Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, July 18, 2004

I Believe

While I was preoccupied with teaching earlier this summer I fell out of the habit of blogging regularly.  Blogging, I realize, is for me a habit of reading differently than you otherwise would, reading to write.  Annotating the world is a very different and provocative way of inhabiting it, I have to say.  Anyway, I am making my return now, and to mark that return I want first to post some thoughts I had while I was away about just what it is I am up to here:
 
First off, I believe that technological development can and should be a genuinely emancipatory force. 
 
Within the lifetimes of many now living, emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive medical technologies will likely provide the tools with which to eliminate many diseases and renegotiate lifespans, as well as to render traits of basic morphology and temperament radically more discretionary.  New renewable energy technologies could provide abundant, clean, and inexpensive alternatives to fossil fuels for developed and developing societies, while new biotechnologies could reinvent agriculture to feed burgeoning populations or to engineer microorganisms to help reverse the damage of primitive industries on the planet’s ecosystem.  Emerging digital networked information and communication technologies are already reshaping global cultures and economies, and are providing new tools to facilitate collaboration and proliferate intelligence, invention, and criticism.  With these tools we could expand the reach and force of democracy, support more representative and accountable global institutions, and secure the rights of humanity around the world. 
 
I regard technological development as the last remaining historical force that could plausibly be described as potentially revolutionary, and I find in it our single most tangible hope that humanity might truly and finally eliminate poverty, illness, ignorance, exploitation, inequality before the law, and social injustice for everyone on earth.  
 
But technological development is a process of profound social struggle.  It is anything but naturally or inevitably progressive in its effects. 
 
I believe that the paths and outcomes of technological developments now underway will be emancipatory only so long as they are driven by the efforts of people and institutions with an explicit commitment to social justice, only if they contribute actively to the strengthening of a global democratic culture of rights, and only if they are properly regulated by legitimate and robust global institutions to ensure that the costs, risks, and benefits are fairly shared by all of the actual stakeholders to these technological developments. 
 
Whenever technological development fails to reflect these ideals or fails to be governed by the legitimate democratic processes and institutions that embody them, whenever it is driven instead by parochial national, regional, or economic interests, I believe that it will almost certainly be a profoundly dangerous and often devastating force, exacerbating existing inequalities, facilitating exploitation, exaggerating legitimate discontent and thereby encouraging dangerous social instabilities, and threatening unprecedented risks and inflicting unprecedented harms on individuals, societies, species, and the environment as a whole.   
 
In my writing here and elsewhere I try to draw on and contribute to conversations in bioethics, neuroethics, roboethics, public policy, legal, literary, and media criticism (all of which represent, I believe, fledgling counter-discourses to the compromised but occasionally still-useful tools of canonical corporate and managerial futurism), through which activists and scholars and citizens are grappling with the problems and promises of emerging and converging technologies, prosthetic practices and ways of life, and proliferating technocultures. 
 
As a complementary ambition, I want to contribute somehow to what I believe is a vitally necessary renewal of a scientifically literate and technologically savvy politics in the mainstream and progressive left.  Too many in the left seem lost in a delusive New Age disavowal of their inescapable indebtedness to and inbrication in emerging technocultures.  Too many maintain the utterly defeatist stance and self-fulfilling prophecy that technological development is always only a force for the consolidation of regressive racist, sexist, militarist, corporatist ends.  I repudiate technophobic defeatism and want a left that actively participates in the processes of technological development to demand and ensure that their forms be democratically accountable, their risks, costs, and benefits fairly shared, and their energies explicitly directed into projects of global emancipation.  
 
While many social conservatives and environmentalist progressives claim to fear that new technologies will “rob” us of our humanity, I believe that the “essence” of our humanity is our capacity to explore together what it means to be human.  No sect, no tribe, no system of belief owns what it means to be human.  Humanity can be denied by violence, degraded by poverty, diminished by tyranny, but it cannot be robbed from us because nobody owns it in the first place.  Genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive enhancements are our generation's great contributions to the collective conversation we are having about what humanity is capable of, and those who want to freeze that conversation in the image of their pet platitudes are the only ones who look to me like thieves.
 
Too many who do recognize the radical and transformative potential of technological development seem to see this potential as merely an opportunity to make a quick buck.  I believe that the default market fundamentalism of especially America’s technophilic corporate culture and its cheerleaders among the self-appointed “digirati” is an invitation to the worst imaginable developmental outcomes.  When the excesses of the current American Administration of killer clowns finally end either in (another) election defeat or in a subsequent impeachment, it is too likely that the left will fragment once again soon after into ineffectual factions in an ever more debased public discourse drifting inexorably rightward into irrelevance and disaster.  I believe that the left needs to embrace the emancipatory forces of progressive technological development as its definitive project.  If the world is to find its way through the almost unimaginable technoconstituted transformations afoot and ahead it needs to embrace the deliberative, responsive, responsible, fair-minded pluralism of the left no less than the left needs to embrace the revolutionary potential of technology to find its own way back to its convictions.
 
I’m just saying.





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