Apocryphal Technologies

<p>These past few years, the fairly ancient concept we call “truth” has been bandied about the place quite a bit. Our social trust barometers, for a long time calibrated with “politician” on one side and “scientist” at the other, have been thrust into stormy weather. People like Donald Trump and Richard Dawkins have buried the needle into extremes of rhetorical squall, political uproar and techno-scientific demand, operationalising belief and fact in excessive ways — destructive of both self and others. The rest of us, muddling through this other ancient concept we call “modern life”, try and poise ourselves somewhere in between because, in practice, things are never entirely subject to whim, spurious input or personal opinion, but neither are they always impermeably empirical, tested and proven. Sometimes, we check our references.</p> <p>Living in conditions of technological saturation requires that we negotiate, constantly, the encroachment and/or acceptance of new social trusts that are enabled, subverted and possibly even perverted by technologies. Jacques Ellul famously argued that modern technologies convey “the feeling of the sacred,” as they are “always joined to mystery and magic,” and he diagnosed this quasi-religious faith as an expression of the human “power instinct,” as technologies effectively transform average citizens into “heroes, geniuses, or archangels.” Anthony Giddens similarly argued that our trust in technology tends to increase the more the complexity of technological systems surpasses our understanding, as “faith is sustained in the workings of knowledge of which the lay person is largely ignorant.” However, he also emphasized that our inability to understand these systems can lead to resistance, as “ignorance always provides grounds for scepticism or at least caution.” In other words, users tend to trust technologies that grant them a sense of empowerment, and this trust often resembles a kind of religious conviction when users are dependent on technological systems that they do not fully understand. This condition can inspire utopian fantasies, in which technologies are imagined as the solution to all of our problems (and potentially even our salvation), yet the inability to understand can also inspire dystopian fantasies, in which technologies are imagined as the cause of our problems (and potentially even our extinction)…</p>