Teleologizing Technology: Technology and History
One theme we encountered in the discursive convergence of technology and nature is the idea that technology is autonomous from society, that is, that it has its own history independent of social history; what is more, in some sense the history of network technology precedes social history, both chronologically and ontologically. In such a framework, technology is reified and in turn conceived as an environment (like nature) to which humans need to adapt (Feenberg 1991). Moreover, such framework provides a cosmology that is not human-centric. Just as humanists, or natural historians, put humans and nature, respectively, at the center of their investigation, so does the digital discourse’s technologism construct a history of the world in which technology is the main protagonist, the central axis of analysis.
MARGINA<sub>L</sub>IZING H<sub>U</sub>MANS IN T<sub>E</sub>CHNO<sub>L</sub>OGICA<sub>L</sub> HISTORY
Put differently, just as network technology is distinguished from industrial technology, so does each have its fitting cosmology. Since industry was “artificial” and man-made, a human-centric cosmology was fitting. But with informationalism, since network technology is “natural,” the role and status of humans in that cosmology recedes. In such a history, technology has its own teleology (distinct and autonomous from human history) at the end point of which technology, rather than humanity, rules supreme. Human civilizations are therefore seen as transitory phases in a greater history in which humans are likely either to disappear, leaving the scene to technology, or to integrate into technology.
A forecast about the future of humanity is laid out, for example, by Vernor Vinge, academician and science fiction writer (Kelly 1995). His forecast incidentally reveals the digital discourse’s assumptions regarding the secondary role of human history within a larger history: that of natural and technological information and communication. Vinge says, “If we ever succeed in making machines as smart as humans, then it’s only a small leap to imagine that we would soon thereafter make—or cause to be made—machines that are even smarter than any human. And that’s it. That’s the end of the human era—the closest analogy would be the rise of the human race within the animal kingdom” (Kelly 1995). The significance of such a statement lies in turning our common sense of history on its head. In contrast to our modernist, human-centric history where humans are held constant, Vinge offers a story where technological progress is held constant and, as a consequence, humans assume a transient and ephemeral position. As technology, that is, as information processing machines, humans are quite limited. Put differently, the human is a quite primitive technology and is therefore (within the history of network technology) bound to vanish or be transcended by smarter machines.
204
Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age