Also applicable here is the peculiar but common belief that “technology” means only “stuff that was invented after you were born.”

Yuki says hi!

It is a little sad, but probably inevitable, that the terms “Luddism” and “Luddite” have been hijacked and reduced to a thin broth of their original meaning, which should be more on the opposed-to-technological-and-social-changes-that-screw-the-little-guy tip, ie social justice concerns. It is now often used as a shorthand blanket indictment of “all” technology (as if) because of two big reasons: bad design and bad personal choices. I’m willing to rail against bad design (just ask my wife), but people in affluent/fortunate circumstances should shut the hell up about bad personal choices (or make better ones).
- Ned

Partly related to the harsh economic climate due to the Napoleonic Wars, but mostly because I find technology overwhelming, I’ve always been interested in observing misuse of technology by others. P.S. who took my technocracy sign?

Oh, and I’ve _never_ owned a T.V.

I suppose it depends how you read it. We use this kind of anthropomorphic language all the time without inferring any actual agency: I don’t see how “Information wants to be free” is any different from “water wants to be downhill” or “supply wants to match demand”. If we believe that social science is actually science, then surely we can talk about patterns in human behavior that vary across social contexts and that create certain “laws”. I read Brand’s statement as just such a law: in a digital world, information wants to be free more than it does in an analog world. Maybe I misunderstand him. But I think this is all he’s saying. And I don’t see how it’s any different from the sorts of laws formulated by social scientists everywhere.

This, I think, is similar to Benkler’s thesis: in a networked digital society, more cultural artifacts get produced by non-market forces than in a non-networked, analog society. It discounts agency on the part of either humans or technology (or information), just as all economic theories do. This is, for better or worse, what economics and other social sciences are good for: examining human behavior as a mechanical system and generating models with predictive power. I think Brand’s statement accomplishes this too, and I think it’s been borne out pretty well by events since.

Insofar as it’s been read as a normative statement – a rallying cry for techno-libertarianism – I agree with you that it’s a dangerous way to think. Techno-utopians are increasingly rare in an age when it has been made painfully obvious to everyone that Brand’s statement applies equally to Hollywood movies and Social Security numbers. Free information has created a lot of efficiencies, but it has also created a lot of problems. If McLuhan was honest about anything, it was the fact that changes in the media environment are often terrifying to the moral understandings of the residents of the previous environment. I’m no great fan of rampant harassment and invasion of privacy. And I agree with you that these social changes wrought by technology underline the need for humans to make good choices: about what technologies to foster, and about how to react to the technologies that have already been adopted.

I don’t think we disagree either, and I hope nothing I said sounds like I don’t believe technology shapes our minds, cultures, and lives. It’s because it does have all sorts of shaping and constraining effects that taking responsibility for shaping technology is so important. But I am still uncomfortable with assigning agency to technology: to me, “information wants to be free” mystifies the more important point, “we (some of us) want information to be free.” But you’re right that both directions of the feedback loop deserve and demand our scrutiny.

It’s funny how different the starting point on these questions is inside and outside the bubble of academic historians of technology. In a review of Tom Misa’s Leonardo to the Internet, I called it refreshing that Misa was even willing to talk about technology’s effects on culture:

Nonspecialists will probably come away from Leonardo to the Internet impressed with the many ways technologies have been shaped by social and cultural factors. Historians of technology, who have been struggling to get that message out for years, may be more struck by the reverse. Misa argues boldly for the influence of technology on society in a way that his colleagues, wary of technological determinism, have often been reluctant to sustain. His is a refreshing and powerful perspective. Surely the interaction of technology and culture, to the extent that they are separate entities at all, should be seen as a two-way street.

Yet in this post I seem to have fallen into the stock role of the SHOT/SCOT historian, once more wagging his finger about the bogeyman of technological determinism.

The technology -> culture / culture -> technology debate has such a chicken / egg quality that one is tempted to go all Bruno Latour and say there’s no meaningful distinction between the two.

As a professional advocate for free software, of course I share your primary concern with the human choices that shape our technological environment and I agree wholeheartedly with your normative statements about the need for critical examination of technology decisions.

But while it’s important not to fall into the naturalistic fallacy so common among technological determinists, I also believe that thinkers like McLuhan and Lewis Mumford have a lot to tell us about the complex feedback loops by which technology shapes, as it is shaped by, our minds, cultures, cities, and daily routines. It is precisely the invisibility of technology that you and Bill cite – the same invisibility that McLuhan invokes in his statement about water being unknowable to fish – that allows technology to contrain social reactions to it. In that sense, I think it’s dangerous to overstate the one-way determinism of technology as “the sum product of human choice”, just as it is dangerous to overextend McLuhan’s whimsical notion that humans are simply the reproductive organs of technology. Brand’s “Information wants to be free” – and Stallman’s recontextualization of the phrase (changing Brand’s [free/gratis] to [free/libre]) – isn’t a bad metaphor for the social affordances of digital networks. Benkler’s Wealth of Networks builds on these kinds of ideas in a very direct way, and I think it’s work that needs to be done.

So while I don’t think we disagree, I think it’s important not to be overly critical of scholars looking at the technology–>culture part of the feedback loop, even as we focus our efforts on the culture–>technology part.