Why Technological Determinism is Problematic
The technology determinism of Silicon Valley has failed society. New ways of thinking are emerging there and around the world.
Some coders will optimise their daily routines to eat only when and what is necessary to survive. Lost in days and weeks of coding to solve for a problem, mesmerised by the glow of their screens. While other tech entrepreneurs prophesy a future based on technological abundance. All technologies will solve all human problems. So far, they’ve failed to achieve this ideology of technological determinism. Yet there are signs this is changing. In a good way.
Perhaps those idealists of technological determinism are starting to awaken to the paradox of their philosophy. Surprisingly, they understand little of how the technologies they create, will affect humans theirs technologies are designed to serve. That deny it as they might, technology always has been and always will be decided by culture.
This blindspot has lead to the the mantra of “move fast and break things” to actually breaking the most important things in human societies. The rituals, behaviours, norms and customs that enable societies to function, as messy as that can be at times. We are, after all, human.
This mindset of technological determinists are what lead to surveillance capitalism, tools that treat human attention as an extractive resource to be mined, rather than a gift to be respected. The erosion of community bonds and enabled today’s social divisions. Fortunately, all is not lost.
The Social Cost of Technological Determinism
To understand how the future is likely to be brighter, we first have to understand a little more, the social costs of technological deterministic thinking. This philosophy, or way of thinking, is the view that technology drives all social and cultural change in a mostly autonomous, unidirectional way.
It’s culture on a diet. Humanity is far more complex and while technologies do cause sociocultural change, it is always humans that determine the role a technology will or will not, play.
All technologies evolve through a process of complex feedback loops between human needs, cultural contexts and technological capabilities. It has been this way for millennia, from stone tools to smartphones.
Social media platforms began as simple communications tools but evolved through a constant series of negotiations between user practices, business models and technology affordances. No social media platform has figured out the tragedy of the commons, or how to effectively moderate themselves.
Technologies are always interpreted by cultures and incorporated differently across societies. The mobile phone, for example, was adopted largely in Kenya to become a banking platform. In Japan, it became deeply integrated with youth culture and identity formation. There are many more examples.
The ideas of technological determinism reduces humans to passive recipients rather than the active shapers of technology, the reason technologies rarely evolve the way the creators intended. This mindset fails to account for how societies resist, repurpose or reject technologies. Human cultures dislike having their agency taken away from them. No technology can resist the forces of human agency. None.
Rethinking Human Evolution with Technology
So if technological determinism is a failed way of thinking, what other frameworks or mental models might we find in the next phase of our co-evolution with technology?
For many technologists, deterministic thinking is easier, more comfortable, seemingly faster and a logical way of thinking and iterating. In the short term yes, but in the long term, it is much more expensive. For a technology business and society.
So rather than technological determinism what might we call a new approach? Perhaps “Techno-Cultural Co-Creation”? “Entangled Progress” or “Adaptive Convergence” or “Technological Humanism”?
Regardless of how we might name such a new philosophy, fundamental to it all would be technologists recognising and understanding the value of the social sciences as helping new technologies and existing ones evolve. In ways that add value and ensure a greater chance of success.
This might mean participatory design such as involving gig workers in the design of delivery platforms from the outset. Conducting cultural impact assessments to understand how the technology might impact society before it’s launched. Bringing anthropologists and sociologists into product development teams (Apple has been doing this for decades by the way.)
Perhaps too, it would mean adopting some sense of technological humility. Fostering a deeper understanding and respect for sociocultural complexity. To recognise the limits of some technology solutions.
This also requires some rethinking of business models, from short-term value to venture capitalists looking for fast money and exists to delivering longer term value. VC’s are rarely of this mindset, although some do practice patient capital. It means a change of mindset, but this is happening as society pushes back against the technologies that have been thrust upon them. Consumers are forming new habits that reject or push back against technologies.
As always, culture will win. The technologists who understand this, will be the winners in the near future, those that don’t will see their successes diminish. Society has, like the invisible hand in economics, determined the cost of technological determinism does not deliver an ROC — Return On Culture.