that either behavior is ethical. In the theory business, we tend to think that open discussion of ideas is best--but given the stakes of the Future-Present, we also might be tempted to keep our cards close to our vest. Is it unethical to sell theory exploits? Maybe, if they would better help more people if they were free. But what if their value could support further theory development and discover more exploits? All of these ethical issues are underscored by the question of value. If we cannot tell the value of our theory narratives, it is difficult to understand whether there is an ethical implication at all. The lasting effect of using or not using something with an unknown value or lack of value is almost impossible to measure. Unlike zero-days, the market for criticism is not measured in quantitative value. The critical narratives of Future-Present system failure are uncertain, un-valuable, indistinct, and outside of a quantitative metric of efficacy.
The problem with the humanities is that it is good at criticism, but bad at effects. It isn’t good at doing things in the world. You could argue that someone leaving comments on an Amazon camera review has more impact that Fredric Jameson. Someone writes a review, and supply chains kick into gear, engineers work overtime, quarries are taxed to produce minerals--these are global geologic effects. I mention this because this is opposed to what we think of as “criticism” in the humanities. I have mixed emotions about academia and working within it. Opposite to that, we get people like Mike Daisey’s Apple dialog, which had issues with fact-checking. And yet it cataloged an intense scrutiny on Apple and engendered a review of their hiring practices. Tim Cook actually went to Foxconn. It’s hard to say that he went there because of Daisey, but Daisey’s performance had real life effects, in the way that a blogger might not have had.
I think there’s a potential to have criticism that has an effect on the way things are made. I think that’s why a lot of people are experimenting with fiction, because it allows things to reach people in a way that it wouldn’t if you wrote for a Marxist criticism magazine or the University of Chicago. It’s a nice way to reach a larger audience. I think there will be things like Mike Daisey’s plays that hits at the right time, and affects the supply chain. I’m inclined to think that it will happen through the humanities, but not in academy. Jason Kottke can probably affect Apple’s development more than the academy can. I generally believe more people in academia should embracing things like blogging to find a wider audience for criticism. I’m still slightly amazed when people cite Kottke as an academic source. If you could take the populist appeal of Gizmodo and apply it to criticism, I think that would be an exciting use of social media. We could intensify the social media discourse by adding really exciting ideas to things considered speculative or frivolous.
- Geoff Manaugh
There is certainly a degree of obligation for society to monitor and regulate technology. Technology is not solely an independent sphere of immanent becoming that leaches into our reality. We intuitively understand this knowledge and have curated and shepherded technologies since the dawn of time. We suffer collateral damage, but the general trend has been to contain the existential threats offered by our tools. For example, we have not yet destroyed ourselves in nuclear conflagration.
Our security, however, is surely not a given. It is only our vigilance and the insistence on a degree of political representation for the shared values of culture & community that mitigates the threat of our creations enough to ensure progress. At present, we do not fear governors so much as potential world destroyers. It is now rogues we worry about--those who have removed themselves from culture and placed themselves above politics. So while it is our obligation to ensure that technologies do not destroy us, it is also our responsibility to innovate technologies that will equalize the balance of power across civilization.
- Chris Arkenberg
New methods of criticism are always coming online, says Geoff. As the system evolves, so does its holes, and so does the methods of finding them. It does seem that there is a certain vigilance in society for keeping watch over our mechanisms, and for correcting mistakes before they have far-reaching effects. This tendency’s successes are proof of its own efficacy. However, as Chris notes, there are trends to this instinct that may leave the search for vulnerabilities vulnerable. Working on instinct is not a theory, but a baseline reflex.
We have this cycle between society and technology--they affect each other. Groups, corporations, or communities, are the actors here. They inflict technology upon everyone else, and this changes the shape of the world for everyone else. This should probably be disturbing to us, as this is the dynamic that we’re stuck with. Those emergent actors aren’t any more rational than individuals are. We see corps lashing out for their own survival, and creating things like the DRM system. They are scared, and creating a thing in response. Those actors might be more rational than individuals, but certainly aren’t necessarily so.
People do have some agency over technology, but it is constrained by other forces. The agency of technologists only goes as far as creating the technology. Society decides what they do with it. Technologists can’t take technology out of culture, once it is inserted.
I’d like companies to be more conscious of this. I think it would be a better world if technologists paid attention to the harm they are doing to the world. But there is no incentive to do this. It is practically a losing battle to get people writing software expressly for non-profit or activists causes to properly consider the impact of their technology. Oil companies? Forget it.
- Eleanor Saitta
It would be nice to think of criticism as a contrary force to the less positive aspects of the capitalist system and its valuations. We’d like to think of criticism as objective, above instincts such as self-defensiveness and greet, impartial to all concerns except ethical. But while criticism can identify positives and negatives objective from capital, these create new feedback cycles that are not economic, and yet keep theory trapped in subjective, biased instinct. The motivations of profits and loss are only one valuation system that competes with ethics for constructing the narratives of technology.
The normative structures and goals of culture define the terms within which power relations are expected to operate. Politics is inevitably an expression of culture, even if representation may drift towards elite sub-classes.
As an expression of mind, technology contains all the same desires and fears and psychic baggage as anything we do. Some technologies may be aspirational while others are intentionally destructive. Some technologies may indeed be effectively neutral but all are colored by the goals of their creators. If a technology shifts the power dynamic, then the technology becomes political, whether by intent or serendipity.
- Chris Arkenberg
Are their schema-less technologies? Probably not. I’m a firm believer in the statement, “technology is neither good or bad, nor is it neutral.” Tech isn’t about social structures, but of course it also is. Our “normal” society is western, male-dominated, etc. So this is also what technology “is”. The assumption is that straight white men use technology in the “right way”. If you aren’t using tech in the same way as the dominant culture, you’re doing it wrong. See, for example, the endless news articles about how much teenage girls use SMS, or how teenagers are postponing getting their drivers’ licenses. Not to sound all feminist theory 101, but to assume that there are technologies that are schema-free, you are deluding yourself. To say that technology is available to everyone, you’re deluding yourself. The faces of “The Singularity” are all older white men. That’s not a coincidence. Bruce Sterling said this better than I can, in his SXSW 2012 talk – that life extension is going to mean a cohort of Sarkozys and Berlusconis, hitting on twenty-year-olds a century their junior. If you are brown, or female, or queer, you know something about how your body (and how other people respond to your body) affects your psyche and identity. Only straight, white, able-bodied males think that their body doesn’t affect their brain. So if you talk about up
loading your brain, you are talking about an unmarked body. That’s an example of a tech that is presented as not about society, not about schemas, but that isn’t true.
I think its even more true now than it’s ever been, that people are starting to think about why we do things. Why do we have the government that we have, why do we have the capitalist system in the form we do... all these cultural assumptions are being questioned. This is the culture we’ve lived in, that we’ve accepted, but now people are not sure they’re happy with that anymore. Do we want our culture to only be what is sold to us?
- Deb Chachra
The stories that we tell as a means of technological criticism are ultimately, about ourselves. We are a technological species with a sprawling culture of signifiers both right and wrong, helpful and harmful. We are critically minded individuals, that despite all that we have done to the earth and its pre-existing systems, still cling to a notion that we are ethical creatures, deep down. And also, these are narratives about our self--our sense that we are material beings, that interact with the world in a curious, inventive, and creative way. We want to