, Smith the machine absorbs Neo the man,
but it is Neo’s own self-sacrificial choice and plan. When he accomplishes
the human–machine interface, when he dissolves in total mystical union
with the source—the machine mainframe, that is—he brings salvation to
machine and human being alike.
Viewers are led to think the Terminator and Matrix films criticize
and sound a warning about technology. Byron Reese, author of Infinite
Progress (2013) responded in the typical and desired fashion. “When I
watch a Terminator movie,” he writes, “I am rooting for the people, not
the machines” (45). It is precisely this reaction these movies intend to
produce. In the Terminator films, first humans and then the humanized
terminator played by Schwarzenegger do battle with relentless, pitiless,
killing machines bent on the extermination of the human race. In the
196 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
Matrix movies, human beings face the onslaught of wave after wave of
autonomous killing machines known as sentinels which never rest, never
deviate from the task of eradicating the rebels opposed to life in a fully
technological environment. In each series, human beings are engaged
in a seemingly endless and impossible struggle to survive. Whatever and
no matter how many machines they destroy, they can never finally gain
the upper hand and triumph. The machines, the technological overlords,
exercise total control, until the likes of John Connor and Neo tip the
scales in favor of humanity, but ultimately actually in favor of technology.
The humans do not win out over the machines: the machines win, but
in a startling twist save the day. The Terminator and Matrix trilogies at fist
appear to be against the domination of human beings by technology, but
then subtly reverse positions and promote instead human submission to and
convergence with that technological system. Humanity does not conquer
or check technology in these films. Instead of liberation from technologi-
cal domination, the films depict as inevitable humanity’s total surrender to
and absorption into technology. Any real-world struggle against technol-
ogy occurs within the technological system and environment, within the
technological framework. As a result, it is shaped by that framework even
to the extent that the protest is absorbed into the self-same technological
framework. And that is also what the Matrix and Terminator films depict.
In both the Terminator and Matrix movies, humanity forms an intimate
alliance with technology. Whereas the Terminator becomes defender and
protector of humanity, even teaching human beings how to be human,
Neo merges with machine, with the Matrix, with the whole technologi-
cal system. Neo reconciles humanity with technology, but humanity loses
more in the bargain than technology does. The professed original intent
of the films to show the dark side of technology has been inverted. The
moral of the story turns out to be, in the ironically stated, but self-fulfilling
words of Agent Smith, “If you can’t beat us, join us” (M2).
CINEMA AND PROPAGANDA
In Profiles of the Future (1962), Arthur C. Clarke asked: “Can the synthesis
of Man and Machine ever be stable, or will the purely organic component
become such a hindrance that it has to be discarded? If this eventuality hap-
pens—and I have given good reasons for thinking that it must—we have
nothing to regret, and certainly nothing to fear” (242–3). So why should
we worry about discarding our humanity? And why should we care about
MOVIES, MACHINES, AND HUMAN BEINGS 197
what these movies communicate? They are just movies, after all, mere
entertainments. Or are they? As the great literary critic, Tzvetan Todorov
points out, every society requires a narrative to understand, to order, and
to give meaning to existence. He indicates as well the key role the movies
now play for society. “It is a given,” he writes, “that the narratives that all
society seems to need in order to live depend today, not on literature, but
on cinema” (38). For Edward Bernays, the author of Propaganda (1928),
the “motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in
the world today. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions” (166).
The films considered here must then also be understood as propaganda
for certain views and ideas about technology, as instruments of persuasion
concerning our relation to it and its place in our lives.
Similarly, Jacques Ellul (in his book also entitled Propaganda) stresses
the subtle, yet immense influence exerted by motion pictures on us: “The
movies and human contacts are the best media for sociological propa-
ganda in terms of social climate, slow infiltration, progressive inroads, and
over-all integration” (10). Even if the director of a movie has no overt aim
to propagandize, the film (like advertisements to be discussed in the next
chapter) nevertheless functions as an instrument of propaganda, molding
our thinking and behavior. “When an American producer [or director]
makes a film,” Ellul explains,
he has certain definite ideas he wants to express, which are not intended to
be propaganda. Rather, the propaganda element is in the American way of
life with which he is permeated and which he expresses in his film without
realizing it. (Propaganda 64)
lation here and following). In the movie theater, the faculties of criticism
and enjoyment combine, he realized, so that as a result, the audience has
no powers of discernment (33). In consequence, an audience does not—
almost cannot—recognize the inversion of the message in movies like the
Terminator and Matrix series. What is more, film brings its audience into
a posture of approval (“eine begutachtende Haltung”), which is accom-
panied in the movie theater by decreased attention (41). The moviegoer
accordingly and necessarily accepts without criticism the narrative pre-
sented in and by the film.
I must admit that the inconsistencies and mixed messages of these films
entirely escaped my notice when I first saw them. The medium does not
permit reflection, because we cannot pause to reflect during the uninter-
rupted flood of sights and sounds. In the second Matrix, for example, a
program called the Architect explains the state of the Matrix in the most
precise and complex terms. But he speaks softly and quickly, without stop-
ping, and we are bombarded simultaneously with a volcanic eruption of
so many images on countless screens in the sequence on screen at that
moment that there is little chance to hold on to what he reveals. I was
unable to comprehend, let alone think about, what he said until I viewed
the movie on DVD and could pause, reverse, and replay the scene again
and again. But incomprehensible or unnecessary discourse is essentially
inherent to the cinematic medium in which the images run against and
overrun the words.
These films represent an altered version of an old story, once again that
of Pygmalion and Galatea, where man falls in love with what he has made,
and that inanimate object comes to life. In the new version of that myth, the
machines come to life, but humanity is no longer the criterion to which one
is to aspire or by which one is to be measured. Technology has become the
standard instead. It is no longer the machine that needs to acquire human
attributes, but humans who need to become more like machines. As the
historian Lynn White Jr. observed, “human life no longer adapts the mecha-
nism to its needs; mankind is in some measure shaped by a machine which
it adores” (198). He was referring to the mechanical clock. The machines
we now adore are myriad and much more complex: the automobile, TV,
PC, smart phone, AI, and even the cyber-organism that unites machine and
human being into one. The orientation of much research and development
today leads in that very direction. Ellul’s assertion that “technique turns
everything it touches into a machine” (Society 4) now reaches beyond any
metaphorical sense it might have had to its very literal realization.
MOVIES, MACHINES, AND HUMAN BEINGS 199
This mode of science, which is only the half of science, manipulates nature to
further its own ends, and has taken possession of our thinking. It lays claim to
everything and even makes preparations for controlling people bio-technically,
transforming the human being into an object of technology. (67)
In his essay “New Media, New Era,” John Paul Russo reminds us of
Marshall McLuhan’s statement that technologies are “extensions of our-
selves,” but that now we must ask to what extent we are extensions of
machines and “to what extent we ourselves have become cyborgs, trans-
gressive mixtures of biology, technology, and code” (501). We are “no
longer fully ‘human,’” Russo remarks, “but a combination of the human
and the machine—a cyborg. And this is far from the wildest speculation”
(501). Indeed, recent developments in bio-technology mentioned in the
chapter on Frankenstein confirm our acceptance of a human–machine
interface. According to Sherry Turkle, “the traditional distance between
people and machines has become harder to maintain” (Life on Screen 21).
As the Terminator and Matrix movies indicate, however, the question is
really whether we even want to maintain any distance at all.
As indicated in the previous chapter, the replacement of knees or hips
with artificial components has been practiced for some time now and is not
considered unnatural or to pose any threat to our humanity. Likewise, the
pacemaker did not seem to diminish being human or to erase the difference
and distance between human and machine. But the pacemaker is nothing
compared to the mechanical heart or other fully synchronized, synthetic,
mechanized replacement parts now available and yet to come. In May
2013, a young amputee was outfitted with two bionic hands. The desire
and ability to augment the human either promises or threatens to take us
into altogether new and uncharted, desirable or undesirable territory.
Also as mentioned in Chap. 7, Kevin Warwick at the University of
Reading (England) has been actively working to integrate machines and
human beings. He explores and experiments with an actual physical interface
200 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
human and continuing to exist not only in part, but in full as humans.
These movies pretend to base themselves on the same principle, but are
in fact based on an opposing proposition: that the inevitable merger and
fusion of man and machine is not so bad, after all. The fusion—or more
accurately, confusion—of machine and human being actually brings about
the death and end of humanity. Given such an ominous prospect, human
beings might do well to play the role of resistance fighters, but not as
those seen in our blockbuster movies about technology who ultimately are
only unwitting collaborators in the reign and regime of machines.
CHAPTER 9
Advertising Technology
“Everything is possible.”1
(Hewlett-Packard slogan from 2002)
ADVERTISING AS TECHNOLOGY
A pioneer in public relations and propaganda, Edward Bernays champi-
oned the manipulation and formation of public opinion. He called it the
“engineering of consent.” According to him, leaders of all kinds (in indus-
try, commerce, and government, for instance) require “the aid of techni-
cians who have specialized in utilizing the channels of communication” in
order to bring about public agreement with respect to a certain idea or
behavior (“Engineering” 159). He even speaks of using “an engineering
approach—that is, action based only on thorough knowledge of the situ-
ation and on the application of scientific principles and tried practices in
the task of getting people to support ideas and programs” (“Engineering”
159). An extension of public relations, not to mention propaganda, adver-
tising in particular serves to engineer consent.
The purpose of engineering consent, he continues, is “to persuade and
suggest” (“Engineering” 160), that is, to shape public opinion and move
the public to act in a desired fashion. Advertising functions in precisely this
way. While I agree with Bernays’ description of the process, I believe sug-
gestion precedes persuasion. An advertisement first suggests and, with the
1
Used with the kind permission of Hewlett-Packard.
details among their best customer segments and then bid to show ads to
people who resemble those best customers.” The selection of the targets,
the auction of the online ad space, and the dissemination of the ads are all
completely automated. All of this allows advertisers to design ads to fit a
particular person with the result that their ability to manipulate consumers
is greatly enhanced. What is more, digital technology is now used both to
mine data and determine ideal consumers as well as to generate the ads
themselves.
Technology undoubtedly stands in the service of advertising. In Jaron
Lanier’s estimation, the so-called open culture of digital technology has
elevated advertising “from its previous role as accelerant” to a place “at
the center of the human universe” (82). At the same time, advertising
stands in the service of technology. According to Ellul, advertising is “the
driving force of the whole [technological] system” (Bluff 349). While
advertisements suggest the purchase of a particular product, they also
urge us to buy—that is, believe in and accept—the whole technological
order of things. All of this advertising serves to convince us of our need
for technology.
ADVERTISEMENTS AS STORY
Like movies, advertisements tell stories and reach a mass audience. We
are inundated by advertisements. Neil Postman reported in 1992 that
“the average American will have seen close to two million television
commercials by age sixty-five” (Technopoly 170). Newspapers, maga-
zines, and the Internet are full of ads as well, all of them reinforcing
a story about technological promise. In both Hollywood films and
Madison Avenue advertising, McLuhan discerned “a kind of mythmak-
ing process” (“Myth and Mass Media” 290). Wiebe Bijker concurred. As
he points out, ads function like myths and “exert certain political or eco-
nomic effects in support of specific technologies” (x). Advertisements
are micro-narratives which help disseminate and perpetuate the myth of
technological enthusiasm. Indeed, these stories support the dominant
narrative and seek to convince us that technology is what we need, need
more of, and cannot do without.
In The Americans, Daniel Boorstin called advertising the “omnipres-
ent, most characteristic, and most remunerative form of American litera-
ture” (137). Whether in print or on screen, advertisements constitute a
ADVERTISING TECHNOLOGY 207
huge collection of stories and are those with which most people are now
familiar. In Advertising the American Dream, Roland Marchand identi-
fied advertisements as one specific type of literature: parables (363). Like
Marchand, Postman appreciated the parable-like character of television
commercials. He emphasized in particular their religious character and
purpose. They represent for him “the most abundant literature we possess
of our new spiritual commitment” (“Parable” 71). As he shows, these ads
are essentially parables about technology and our devotion to it.
Parables offer comparisons. In the case of commercials, they compare life
with to life without technology. Parables are also didactic, that is, they teach
a lesson. These ads teach us that technology is essential to existence and will
always provide what we need. Postman’s analysis and interpretation of a
typical commercial (specifically one about a stained shirt collar) reveals it to
be a religious–mythic–archetypal story in the service of technology. In his
words, these parables “put forward a concept of sin, intimations of the way
to redemption, and a vision of Heaven” (67). They moreover fit the basic
pattern of a myth (or mini-myth) as discussed in Chap. 2 of this book: the
ad presents a challenge or problem to be overcome by a hero which ends
with a better life in an ideal world.
As elucidated by Postman, the problem or “root cause of evil is
Technological Innocence, a failure to know the particulars of the beneficent
accomplishments of industrial progress” (68). The commercial in question
is “The Ring around the Collar” ad from the 1970s for Wisk laundry deter-
gent. Although it hardly seems like technology, Wisk is without question
technological, a form of tool, a means to an end, specifically, clean clothes.
According to Postman, the ad shows that “to attempt to live without tech-
nological sophistication is at all times dangerous,” and “evidence of one’s
naïveté” causes pain and embarrassment (69). Much more than detergent
is then at stake; the entire technological system is involved. “Technological
innocence refers not only to ignorance of detergents, drugs, sanitary nap-
kins, cars, salves, and foodstuffs, but also to ignorance of technical machin-
ery such as savings banks and transportation systems” (69). Since the ad is a
parable, there must be a moral to the story. The moral in question is simple:
if one will act in accord with the model provided by the ad and forsake
technological innocence in order to achieve technological sophistication,
elation and serenity will be the reward. The parable teaches finally that
technology in whatever form brings knowledge and ends ignorance, then
provides fulfillment and happiness.
208 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
SELECT ADVERTISEMENTS
In order to keep the discussion here manageable, I concentrate on adver-
tisements for devices and services plainly identifiable with technology.
Aside from a few print advertisements, the selection is limited to US televi-
sion commercials from the recent past, the time when digital technologies
began more and more to populate our world. Most of the commercials
considered here have aired since 2010. As with the narratives found in non-
fiction, fiction, and film, advertisements for technology are burgeoning.
What is striking about the advertisements for technology is the wide range
of products for which technology is now integral.
As there are volumes of print ads for technology of all stripes, I have
chosen three to represent the vast array. They appeared in very different
print outlets, one a publication for techies, another for educators, and one
for a general, educated audience. In 1987, PC Magazine ran an ad for Xerox
Ventura Publisher (February 24, vol. 6, nr. 4, p.73). That ad described the
tasks which that particular software could perform: arrange and format text
210 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
company Verizon ran a commercial about a little girl who opens a lemonade
stand (“Suzie’s Lemonade,” https://www.youtube.com). We see her at
a table in the front yard of the family home—it is a sentimental scene of
domestic tranquility—where her father helpfully gives her his cell phone
with its calculator. It is the decisive change which sets an amazing sequence
of events in motion and launches her career. Technology has much more
to offer and leads from one thing to another. At one point, the camera
cuts to a construction site with a big, new building underway as proof of
how well her business is doing and what a success she is. She appears to
be the CEO of a powerful corporation, all thanks to Verizon’s technol-
ogy. At the end of the ad, a confident male voice imparts the most impor-
tant message of all: People like Susie know that “THE SMALL BUSINESS
WITH THE BEST TECHNOLOGY RULES.” The tagline appears in
bold red letters alongside an obviously tenacious Susie dressed in a power
suit and standing in front of her headquarters. This ad tells a variation
of the self-made man (or woman) story, but also of the parable Postman
described. It urges us to be a person like Susie who is in the know. She is
not technologically innocent or ignorant. And technology makes everything
possible: it turns a small business into a big business; it breeds success and
offers status; it makes us sophisticated and powerful. That one word at the
end of the ad—“rules”—says it all: technology confers power.
A 2012 television commercial for BlackBerry makes the same point
(https://www.youtube.com). A woman appears on screen wearing a
white lab coat. Next her name “Yvonne Chan” and under that her cre-
dentials “MD Scientist Mom” materialize mid-screen. Ms. Chan narrates
the fifteen-second ad and indicates how very busy she is—she embod-
ies the modern, multi-tasking woman—but then announces that she can
be a mom, a doctor, and a research scientist. She can do it all, she says,
“cuz I have a BlackBerry.” The suggestion is that none of it would be
possible without technology. The capable, multi-tasking woman calls her
BlackBerry “my other brain” and with that statement ends her commen-
tary. That technology has begun to think for her is not only an enhance-
ment, but a liberation. As this micro-story suggests, technology eliminates
all difficulties and obstacles. It assists, enables, and empowers. With the
possession of this technology, moreover, anyone can become someone as
successful, competent, and important as the physician/scientist/mother.
The car company, Audi, ran a witty and telling ad for its Quattro in 2012
(https://www.youtube.com). It alludes to Moby Dick with a tow truck
driver as Captain Ahab in search, not of the great whale, but an elusive,
ADVERTISING TECHNOLOGY 213
white automobile. If someone can manage to buy that car, she or he will
have accomplished what Ahab never could and will become a conquering
hero. The highly suggestive tagline at the end of the commercial is espe-
cially revelatory: “Truth in Engineering.” A bold statement, it conveys
two separate meanings. On the one hand, it suggests the integrity of the
engineering, the technology, which is the Audi automobile. Its reference
to “Truth” implies as well that Audi is the genuine article. On the other,
it begs the question—what is truth—and confidently provides the answer.
Truth is found in engineering, in technology. It is the truth, certainty, real-
ity, and there is no other, but technology.
In particular, advertising disseminates a narrative of ineluctable and
necessary technological progress, as a 2013 commercial for another car,
the Lexus GS, indicates (https://www.youtube.com). With images of
assorted antiquated devices slipping past the car into what can only be
oblivion, a man’s voice solemnly announces: “Technology accelerates at a
relentless pace. Anything not moving forward is moving backward.” This
ad expresses what Ellul called “the functional imperative of technology,”
namely, “that everything must always be up to date” (System 70). It is
essential that we always keep up with technological change. A print ver-
sion of the same ad asserts that Lexus offers “future-proof technology.”
In other words, this technology protects and insures against becoming
out-of-date. With such technology, we are offered a chance to share in
its invulnerability. Like the ad about the dirty shirt collar, this ad warns
against the sin of technological ignorance. It implies that it is foolish, even
ruinous, to resist or refuse any technological advance. It is only important
that we have the next technological device and accept the technological
order of existence.
In recent years, the expansion of online-education programs has gener-
ated a new collection of advertisements. The application of technology to
education extends from the college and university level (e.g., University of
Phoenix) to include elementary and high schools as well (e.g., K12.com).
A 2013 TV spot for Ashford University, one of a host of online educational
enterprises, exemplifies the devotion to technology as source of knowledge
and opportunity (http://www.ispot.tv). Ashford’s trademarked motto is
also the slogan for the advertisement: “Technology Changes Everything.”
The simple three-word declaration claims universal power, possibility, and
authority for technology.
The ad begins with different, young school-aged children shown in a
traditional university lecture hall, characterizing their portable electronic
214 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
This is it. This is what matters. The experience of a product. How it makes some-
one feel. Will it make life better? Does it deserve to exist? We spend a lot of time
on a few great things. Until every idea we touch enhances each life it touches.
You may rarely look at it, but you’ll always feel it. This is our signature …
[then on screen appears the slogan] “Designed by Apple in California.”
The spot concludes with the narrator saying: “And it means everything.”
The questions are rhetorical; the answers can only be a decisive “yes!”
Of course, life will be better; of course, Apple technology has to exist.
Enhancement is the prize and can be ours. Although the focus seems to be
on human beings, it is actually on human beings directing their attention
in every situation to the technological device which produces pleasure and
happiness. As the opening words make clear, what really matters is technol-
ogy. And it matters most of all, as the closing words decide.
ADVERTISING TECHNOLOGY 215
through the liturgy of advertising. This myth (in the strong sense of the
term) is as much a myth as that of any archaic people” (Culture 61). As in
an ancient myth, there are problems to solve and obstacles to overcome
in every advertisement, and technology solves and overcomes them all
for us. Myths tell moreover of well-being and happiness, also the two key
elements in the story advertising tells. Happiness is “the paramount value
of advertising culture” (Stivers, Culture 59) and is “portrayed in adver-
tising as pleasure” which results from “increased consumption” (Stivers,
Technology as Magic 125). That is, increased consumption of technology
leads to happiness. Above all, these advertisements declare technology to
be the crux of the myth to unite us all and give direction to our existence.
Advertising is a form of indoctrination into a technological belief system.
From the advertisements, we learn that technology can solve all our prob-
lems and eliminate all our woes. Allusions to the Gospel stories of Jesus’
miracles ring loud and clear in this advertising scripture. Technology works
wonders. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the mute speak, the
hopeless at last have hope. There is seemingly nothing technology can-
not do: it is magnificent, marvelous, and magnanimous. Its blessings for
humanity are without number and new every day. It is essentially a religious
message about technological salvation. Technology is as it were a deity:
the source of our joy, deserving our gratitude and adoration. Technology,
the ads all teach us, should and must be the center of our world.
PROPAGANDA
Advertising, public relations, and propaganda are all related. They are
all means of persuasion, mechanisms to spread and establish attitudes or
convictions, to bring about active or passive participation in a particular
belief system. In Stivers’ opinion, “the American culture of advertising is
a culture of propaganda” (Technology as Magic 124). Propaganda is a wor-
risome word. It conjures up notions of totalitarian dictators and regimes,
not entertaining and informative (or inane and innocuous) advertisements.
Those of us who live in what we consider a free, democratic society tend to
think we stand beyond its reach. No one thinks he or she is conditioned by
propaganda, but it is an undeniable condition of our world.
For Edward Bernays, propaganda was “the mechanism by which ideas
are disseminated on a large scale … in the broad sense of an organized
effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine” (Propaganda 48). He did
not address the assault on freedom through such manipulation of opinion.
ADVERTISING TECHNOLOGY 219
INCOHERENCES
Apple ran an ad in print in the summer of 2014 which was a part of
a larger campaign called apple.com/your-verse (cf. https://www.apple.
com/your-verse). The formulation suggests both a universe each indi-
vidual can construct and the part of a poem, song, or narrative each of us
can compose. Under the heading “iPad Air,” the ad copy reads simply:
“Everyone has a passion. A new idea your verse to share. A stanza to add to
the world’s story. What will your verse be?” The image depicts three hip-
looking young people with the Apple product, filming a group of women
dancers attired in the exotic dress of the Indian subcontinent. The ground
is strewn with flower blossoms. In the lower left-hand corner, a small rect-
angle of text explains the scene: “Agra, India. Bollywood choreographer
Feroz Khan uses an iPad in almost all aspects of production from scouting
locations and mixing music to framing each shot and refining every dance
move.” Technology is associated with excitement, creativity, productivity,
fun, and entertainment. It has almost universal application. Or is it that we
exist in a universe of technology?
The ad flatters us with our particular potential and at the same time subtly
inserts technology into the equation. It suggests that we need the iPad,
that is, technology, in order to “write” the story. “What will your verse
be?” cannot be answered or the story written without technology. It allows
you (me) to contribute to, perhaps even produce, a narrative, a very impor-
tant narrative, the most important narrative there is, “the world’s story.”
The story of or for the world is a momentous task. It is tantamount to the
composition of a master narrative or myth which would explain who and
why we are. It would illumine the purpose and meaning of our existence.
This particular story of and for the world is centered on technology.
To be sure, we have composed a story about technology which tells of
progress and perfectibility. It now enjoys considerable cultural authority.
We have written an opposing narrative as well, but it has not been able
to compete with the popularity of the other. In the dominant narrative,
technology solves puzzles and problems as the hero in the myths of old. It
first overcomes and then eliminates difficulty and limitations. Given time,
it will, it is believed and widely accepted, eventually solve all problems
and answer all questions. It will meet our every need and more. It is an
appealing and satisfying story. It unites us and offers hope and meaning to
many. But can this story, can technology, provide the meaning most neces-
sary for being human? Can it really tell us what it means to be, or how we
should be, human?
Narrative depends on and creates coherences. In technological culture,
however, coherence dissolves. Even though we continue to tell stories
about technology, our technological devices, habits, and mindset under-
mine narrative. Everyone asserts that we are writing more today than ever
before thanks to email, texting, blogging, tweeting, and the like, but what
are we writing? We are not creating coherent narratives. Let Twitter serve
as an example. It is now used regularly by over 300 million people around
the world. On the “Company” page of the Twitter home site, we find
blazoned across the screen in what looks like a neon sign the invitation:
“tell your stories here” (https://about.twitter.com/company). It seems
reasonable to conclude that Twitter technology, like Apple technology,
serves narrative.
The market-research firm, Pear Analytics, inspected 2000 tweets sent
between 11:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. for a two-week period in August 2009.
The analysis established the following (in approximate values): 40 % was
pointless babble; 38 % was conversational in nature; 9 % had pass-along
value; 6 % involved self-promotion; 4 % was Spam; and 4 % had news con-
tent (http://pearanalytics.com). Whether “conversational,” “pass-along,”
or “self-promotional” tweets are any better than the “pointless babble” is
THE TRANSFORMATION OF NARRATIVE 223
not clear. As of June 2015, nine of the ten most popular Twitter accounts
in the world followed pop-icons and celebrities (Barack Obama was the
sole exception) with singer Katy Perry at the top of the list. In spite of
claims for Twitter’s role in social and political action around the world,
insignificance appears to be the rule for tweets. Based on the percentages
above, it is probably generous to conclude with an estimate that at least
70 % of Twitter traffic is trivial. Even Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey
remarked that a message on Twitter is “a short burst of inconsequential
information” (Sarno, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com). The introduc-
tion and implementation of Twitterbots, computer programs which auto-
matically post and repost comments on the social networking service, now
allow human beings to dispense altogether with the task of tweeting their
comments. However tweets are generated, they do not result in real story
telling, in real narrative.
The links and clicks, the send and delete of our technological environ-
ment, likewise eliminate coherence and preclude narrative. As the mes-
sages we write with our technological devices reveal, they themselves
are disconnected and incoherent, evanescent and ephemeral, of no real
consequence. Every communication now resembles a hyperlink which in
a few mouse-clicks transports us to an entirely unrelated topic or text.
According to Edward Tufte (who taught statistical evidence, analytical
design, and interface design at Yale University), a technology like the now
ubiquitous PowerPoint similarly abolishes narrative. As he explains, “the
rigid slide-by-slide hierarchies, indifferent to content, slice and dice the
evidence into arbitrary compartments, producing an anti-narrative with
choppy continuity” (10). The Facebook “thread” functions in much the
same way. It may look as if it provides a history or a story line, but the
thread only provides disconnected factoids and superficialities which then
disappear from view. As in texting, tweeting, and powerpointing, the mes-
sages are sliced and diced, they are fragments lacking any larger context
or connection.
Brian Christian’s discovery that we think, speak, and write like the com-
puter programs we have designed to “think,” “speak,” and “write” like
humans is, or should be, deeply disturbing and cause for great concern. It
demonstrates how we have adapted to and adopted the essentially inhuman
forms of communication our technological tools and toys have configured.
In a technologized society like ours, where words and thoughts conform
to technological demands, intelligence ceases to be “the intelligence of the
humanities, of human beings as such,” as Jacques Ellul realized. It becomes
224 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
“the intelligence that cooperates with the robot [or machine] and that is
modeled on artificial intelligence” (Bluff 387). In a strange reversal, we
have come to model our speech and written expression on the structures of
our technological devices and systems.
ELECTRONIC (ANTI-)NARRATIVES
While we have seen that there is a narrative or story to be found in what
has been told and written (or filmed and televised) about technology,
and that that narrative has clearly identifiable features, we need to con-
sider as well the construction of narrative by technology itself, that is, by
machines. Already the first typewriting machine instigated “a disembodi-
ment and disengagement of the text from its human origin” (Goody 110).
When we began to compose with a typewriter, we handed over “some
measure of the power belonging to the writer … to the machine” (Birkerts
156). The human component is reduced, while that of the machine is
greatly increased. The first steps toward word-processing programs and
then to machine-generated narratives had already been taken with the
lowly typewriter.
With the advent of computer technology, a new form of narrative,
a very technological narrative, has appeared: the hypertext. Hypertexts
require a computer or similar electronic device for access to the story.
A hypertext consists of “lexia” or discrete reading units “segmented into
generic chunks of information” (Janet Murray 55) which readers manipu-
late and connect as desired via hyperlinks or links to other blocks of text.
According to Alex Goody, afternoon, a story by Michael Joyce (written in
1987, published in 1990) with 539 independent lexia was “the first major
hypertext fiction” (124). The reader must return to and circle through
certain lexia again and again in order to continue through a hypertext.
There is consequently no succession—a necessary constituent for narra-
tive—in a hypertext story. The key features of hypertext are “interactivity,
non-linearity, rupture or frustration, textual process over textual product,
the performative aspect of the text, the interaction between human lan-
guage and the machine-readable code enabling the text” (Goody 123).
Hypertext stories intentionally undo rather than create coherence. Since
hypertext fiction enables and encourages, even requires the reader to click
on certain hyperlinks which lead to other unrelated segments of the text,
the idea of narrative as beginning, middle, and end, as situation/transfor-
mation/situation, no longer obtains. Some pathways in afternoon “take
THE TRANSFORMATION OF NARRATIVE 225
the reader away from narrative altogether” (Goody 126). The principle
of breakdown, even the breakdown of narrative itself, is “essential to
hypertext fiction” (125). Tellingly, the main character of afternoon Peter
says: “I’m not sure that I have a story” (http://www.wwnorton.com).
Janet Murray describes the hypertext as a “digital labyrinth” (132). She
says that hypertexts “offer no endpoint and no way out” (132). But narra-
tive must have a beginning, middle, and end. As Daniel Mendelsohn wrote
in Harper’s Magazine (January 2015), “endings in literature, like death
in real life, give retrospective meaning to what’s come before: it’s because
life (or a novel) can’t go on forever that what happens between the begin-
ning and the end becomes precious, has value” (88). The reader can con-
sequently never find or create any order or meaning in or with a hypertext.
Without an ending and without coherence, there can be no real narrative.
Hypertext stories are anti-narratives. They may seek to challenge and lay
bare the structures of or to restructure and reconfigure conventional narra-
tive, but they nevertheless work against narrative. While narrative tradition-
ally created coherence, the hypertext leads purposely only to “confusion
itself” (Janet Murray 133). As Robert Scholes explains, “the function of
anti-narrative is to problematize the entire process of narration and interpre-
tation,” but he was not “sanguine about its success” (“Language, Narrative,
and Anti-Narrative” 211 and 212). Or as Nicholas Carr observes, hypertext
is supposed to “overthrow the patriarchal authority of the author and shift
power to the reader. It would be a technology of liberation” (Shallows 126).
Hypertext has not so much shifted power to the reader as to technology,
however. Electronic or digital narratives, like hypertexts and hypermedia,
allow readers/participants to construct the “narrative,” but only within the
parameters of the cyber-structure set by the writer/programmer. Readers
are not so much liberated as trapped in a maze of unending permutations.
The reader may try to piece together different component parts or blocks of
text, but the design of the hypertext, the technology of the “story,” thwarts
the attempt and stands opposed to narrative. The various and numer-
ous connections become disconnections. Incoherence and fragmentation
become the rule. Narrative comes undone.
MACHINE-GENERATED NARRATIVES
Human beings now no longer need be involved at all in the production of
our stories, as we are able to turn the task over to technology altogether.
Even learning how to write has now been handed over to machines.
226 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
Web applications and online writing platforms with scoring engines are
available to teach school children how to write prose compositions. Tom
Vander Ark reports on his website that these digital materials score stu-
dent essays and provide feedback as well as other instruction for narra-
tive, expository, descriptive, and persuasive writing assignments (http://
gettingsmart.com). He reviewed and described several of the programs.
Here are a few examples. Criterion Online Writing Evaluation service
from Educational Testing Service (ETS) is “a web-based instructional tool
that teachers use with students to help them plan, write and revise essays
guided by instant annotated diagnostic feedback.” Similarly, Essay Punch
from Merit Software guides students “through each step in the writing
process with contextual help and feedback.” Another online writing tool
called Writing Roadmap from CTB “provides an effective way for students
to practice and improve their writing.” Finally, Odyssey Writer by Compass
Learning is “a customizable writing program for elementary and middle
school students” which “can guide students through the entire writing
process and make writing more focused, more effective, and even more
enjoyable.” The assorted programs transfer the task of teaching people how
to write—which involves modeling the production of prose and invention
of narrative—from human beings to technology.
Today, technology not only “teaches” us how to write, but also “writes”
our stories for us. Computers, or more precisely programs or algorithms,
now compose or generate stories for newspapers, magazines, and online
media outlets, ranging from sports and financial reports to film reviews
and other news. What is fascinating about this development of machine-
produced narratives is that Jonathan Swift satirized it almost 300 years ago
in Gulliver’s Travels. He described a word- or sentence-making machine
with which “the most ignorant Person, at a reasonable Charge, and with
little bodily Labour may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politics, Law,
Mathematics and Theology without the least Assistance from Genius or
Study” (182–184). No person and no real knowledge are then necessary
for the composition of any sentence or story.
Companies like Narrative Science offer customers and clients auto-
matically generated “narratives” from its “artificial intelligence platform”
(www.narrativescience.com). Narrative Science “produces reports, articles,
summaries and more.” In fact, with no hint of irony or suggestion of con-
tradiction, it promises “human insight at machine scale.” Natural Science
mines data, and its natural language generation platform Quill “creates
perfectly written narratives to convey meaning for any intended audience”
THE TRANSFORMATION OF NARRATIVE 227
NARRATIVE LOST
While it has been the substance of a narrative and there are even tech-
nologies to create narratives, technology is itself anti-narrative. Not only
machine-generated narratives assembled independent of human agency,
but also technology per se militates against storytelling. Indeed, it discred-
its, rejects, and eliminates narrative. As Wylie Sypher indicates, narrative is
wasteful or profligate and as such always inefficient (175). But technology
is fundamentally about control and efficiency. The constituent material
of narrative—language—is characteristically unwieldy, messy, ambiguous,
exceedingly complicated, and highly inefficient, all of which are at cross-
purposes with the order, regularity, and precision of technology. As such,
technological culture calls for language and narrative to reduce complexity,
THE TRANSFORMATION OF NARRATIVE 229
None of that computes. Our dominant technology, the computer with all
its appurtenances and subsidiary devices, cannot, by virtue of its very design,
deal with anything except information in binary code, and whatever else
there is must conform to the configurations and structures of that tech-
nology. “No mechanical system,” Mumford declares, “knows the mean-
ing of meaning” (Pentagon 87). Likewise, no AI operates with meaning
in contrast to human intelligence which always analyzes “in the context
of meanings” (Hanson 136). For example, Weizenbaum’s famous and
ground-breaking computer program Eliza (written between 1964 and
1966) “includes no representation of syntax or meaning” for processing
language (Janet Murray 72).
In a technological culture, nothing counts unless it can be calculated or
measured, but there is more to human existence than calculation and mea-
surement. As Morozov remarks, “numeric imagination might tell us how
to use the air conditioner more efficiently, but narrative imagination can
tell us whether we should use it at all” (To Save Everything 263). In other
words, narrative has a moral dimension. It calls for a response and a judg-
ment. It asks and answers questions about good and evil, true and false,
in a word, morality, which lies outside the purview of technology. “In a
technological civilization,” Stivers asserts, “the tension between what is
and what ought to be (an ethical norm) is supplanted by that between
what is and what is possible” (Technology as Magic 202). New technol-
ogy is moreover typically and “necessarily used as soon as it is available,
without distinction of good or evil” (Ellul, Society 99). Technology in fact
erases the distinctions between good and evil, true or false, natural and
artificial, real and simulated.
There is no doubt that technology has and offers meaning. As this
study has shown, we ascribe many meanings to technology, such as reli-
ability, advancement, improvement, liberation, sophistication, democracy,
equality, limitlessness, and power. The narrative of technological idealism
tells us moreover that both the world and the human being are essentially
machines. But how true are these meanings? How reliable is technology?
It is actually notoriously fragile and prone to breakdown and failure. Every
technician and engineer takes the “normal accident” into account as a part
of the technological equation (cf. Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents:
Living with High Risk Technologies). What about advancement and
improvement? Our great steps forward also take us backward. The unde-
niable and enormous past, present, and future damage to the environment
occasioned by technological existence turns gains into losses. The damages
THE TRANSFORMATION OF NARRATIVE 233
our bodies nor our minds will be able to keep pace with technological
advances in synthetic prosthetic enhancements and machine intelligence,
our strengths and abilities shrink to negligible. And in a world interpen-
etrated and defined by technology, morality no longer has any real role
to play. Wendell Berry posited “the length of our vision” as “our moral
boundary” (83–84), but technology removes all boundaries to our vision
of what is possible—and so also of what is permissible. When everything
including the human being is viewed in terms of a machine or technology,
no moral limits remain, because there is no moral obligation needed in the
operation or use of a machine. It simply works or does not work. It starts
or stops without regard for any needs, because it has no needs (aside from
its energy source).
As Stivers explains, “ethical meaning arises from a limitation of power”
(Culture 154). That is, individuals can only relate morally to one another
when they limit their power—what they can do or can have—vis-à-vis
one another. Morality sets boundaries and limits on human behavior and
“on the exercise of power, collective and individual” (Stivers, “Technique
against Culture” 75). But technology eliminates limits. In the technologi-
cal order, power can never be limited, because technology always serves
above all to enhance power. As a result, no ethical meaning can derive
from technological principles. To be sure, people continue to prohibit
theft and murder, but any restriction of technological innovation, imple-
mentation, and power is unacceptable. A morality defining good and evil
is in any case hardly relevant or necessary where technology is concerned,
since we typically think our technology is neutral.
Ursula Franklin has deemed language “a fine barometer of values and
priorities” (126). Indeed, the false meanings created by technology are
evident in our lexicon. The word smart is a case in point. We have smart
cars, smart houses, smart classrooms, smart boards, smart phones, smart
eyeglasses or contact lenses, even smart skin. But what is so smart about
any of these devices? When applied to phones, classrooms, cars, fabrics,
and homes, all of which are nothing more than inanimate objects or col-
lections of such objects, “smart” gains and loses meaning, invites the
comparison or equation of human with machine functions, and actually
degrades intelligence so that it becomes simply a designation of techno-
logical devices at our disposal. The same is true of the word and concept
friend. When we use Facebook and have a long list of “friends,” a few of
whom we know, many of whom we never see, many more we hardly know,
and some we do not know at all, “friend” has lost its sense and meaning
THE TRANSFORMATION OF NARRATIVE 235
DIS-UNITY
Technological idealism has become the new master narrative, the new
myth, and it unites us probably more than anything else today. Technology
is now our shared experience and that which we all have in common and on
which we all depend. It assists us, keeps us busy, entertains us, and occupies
our time and attention. It unifies the culture or society around itself, but
we are unified around a void, because the meaning technology offers us is
false. To reiterate Stivers’ insight, “technology can only organize a society
at the level of logic and power” (Technology as Magic 138). Because tech-
nology does not provide moral direction, the narrative of technological
idealism cannot ultimately function as a guiding myth. In other words, a
story of technology cannot provide a useful and usable narrative to unite
culture in a meaningful way, since meaning must be related to a morality
which is concerned with human consequences and which seeks what is best
for humanity. As method and machine, as calculation and management, as
total system, technology ignores human concerns and cannot give us direc-
tion or purpose. It can only lead us astray.
The myth of technological progress, of unlimited possibility, and of
perfectibility proves illusory and untrue. Technology has failed to make
us better human beings and to give us any direction, purpose, or meaning
other than to advance technologically. The technological framework in
which we live and move and have our being, which governs and shapes us
and our stories, actually produces a narrative-at-odds-with-narrative and
-with-human-beings, one we cannot use to know or find any meaning for
ourselves and our world other than in technology alone.
Ultimately, technology may do more to divide than unite us. Because
technology mediates almost every activity and experience now, it disconnects
236 J.M. VAN DER LAAN
us from reality and separates us from one another. We spend our days
isolated from each other in the artificial environments of our houses and
workspaces, where heating and cooling systems keep the actual weather
and the natural world at bay. We make our purchases, pay our bills, and
bank online; communicate with members of our own families by text and
with colleagues in the next office or down the hall by email; all the while
we avoid actual contact with other human beings. We eschew physically
walking from one place to another in favor of getting there by car. Our
games, entertainments, work, and relationships are more often on screen
than off. Most of our interactions over the course of a normal day are with
machines rather than face-to-face with another human being. In the final
analysis, a narrative of technological idealism must fail to provide us an
integrated and meaningful view of the world and ourselves.
Technology is not itself the problem. We human beings are the problem,
but not in the way the narrative of technological idealism tells us we are.
We are not the problem, because we make mistakes, get tired, are limited
both physically and intellectually, are unreliable, and are inefficient. We
are the problem, because we value technology more than human qualities,
even more than human beings. From a technological perspective, our all-
too-human abilities and traits appear to be weaknesses and deficiencies, yet
they may be our greatest strengths and virtues. Those seeming imperfec-
tions distinguish us from technology and warrant our existence as human
beings. They allow us to know joy and sadness, to experience the fullness
of life from birth to death, to find and give meaning to what happened
in between, and to know we can and will die, something no machine can
know or experience, a perspective which makes all the difference.
The perfection of the world and the human being is the goal of tech-
nological idealism. To achieve perfection, technology has to put an end to
inefficiency, to irregularity, to unpredictability, to uncertainty, to difficulty,
to inconvenience, to disorganization, to disorder, to instability, to suffer-
ing, to error, and to mortality, the most destabilizing, disorganizing, and
disordering enigmatic event of existence. As tragic and unwanted as death
is, it nevertheless puts all that went before into perspective. The beginning
and end of life give meaning to the middle. Narratives need endings. We
need endings. The technological perfection of existence would end mortal-
ity and in doing so extinguish the story of being human. To be perfect, to be
immortal, is not to be human. Errare humanum est. Memento mori.
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INDEX
Chronicle of Higher Education The, 141, 160, 167, 200, 201, 204,
210 211, 218, 219
cinema, 10, 187, 189, 196–8 Condorcet, Antoine-Nicolas de, 45,
city, 2, 12, 23, 24, 114, 116, 121, 47, 48
133, 135, 148, 179, 187, 188, Configurations: A Journal of
194 Literature, Science, and
Clarke, Arthur C., 52–4, 61, 136, Technology, 112
138, 168, 196, 200 confusion, 3, 54, 144, 202, 225
Claussen, Bettina, 156, 157 connected, connectedness connection,
clickers, 69 32, 39, 67, 70, 96, 98, 101, 102,
climate, climate change, 17, 45, 48, 114, 147, 149, 159, 195, 204,
68, 90, 197 214, 215, 223, 225
Clinton, Bill/William J., 59, 60 conquer, conquest, 56, 71, 122, 153,
clock, 2, 4, 17, 43, 121, 143, 198, 159–62, 167, 168, 192, 196
209 consumer, 9, 58, 64, 67, 99, 204–6,
cloning, 107, 175 215
Closed Circuit Television, 100 consumption, 80, 100, 205,
Cockaigne, land of, 72 218, 235
cog in the machine, 91, 188 control, 6, 7, 15, 16, 49, 51, 59, 64,
coherence/s, 32, 35, 222–5 65, 72, 81–94, 96, 105–9, 117,
Cohn, Jonathan, 25 118, 139–42, 158, 159, 175,
Coketown, 124, 129 182–4, 191, 192, 196, 200, 201,
Collins, Suzanne, 137 204, 208, 211, 219, 228
Comcast, 227 convenience, 72
commercial/s, 12, 29, 38, 60, 206–9, Cooke, Alistair, 176
211–13, 215–17, 219 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 2, 43
Compass Learning, 226 Coupland, Douglas, 145
computer, 2–4, 9–11, 13–16, 19, 29, Crampton, Gertrude, 135
39, 42, 54, 56–60, 62, 64, 65, creation, creativity, 9, 36, 44, 53, 60,
68–71, 81, 85, 87, 91–5, 98, 71, 72, 81, 88, 89, 109, 115,
100–2, 107, 110, 138, 140, 142, 119, 172, 174, 175, 177, 178,
144–7, 149, 158, 181, 182, 183, 185, 231
189–92, 194, 195, 205, 209, Crichton, Michael, 176
211, 214–16, 223, 224, 226, Crick, Francis, 179
227, 229, 230, 232 crime, criminal, 28, 100, 113, 128,
computer-generated imagery 137, 146, 178
(CGI), 189 Criterion Online Writing
Comte, August, 49 Evaluation, 226
condition, conditioned, conditioning, crossbow, 75
7, 10, 28, 36, 45, 54, 60, 63, 72, Crusades, 124
76, 78, 83, 87, 88, 90, 92, 96, cryonics, 180
99, 104, 110, 127, 128, 139, CTB, 226
INDEX 261
DNA, 62, 103, 174, 179, 180, 183 Einstein, Albert, 178
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, El Dorado, 149
136 electric chair, 130, 134
Dolan, Pamela Lewis, 182 electricity, 2, 11, 12, 48, 49, 54, 107,
dominance, dominate, dominated, 142, 166, 170–2, 188
domination, 61, 71, 77, electronic, 54, 57, 61, 91, 96, 109,
78, 81–83, 86, 90, 105, 140, 143, 147, 156, 181, 209,
109, 110, 130, 137–40, 158, 213, 216, 224–5, 230
164, 166, 167, 187, 191, Eliade, Mircea, 34, 36, 70
196, 200, 231 Eliza, 91, 232
Dorsey, Jack, 223 Ellul, Jacques, 7, 8, 12, 13–15,
Dos Passos, John, 139 20, 36–8, 55, 83, 85–8,
Dow Chemical Company, 210 92–4, 109, 153, 156, 160,
Dreyfus, Hubert L., 98 162, 163, 166, 176, 177,
Drucker, Peter, 7 184, 189, 197, 198, 201,
Dr. Who, 190 205, 206, 208, 213, 219,
Dune, 136 223, 227, 229, 232, 233
Dyson, Esther, 59 email, 10, 13, 49, 138, 216, 222,
dystopia, dystopian, 98, 105, 130, 229, 233, 236
138, 187 embodiment, 61, 92, 132, 190,
224, 228
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 37
E empower, empowering,
ease, 72, 94, 141 empowerment, 55, 58, 59, 99,
Echo, 215 162, 212, 215, 216
economics, economy, 7–9, 11, 14, Emrich, Wilhelm, 163
17–19, 44, 57, 58, 67, 79, 80, encyclopedia, 5, 13, 44, 138, 139
83, 86, 93, 98, 114, 116, 128 Encyclopedia Britannica, 44
Edison, Thomas A., 50, 126, 127, 142 Encyclopédie (French), 5, 44
Edmunds.com, 227 end, end in itself, ends in themselves,
education, 3, 7–9, 11, 14, 16, 19, 27, 1, 3, 26, 28, 32, 34, 40, 45, 46,
44–6, 51, 52, 57, 66, 68, 69, 78, 49, 58, 61, 66, 67, 83, 90, 93,
86, 95, 99, 100, 104, 116, 210, 96, 101, 106, 108, 109, 114,
213, 214, 217, 226, 233 130, 137, 141, 143, 146, 147,
Educational Testing Service (ETS), 151–3, 159, 161–4, 162, 175,
226 178, 188, 190, 193, 195, 201,
efficiency, efficient, 4, 7–9, 16, 20, 38, 202, 204, 207, 212, 213, 217,
39, 45, 51, 58, 68, 70, 78, 81, 224, 225, 230, 236
86, 89, 93–5, 104, 106, 107, ending/s, 36, 124, 135, 138, 147,
125, 127, 128, 132, 134, 140, 225, 230, 236
141, 168, 205, 211, 216, 228, enframement, 82, 94
229, 236 Engelhardt, Dietrich von, 122
INDEX 263
engineer, engineered, engineering, 1, 6, evolution, 15, 28, 52, 108, 109, 126,
8, 9, 12, 24, 47–9, 55, 62, 69, 88, 127, 191, 200
90, 97, 104, 107, 117, 118, 121, Ex Machina, 111, 190
125, 126, 128, 135, 139–42, exploitation, 158, 167
157–9, 161, 168, 169, 171,
174–6, 180–4, 203, 213, 232, 233
engine/s, 1, 2, 4, 10, 13, 43, 46, 47, F
63, 76, 79, 93, 94, 100, 112, Facebook, 10, 107, 131, 223, 233, 234
117–19, 124, 125, 128, 129, 135, factory, 12, 36, 63, 78, 89, 107, 124,
136, 152, 155, 160, 165, 226 137, 140, 188, 211
Enlightenment, 44, 117–21 Fahrenheit 451, 136, 201
Enola Gay, 179 failure, 18, 29, 40, 56, 97, 131, 142,
enrichment, 103, 164 164, 169–85, 207, 232
enslave, enslavement, 167, 191 false meaning, 163, 231–5
enthusiasm, 42, 45–7, 49, 52, 56, 59, Fantasia, 155
72, 75, 87, 98, 99, 103–5, 129, fantasy, 34, 81, 89, 97, 99, 101, 102,
206, 219 107, 113, 140, 155, 184, 185,
environment, environmental, 2, 3, 6, 189
7, 16, 19, 28, 57, 60, 64, 69, 75, fascism, 50
84, 88–90, 106, 107, 116, 118, Faulkner, William, 113
120, 121, 129, 131, 135, 139, Faust/Faust, 29, 111, 122, 151–70,
147, 151, 153, 155, 158, 159, 170, 174, 183
161, 168, 169, 176, 187, 189, Feed, 56, 78, 89, 139, 229
190, 196, 204, 208, 223, 232, Feenberg, Andrew, 8, 13
236 Ferkiss, Victor, 50, 90, 91, 109, 155,
EPICAC XIV, 140 175
equality, 60, 68, 70, 95, 100, 117, Ferrucci, David, 181, 182
128, 135, 232 Filene, Edward, 51
equation, 9, 80, 92, 105, 141, 217, film, 13, 121, 133, 137, 170, 188–95,
221, 232, 234 197, 198, 201, 209, 226, 230
Erdrich, Louise, 113 finance, 3, 11, 89, 181
error, 78, 94, 143, 183, 236 fire, 1, 2, 17, 18, 21, 22, 94, 113,
Essay Punch, 226 114, 173
Esurance, 216 Flash Gordon, 190
ethical meaning, 234 Flaubert, Gustave, 112
ethic, ethical, 81, 100, 162, 184, Florescu, Radu, 171, 178
232–4 Florini, Karen
Étienne Lantier, 128 Florman, Samuel C., 55, 56
ETS. See Educational Testing Service Forbes, R.J., 1
(ETS) forbidden/forbidden: knowledge, 22,
Etzler, J.A., 48 23, 72, 73, 114, 152, 170,
European Union, 100 173–4, 183, 204
264 INDEX
mortal, mortality, 23, 113, 236 dominant, 41–73, 75, 92, 94, 101,
Mostow, Jonathan, 191 108, 110, 149, 206, 222
Mountain Dew, 208 grand or master, 231
movies, motion pictures, 28, 29, 117, loss of, 55, 83, 90, 98
187–202, 206 machine-generated, 224–30
MRI, 11, 103 principles of, 32, 42, 44, 51, 55, 231
Muckermann, Hermann, 165 in relation to story, 65, 70
Mumford, Lewis, 1, 8, 34, 43, 55, 70, Narrative Science, 226, 227
83–8, 91, 109, 152, 155, 156, National Science Foundation, 62
158–60, 166, 168, 179, 182, National Socialism, Nazi/s, 82, 143,
231, 232 144, 188
Murasaki Shikibu, 21 natural, nature, 1, 5, 28, 46, 58, 70,
Murray, Henry A., 34, 36, 71 78, 84, 85, 90, 125, 131, 139,
Murray, Janet H., 60, 224, 225, 228, 146, 151, 153–5, 158, 163, 168,
232 169, 180, 181, 204, 219, 224,
Musk, Elon, 69 226, 227, 232, 236, 323
myth need, 9, 17, 18, 28, 33, 48, 49, 53,
ancient, 37, 71, 127, 144, 169, 218 56, 57, 64–8, 80, 84, 85, 87, 93,
definition of, 70 97, 101, 104, 106, 107, 109,
etymology of, 34 115, 118, 125, 128, 131, 135,
in relation to narrative, 70 143, 162, 193, 197, 198, 204–7,
technological, 35, 55, 86, 87 210, 211, 217, 219, 221, 222,
traditional, 39 224, 225, 228, 230, 231, 234,
mythic, mythical, 33, 37, 38, 72, 88, 236
89, 136, 146, 207, 217 Negroponte, Nicholas, 29, 58, 100,
mythologize, mythology, 29, 35, 37, 113, 225
72, 83 Neo, 192, 194–6, 201
Neumann, John von, 101, 141
Neuromancer, 138, 139
N New Lanark, 77
Naisbitt, John, 56–9 New Republic, The, 103
Naisbitt, Nina, 57 Newton, Isaac, 44
nanobot, 62 New Yorker, The, 25
nanoscale, 62, 181, 200 New York Times, The, 25, 173, 205
nanotechnology, 62, 63, 176, 181, 200 NGram Viewer, 27
narrative Nichol, Andrew, 187
anti-narrative, 30, 223, 225, 228 Nichol, Joseph McGinty, 191,
breakdown of, 225 1984, 136
as cognitive instrument, 30 No Child Left Behind, 9, 69
counter, 39, 72, 75–110 non-existence, 103
definition of, 30–3 Noosphere, 53
digital, 225 normal accident, 232
INDEX 271
Tantillo, Astrida Orle, 167 144, 147, 148, 188, 191, 196,
Taylor, Alan, 191 205–9, 211, 219, 235
Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 51 utopianism, 49, 50, 72, 108, 152,
Taylorism, 42, 51 185, 218
technê, 21, 173 technology
technician, 1, 9, 22, 38, 80, 119, autonomy of, 15, 85, 157
120, 126, 132, 141, 143, 157, definition of, 5
203, 232 essence of, 11–12, 82, 98, 109, 158,
technics, 83, 92, 155, 158, 159 216
technique/s, 4–8, 11, 14, 20, 25, 26, framework, 82, 86, 94, 110, 196,
38, 44, 69, 79, 85–7, 89, 117, 235
141, 143, 153, 154, 156–9, 161, growth of, 10
180, 198, 233–5 history of, 3
technium, 12, 15, 64, 65 invisibility of, 71
technocracy, 50, 95, 220 non-material, 7–9, 16, 114, 116,
technocrat, 104, 138, 157, 158, 160 156, 160, 204
technological reality of, 1–20, 148
advance, 105, 235 as theme in imaginative literature,
affirmation, 39, 40, 52 122, 149
change, 11, 63, 75, 93, 213 Technology, Entertainment, Design
determinism, 39 (TED), 25
enthusiasm, 42, 45–7, 49, 52, 53, 56, Technopoly, 8, 95, 206, 231
72, 75, 87, 103, 104, 129, 206 techno-science, techno-scientific,
idealism, 40, 41, 45, 48, 50, 52, 54, 172–5, 176–9, 184
56, 62, 66, 68–72, 75, 77, 79, telegraph, 2, 49, 130, 133, 134
81, 83, 84, 87, 88, 97, telephone, 3, 10, 12, 13, 123, 193,
105–107, 110, 144, 149, 185, 216, 217
230–2, 235, 236 television, TV, 2, 3, 10, 13–15, 19,
imperative, 80, 152, 180 25, 28, 66, 94, 100, 107, 117,
neutrality, 82 179, 181, 189, 190, 205–9, 211,
optimism, 34, 39, 47, 49, 56, 102, 212, 215
138 temptation, 187, 204
order, 20, 64, 77, 78, 80, 87, 96, Tenner, Edward, 104, 177
109, 129, 132, 134, 136, 141, Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 112
157, 190, 206, 213, 229, 234 Terminator, The/Terminator, 191–6,
progress, 10, 39, 46, 50, 55, 56, 80, 198–201
88, 98, 138, 141, 142, 163, 164, Tesla, 69
178, 185, 205, 213, 229, 235 texting, 11, 25, 102, 222, 223, 233
system, 7, 11–13, 15, 24, 42, 47, Thamus, 114, 115
48, 53, 64, 77, 80, 85, 86, 93, Theatrum, 43
94, 96, 104, 105, 107, 109, The Culture, 46, 75, 97, 137, 235
114, 128–30, 139, 141, 143, Theogony, 21, 22
INDEX 277