Technomania

How Technomania Is Overtaking the Millennium

By: Langdon Winner.

WE ARE TOLD that "it" looms before us as an irresistible force, a world-transforming dynamism that will eliminate our jobs, educate our children, revolutionize our families, erode our privacy and modify our genes. Faced with "it," there is no alternative, nothing left but to accept the inevitable and celebrate its coming. From now on "it" will determine what the future brings.

The "it" is, of course, technology. As the new millennium beckons, a dazzling array of books, news stories, advertisements and television specials boldly proclaims: Technology holds the key to human destiny.

Typical of this barrage is a recent issue of The New York Times Magazine on the theme "What Technology Is Doing to Us." The magazine assembled a dozen well known writers to enthusiastically explain how technology accelerates the pulse of activity, dominates our personal habits, reshapes the social order and fosters exotic dreams of transcendence.

The Times' musings - which led off with an essay glibly proclaiming that "Technology Is Making Us Better" - merely update what is now a cottage industry in cheerful soothsaying. It's a tradition as old as the internal-combustion engine. During the past two centuries, students of the social "impacts" of technological change have been drawn to ideas of determinism and fatalism. But never, in my experience, has the pungency of such beliefs been as strong as we see today. From the tacky neon pages of Wired magazine to fawning features in the Sunday papers, we find wholehearted embrace of the notion that a technology-driven universe is at hand and that any hope for reasonable human intervention is beside the point. This willful fatalism even permeates examinations of technology's darker side.

Consider the growing stream of reports about threats to personal privacy posed by emerging systems of digital information. America's leading news magazines have been warning readers for some time about the ways that workplace surveillance, on-line monitoring and the built-in tracking abilities of electronic networks generate data trails that provide distant organizations access to the most intimate details of everybody's life history. While these stories sometimes offer advice on how clever consumers can achieve partial shelter from the onslaught, they typically assume that privacy-wrecking electronics are now so deeply entrenched that systematic remedies are unthinkable.

In "No Place to Hide," a chilling sketch of surveillance techniques in Forbes, reporter Ann Marsh worries that information networks "will bring on Orwell's 1984, making us all slaves of the state." Does this mean we need new laws and vigorous citizen action to resist the spreading menace? Heavens, no. Marsh concludes that "the damned thing is practically here. Let the chips fall where they may."

---

From nearly a decade ago...it shows how little we heed the warning signs. -Ib