Taking a Tire Iron to Techie Triumphalism
22nd November 2015
Techie triumphalism is all around: “The best thing anyone can do to improve the quality of life around the world is to drive connectivity and technological opportunity,” Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and his co-author, Jared Cohen, wrote in “The New Digital Age.” As Wael Ghonim, who helped usher in the Arab Spring, put it: “If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet.” Today no human domain is safe from the technology world’s “solutionism,” in the phrase of the writer Evgeny Morozov.
Mr. Toyama used to share that worldview: “I am a recovering technoholic,” he writes. Then he moved to India, to lead the Microsoft lab, and observed a phenomenon that he would come to believe was universal: “Technology’s primary effect is to amplify human forces.” When computers entered rural schools, for instance, guess who held the mouse? Upper-caste boys. Technology wasn’t an intrinsic leveler or a bulldozer to archaic structures: It just gave people new, improved tools to be lovely or horrible to each other in all the old ways.
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There are various explanations for the technology world’s contempt for existing human structures. It’s a world full of trained engineers — and many college dropouts — who cannot be expected to grasp human dynamics any more than political scientists understand Java code. Many brilliant technology leaders have stories of bullying and isolation in their youths that would leave anyone with abiding skepticism of human groups, institutions, cultures. If family dinners and school lunches were painful for you, “disrupting” eating with a venture-capital-backed protein drink like Soylent can seem like liberation.
The belief that technology can fix all our problems is very ‘progressive’, which is why the tech industry professionals who devote their work lives to Holy Entrepreneurship are so often politically neoliberal. The core belief of ‘progressivism’, that progress is inevitable so therefore the change that enables progress is inevitably good is at the heart of the start-up mavens who roam about the world like roaring lions seeking something to disrupt. Technology is just another tool, and tools are only as good or bad as the people who use them — and, sad to say, there are a lot of bad people in the world.