A Dearth of Techno-Stuff Skeptics
It’s always tough to argue with success. And high tech is such an amazing engine of wealth creation that it casts even the most thoughtful doubters in the role of self-deluded declinists. But with a new millennium, I find myself wondering if the surging tide of the new economy has swamped the skeptics--with potentially dangerous implications.
Pronouncements from the likes of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates (chief executives of Apple, Amazon.com and Microsoft, respectively) are treated as gospel by fawning reporters and giddy investors, as well as by passive consumers who understandably lack the time or interest to dig more deeply.
Never mind that the titans of tech have a long history of marketing useless, clunky or rapidly obsolescent products--from the eight-track tape to various versions of Microsoft Windows--each one the revolutionary innovation of its time.
For the record, I can hardly imagine life without my technology tools. I constantly use computers at home and at work, a notebook PC on the road, a hand-held computer, cell phone, pager and other “essentials” of modern living. I spend hours online every day. And I’m beginning to have trouble remembering how I got anything done before the PC arrived.
That growing sense of amnesia has reached epidemic proportions.
Digital technologies have so thoroughly permeated everyday life that they seem to have short-circuited the kind of instinctive questioning that was a hard-won lesson of technological mistakes of the past--from X-raying feet in shoe stores to find shoes that fit perfectly, to the endless development of nuclear power plants (electricity “too cheap to meter”), among many others. All were promoted as logical boons to society by technologists and business leaders.
“Trust us, we’re the experts,” went the now discredited refrain.
Yet we do trust the high-tech elite, for the most part, to build the new economy. We grant them wide discretion for what they often call their “real” motivation: to change the world. By default, aided by liberal contributions to political campaign coffers, they’ve been awarded a license to decide what technologies consumers need and how technology will reform our schools, workplaces, homes and modes of communication.
But this ascendancy of high-tech wizards to the status of demigods gives pause, considering their track record. For example, high tech’s wealth-creation machine has generated staggering inequalities of income and opportunity. The vast sums spent on installing technology in schools have returned scant evidence of higher student achievement. Meanwhile, an endless stream of must-have devices now sits in landfills.
“There’s this [general] acceptance that technology will make us free and improve our lives, that ‘progress is our most important product,’ ” said Clifford Stoll, with reference to the famous slogan of General Electric. Stoll, author of “High Tech Heretic” (Doubleday, 1999), one of the few recent, genuinely contrarian books about technology, adds: “Of course we don’t talk about nuclear power like that anymore, but we talk about the Internet that way.”
Little is said about the time-wasting or alienating aspects of digital life. The obnoxious kibitzing of instant messaging comes to mind. Rarely does one hear a challenge to the idea that perpetual connections--via e-mail and voicemail, and wireless, Web-based hand-held computers, cell phones, pagers and now even dishwashers and refrigerators--actually improve productivity and our quality of life.
Nowhere is the dearth of deep thinking more clear than in the lineup of popular books about technology. Most are either guides on how to cash in on the Internet economy (“Customers.com” and Gates’ “Business at the Speed of Thought” were Amazon’s top selling business books of 1999) or voyeuristic hero-worship, such as Michael Lewis’ acclaimed “The New New Thing” (W.W. Norton, 1999). One after the other, they talk about how Silicon Valley’s baby moguls make millions as they stay up late drinking cafe lattes and writing code, shooting Nerf-guns in hip offices and schmoozing venture capitalists.
Popular books that look at technology’s directions or side effects, such as James Gleick’s “Faster” (Pantheon, 1999), tend to be witty, insightful, even critical, but finally comfortable with the fact that all the new techno-stuff is not just inevitable, but that we wouldn’t want it any other way.
Those who genuinely challenge the power of technology and the industry that creates it--Stoll, Douglas Rushkoff, Theodore Roszak and Neil Postman, among others--are often viewed as extremists, if not kooks.
Consider that in today’s irreverent society it’s commonplace to castigate the president or even the Pope. But express any skepticism toward computing or the Internet, and you’re immediately dismissed as a Luddite, Stoll points out.
“Luddite” has come to define irrational opponents of progress itself. The original Luddites were textile workers in early 19th century England who smashed machines introduced by their employers as labor-saving devices. The Luddites were treated as deluded enemies of an unavoidable technological transition. Actually they were starving workers who attacked only employers who caused the greatest hardship through a range of business practices and who used mechanization to weaken workers’ collective power in a time of high unemployment.
One gets the sense that the technological elite--like textile manufacturers 200 years ago--are not totally secure in their position. So they cast themselves in the role of a vanguard who may not be immune from criticism, but whose fundamental ideas about technological progress are sacrosanct.
That construct has achieved such currency that if you aren’t plugged in to the latest technology, you’re not merely unhip. You’re falling hopelessly behind.
To be sure, many benefits of high tech are real. Critics who ignore them and see nothing but greed or manipulation deserve the fanatic label. And don’t blame businesspeople for trying to make a buck, even by exploiting gullibility. But we need social critics who ask penetrating questions about the basic assumptions of technology’s leaders. If those questions fail to get a fair hearing, it is at everyone’s peril.
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Times staff writer Charles Piller can be reached at charles.piller@latimes.com.
