usher in a new age of democracy and universal human rights, there is little role for us humans to play. However, to argue that a once-widespread practice like lobotomy was simply a result of inevitable technological forces is to let its advocates off the hook. Technological determinism thus obscures the roles and responsibilities of human decision makers, either absolving them of well-deserved blame or minimizing the role of their significant interventions. As Arthur Welzer, a political scientist at Michigan State University, points out, “to the extent that we view ourselves as helpless pawns of an overarching and immovable force, we may renounce the moral and political responsibility that, in fact, is crucial for the good exercise of what power over technology we do possess.”
By adopting a deterministic stance, we are less likely to subject technology—and those who make a living from it—to the full bouquet of ethical questions normal for democracy. Should Google be required to encrypt all documents uploaded to its Google Docs service? Should Facebook be allowed to continue making more of their users’ data public? Should Twitter be invited to high-profile gatherings of the U.S. government without first signing up with the Global Network Initiative? While many such questions are already being raised, it’s not so hard to imagine a future when they would be raised less often, particularly in offices that need to be asking them the most.
Throughout history, new technologies have almost always empowered and disempowered particular political and social groups, sometimes simultaneously—a fact that is too easy to forget under the sway of technological determinism. Needless to say, such ethical amnesia is rarely in the interests of the disempowered. Robert Pippin, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, argues that society’s fascination with the technological at the expense of the moral reaches a point where “what ought to be understood as contingent, one option among others, open to political discussion is instead falsely understood as necessary; what serves particular interest is seen without reflection, as of universal interest; what ought to be a part is experienced as a whole.” Facebook’s executives justifying their assault on privacy by claiming that this is where society is heading anyway is exactly the kind of claim that should be subject to moral and political—not just technological—scrutiny. It’s by appealing to such deterministic narratives that Facebook manages to obscure its own role in the process.
Abbe Mowshowitz, professor of computer science at the City College of New York, compares the computer to a seed and concrete historical circumstances to the ground in which the seed is to be planted: “The right combination of seed, ground and cultivation is required to promote the growth of desirable plants and to eliminate weeds. Unfortunately, the seeds of computer applications are contaminated with those of weeds; the ground is often ill-prepared; and our methods of cultivation are highly imperfect.” One can’t fault Mowshowitz for misreading the history of technology, but there is a more optimistic way to understand what he said: We, the cultivators, can actually intervene in all three stages, and it’s up to us to define the terms on which we choose to do so.
The price for not intervening could be quite high. Back in 1974, Raymond Williams, the British cultural critic, was already warning us that technological determinism inevitably produces a certain social and cultural determinism that “ratifies the society and culture we now have, and especially its most powerful internal directions.” Williams worried that placing technology at the center of our intellectual analysis is bound to make us view what we have traditionally understood as a problem of politics, with its complex and uneasy questions of ethics and morality, as instead a problem of technology, either eliminating or obfuscating all the unresolved philosophical dilemmas. “If the medium—whether print or television—is the cause,” wrote Williams in his best-selling Television: Technology and Cultural Form, “all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history, are at once reduced to effects.” For Williams, it was not the end of history that technology was ushering in; it was the end of historical thinking. And with the end of historical thinking, the questions of justice lose much of their significance as well.
Williams went further in his criticism, arguing that technological determinism also prevents us from acknowledging what is political about technology itself (the kind of practices and outcomes it tends to favor), as its more immediately observable features usually occupy the lion’s share of the public’s attention, making it difficult to assess its other, more