2 - Led by Our Own Lights

Summary

I situate the notion of “natural technology” within the wider view of technology’s relation to human history and values. I offer a brief (original) theory of technology as such, focusing on two themes. First, I take issue with the claim that “technology” has independent causal force. The progress of technology is not inevitable, but each new tool reconfigures our understanding of possibility and necessity. Nor is technology something external to our nature or to who we “really” are. I show how our modern conceptions of equality and human rights rest on and are enabled by industrialization. Second, I show that we nonetheless have the sense that technology is an independent force because of the disparity between technological time (the time it takes for watershed discoveries to be made) and “normal” or moral time (the time it takes for such discoveries to be widely stabilized within settled norms and practices). Anxiety about the effects of “technology” as such is a longstanding feature of modernity, stemming from the continuing acceleration of technological time with respect to normal time. The development of modern technology entails permanent culture wars and a permanent sense of estrangement between us and our new tools.