But this need not be the case. Jonathan Sterne, for example, imagines a company that took its time developing a computer that could last, could be easily updated, repaired, and upgraded, was easy to learn and use, worked well with other platforms, and that was less environmentally hazardous when it did finally decompose.33 This would be a “convivial” tool in Ivan Illich’s sense: ease of use, flexibility in implementation, harmony with the environment, and ease of integration into truly democratic forms of social life. Instead, computers are designed to become obsolete after a short period of use. Within the occupational ideology of computer engineering, Moore’s law is “less of a law of computer evolution than it is a fantasy the industry wishes to uphold,” as a high rate of machine turnover drives exponential profit.
To be sure, we have been all too ready to conflate the speed of technical innovation with inventiveness. On the contrary, rapid technological change can actually be conservative, maintaining or solidifying existing social arrangements. Its very speed may occur in order to block and stifle the possibility of alternative trajectories. As other STS scholars argue, inventiveness is not about the novelty of artifacts in themselves, but about the degree to which they are “aligned with inventive ways of thinking and doing and configuring and reconfiguring relations with other actors.”34 Genuine inventiveness, then, can occur when the pace of technological change is slow, or in places and at times least expected.
If inventiveness is about challenging our common-sense ways of doing things, questioning the assumptions that permeate our political discourse, and creating new possibilities for the present, we leave engineering to the engineers at our peril. I have written elsewhere about the culture of engineering and computing, where “the masculine workplace culture of passionate virtuosity, typified by hacker-style work, epitomizes a world of mastery, individualism and non-sensuality.”35 Being in an intimate relationship with a computer can be both a substitute for, and a refuge from, the much more uncertain and messy relationships that characterize social life. It is an environment that thwarts the imaginations of technology designers, ignoring the needs of those who do not fit or conform to their own paradigm of normality.36 One might venture that this mindset is ever more influential in our digital age in which the world’s richest companies are predominantly engineering companies: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
Chapter seven
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