Technics

February 18, 2022

I want to talk about three separate but related issues here. This will altogether raise issues that are not only technological but political, and if they are not strictly speaking agrarian, they raise critical questions of information freedom nonetheless. 

The Democrats favorite canvassing platform, NGP VAN, was completely acquired by a British private equity firm recently. VAN had become the sole repository for most of the Democratic Party's campaign information, including the DNC's voter file information. The buyout firm "Apax" merged all the subsidiary entities into a new firm "Bonterra". 

Having British private equity owning U.S. voter data reminds one quite piercingly of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where a British company was also the owner of American voter data. (There is a documentary on Netflix about that Cambridge Analytica scandal you can watch called "The Great Hack"). This time is at least slightly different because it is direct voter file data that was acquired by the British firm in question, and not mere Facebook data. In other words, it is data that is expected to be private. Nonetheless, the employees of this progressive data tech firm are concerned about their new owners. A great deal of action in the organizing space happens on VAN, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, if you recall, involved voter data being used in "psyops": communication warfare technology. 

It's important to remember that technology is a category that includes broadcast, industry, and everyday tools. And we can learn a bit from that designation. Lewis Mumford, American author, gave a speech once (in 1963) saying that there exist two kinds of technologies: one authoritarian, and one democratic; he says: 

"My thesis, to put it bluntly, is that from late Neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable."

Democratic technics originate in the origin of Neolithic tool-making, but authoritarian technics arise from the period of political centralization and control, in the Near East about 4000 B.C. (Mumford says "No royal mace, no slave-driver's whip, no bureaucratic directive left its imprint on the textiles of Damascus or the pottery of fifth-century Athens," and, after all, this is true). Despite authoritarian power, it was not always possible to influence "technics", or, technology, in the distant past. Mumford continues on to say:

"So even the Roman Empire found it expedient, once resistance was broken and taxes were collected, to consent to a large degree of local autonomy in religion and government. Moreover, as long as agriculture absorbed the labor of some 90 per cent of the population, mass technics were confined largely to the populated urban centers."

This is no longer the case, and so the choice between democratic and authoritarian technics is more important than ever. So Mumford asks:

"Is it really humanly profitable to give up the possibility of living a few years at Walden Pond, so to say, for the privilege of spending a lifetime in Walden Two?"

I think this problem is more worth thinking about than ever. 

The final piece of the puzzle about technocracy for today is the realization hidden within the documents involved in the Fox News/Dominion lawsuit, where Fox News was outed for not thinking that the truth was suitable for their audience. Brian Stelter writes in the Atlantic about the moment it "clicked" for him:

"Inside Fox, the prime-time stars and senior executives raged against the network’s reporters not because they doubted that Biden had won, but because the truth was too disturbing to the audience that had made them rich."

We live in a reality papered over with curated fragments of reality provided from other quarters; to perceive reality is to accurately construct it; to construct reality from this requires a structure not consistently present in the distribution of these curations.