I’ve found myself with a lot of free time lately and decided to write a bit about technology and some of the anxieties surrounding it as a fun exercise. It’s not much, and doesn’t really say anything new. I hope you enjoy it nonetheless. 

As early as Grecian tales of how Prometheus stole fire from Zeus, in order to share it with man, to modern anxieties about how social networks are causing our interactions to become superficial, technology, and how we use it, has been a point of contention in western dialogue.  Our drive to modernize is only matched by our apprehension of modern life. This apprehension that many feel towards technology varies in extremity, but it exists nonetheless, and a tendency to blame the technology itself is oftentimes present in the arguments that stem from these anxieties.

Why was Prometheus condemned to the mountain for giving fire to Mankind? The simplest explanation is that he defied the gods, but that fire was something more, it was knowledge, the knowledge that allowed us to defy the Gods.  What the myth tells us is that new knowledge -new technology- is dangerous precisely because it allows any person to defy the perceived limits of nature. This invention, especially the knowledge that allowed us to use it, drastically altered the way society operated.  In doing so, the fire also altered how we thought about the world, leading to a disintegration of the walls that blocked us from trying to break the natural order of things.

This fire is more than just a single technology; it is a technological mind-set, one that always seeks to defy our limitations, to push past the boundaries of what is now possible.  Building bigger buildings, extending human life, chatting with people on the other side of the earth – the flame that Prometheus brought us is never satisfied with limitations, as a wild fire is never satisfied with one tree, and so it sets ablaze the path to other inventions.  For all that scientists may love nature, even to the point of imitating it, the technological mind-set is never satisfied with the natural order.  That’s why it was fire, and not water, in the myths, that elevated humankind from animals to something closer to the Gods. Technology wishes to consume what it can, for better or for worse, this is the gift of humankind.

The technological mind-set also believes in the freedom of information, which is often itself a radical notion. Technologies desire to spread, and our desire to freely share information, from the library to the free culture movement, is a part of our symbiotic relationship. Sharing is met at times with adoration, the protestors in Egypt protecting the Library of Alexandria, and other times with fear. Some of this may have a beginning in another myth, in Genesis with Eve and the Apple.  In low-technology societies, eating the apple is a sin.  In high technology societies, this is the moment where things get interesting.  The “Twitter revolution” in Egypt wasn’t about Twitter or Facebook, but about new ways of bypassing censors to create a new movement – a movement that protected the Library of Alexandria from vandals, even while defending itself against the enemy.

Technological advances, and the information that is required to develop them, thus always represent social change. Because of this, we will have those who are uneasy with these cultural alterations, and lash out against it.  On the other hand, we will have those defenders of technological advancement, capitalists, scientists, and laymen alike. These are the people who perpetuate these machinations of unease, upheaval, and exploration, and though these people do not always do what is best, they disallow stagnation; allowing for change, ranging from perceptual, to fundamentally altering the ways in which we live our lives.

Each time this has happened, the defenders of the current order forget the last wave of technological change and think that this thing, this new thing, is the one step we’ve taken too far. By the time people were protesting the assembly line, no one objected anymore to the cotton gin. By the time people objected to texting, no one remembered how they’d once thought email was the end of civilized discourse. The objection to new technology is always a rearguard action, fighting a battle against the technological mind that has been lost since Prometheus.

It always goes the same way, because in an important sense the struggle against “new technology” is really a struggle for other things.

A famous example of techno-revolutions, and the anxiety it can bring, was seen in 19th century Britain. English workers, who are known as the Luddites now– named for their anonymous mascot Ned Ludd– were caused to feel insecure about their livelihoods by the onset of large factories that could produce products with little skilled labor and in mass quantity, albeit products of lower quality. These people were a part of a rising working class that worked ages to reach their status in life, only to have their financial security stripped from them by a new breed of venture capitalists. These groups of people were not necessarily against technology, but rather were opposed to the loss of autonomy and culture that came with its misuse.

They were “machine bashers”, but ironically they were also some of the most highly skilled craftsmen of their day. Using advanced techniques, and sophisticated technologies of their own, to create and produce products of esteemed value.  As seen in the lyrics of “General Ludd’s Triumphs”,

“ …Till full-fashioned work at the old-fashioned price,

Is established by custom and law.”

In this song, they sing of the grievances felt by the misuse of technology, but in this last line the point is driven home. This is not necessarily about technology; this is an argument about labor rights and the right to a personal livelihood.

Melvin Kranzberg, a historian of technology at Harvard University, and coiner of Kranzbergs Law, believed that technology and western traditions have co-created the “individual.” This concept of the autonomous person has played a large part in the modern perception of what it means to be human. From the Declaration of Independence, to the Occupy movement, from France to Egypt, individualism is a cause for the birth of many states and movements, with technology as its driving force. The rugged frontiersman always had his rifle and his Bowie knife; the rebel on the road rides a motorcycle; the hacker is wired into the network. Technology has empowered the idea of the autonomous individual because the autonomous individual, too, doesn’t want to know his limits.

But Ritzer, states that technology’s usage, as it stands now as a method to ease life for humans, may eventually limit individual independence, and possibly even come to replace humans with machines, as in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Phillip K. Dick. If all the world is a technology, how do we know that we, too are not programmable? How can we remain rugged individuals if parts of us can be turned on and off at the flick of a switch? Even Androids are uncomfortable with their own on-switches, as Data shows in The Next Generation, only allowing the doctor to know of his control switch under a promise not to tell others about it.

Many from the Christian right, as Deacon Tom Frankenfield writes for integratedcatholiclife.org, claim that access to the Internet increases perversion and sinful action, though he does have suggestions for safe Internet use. Many more less extreme voices tout that our new technologies of heightened connectivity engender in young people a short attention span and is, much like Socrates is claimed to say, making us lose our memory.

Is the Internet really making us lose our memory? Did the giant factory machines take the Luddite’s jobs? In ways, yes, and in other ways, no. We cannot honestly deny that each technology has a downside: overthrowing the old limits is a kind of revolution, and revolutions have victims. Prometheus himself lost the glory of Mount Olympus for giving us the technological mind-set. One wonders if he still thinks it was worth it.

I do. The benefits always seem to outweigh the risks. We may be losing our memory for phone numbers and birthdays, but we have created space for new types of thought. The Internet allows us to convene and create so many marvelous things, from revolutions to millions of images of cats doing cute things, as well creates a space for dialogue we have never experienced before. The Luddites lost their livelihoods, but they started the first step in a long battle for fair working conditions in factories, and the factories themselves made previously expensive and hard-to-attain items, widely available to those who would otherwise go without shoes, cloth, or utensils.

Technology is but a physical manifestation of human thought, and it is the human that is to be apprehended, not the child of her thinking. Adam and Eve, and Prometheus may not have known exactly what they were getting into, and what sort of children their thoughts would birth. The inventors of new technologies rarely do. The pattern of technology is one of revolution, advancement and healing, much like an eternal Ouroboros, regurgitating his tail before he reaches his end.