Naturalizing Technology: The Trinity of Nature<sub>,</sub> Technology<sub>,</sub> and Society
The idea that technology is the prime motor of social change is a cornerstone of technologism. It has certainly been a central thread in technology discourse throughout modernity; indeed it has been a central thread of the discourse on modernity. But in the digital discourse, this argument is made even more forcefully, upgraded from a general theory of technology, and suggested as the quintessential characteristic of network technology in particular.
According to the digital discourse, network technology is truly socially transformative, since it resembles the workings of nature more than any technological paradigm before it, specifically, more than industrial technology. By replicating the ways nature works, network technology serves as a bridge between the natural and the social, hence transforming social dynamics in ways that accord more with nature. This technology-nature theory suggests that the binary language on which information technology is founded complies with the laws of nature. In other words, the process of informationalization—that is, the process whereby the material and social world are translated into digital language and hence integrated into information technology—is not a capricious imposition of some technological or mathematical invention on the world but a long-overdue uncovering and return to the natural order of things.
In the same vein, the architecture and operational modes of the network and the communicative and organizational forms that sprout from it—such as chaos, spontaneous order, decentralization, and flexibility— are all seen as natural insofar as they replicate the workings of nature. To the degree that nature has been reified and depoliticized through much of modernity—that is, constructed as lying outside of human affairs—the association and conflation of network technology with nature is meant to depoliticize technology by quite literally naturalizing it. Table 7.1 summarizes the abstract logical assumption at the heart of the naturalization argument of the digital discourse.
It is therefore commonplace in Wired to conflate technology and nature, to find confirmations for one by its homologous affinity to the other, and to suggest that information technology is natural and, vice versa, that nature is informational. Hans Moravec, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon’s Mobile Robot Laboratory and the author of Robot (1999), goes a long way in converging biology and technology, predicting that “mechanical minds are about to replay the evolution of biological minds” (Davis 1998). The development of information technology, Moravec suggests, got on track with biological entities and their evolution, and natural evolution is now replayed in the technological domain. In the same vein, in a review of a book on the history and future of the information revolution—The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution (Levinson 1998)—William Goggins also likens the evolution of media to biological evolution. The book, he writes in a McLuhanite language, suggests how newer communication technologies “outpaced their ancestors’ limitations, gradually extending human faculties across space and time” (Goggins 1998).
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age