Perhaps Jack Frost nipping at your nose?

Then there’s the article about the Feds losing the infamous Steve Jackson Games case. Plaintiff counsel Pete Kennedy sees the case as “a significant step towards affording people who use computers the same rights as people who use telephones; law enforcement shouldn’t assume that someone with a computer is necessarily a criminal.” That’ll show’em!

I read that thing and was amazed to find that there were other people who thought that technology just might have some political implications. I also immediately downloaded my first copy of PGP from the new-fangled version of ARPAnet that was coming into vogue (not as advanced as the old IPSAnet but I could see that it had promise). The reputation I got as an early adapter from doing that later got me a job at a cryptological dot bomb company.

I’ve still got a copy, along with far too-many other old WIREDs. Too bad the things have about a zero collectors’ value except for 1.1.

…

http://books.google.com/books?id=gInuhOPoOzMC&pg=PA279&dq=the+question+concerning+technology&hl=en&ei=5N-1TNGQIsODOs-utZYG&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

What we do not want to acknowledge that technology fails to improve learning outcomes to any significant degree (we would all have university degrees at age 18 if it did). Instead we invoke ad-hoc explanations such as human factors, the school system, lack of funding, etc. when really it is telling us that our assumptions about how people learn are at fault.

In this sense technology only amplifies what is fundamentally wrong with the education system, and at the same time permits this sorry state to continue under the false assumption that better technology = better learning.

However the idea that technology has its own agenda is hardly new. Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innes were writing about this extensively in the 1960s.

Sure, some technologies are more *likely* to arise and develop than others, at least if you factor out wild cards, but they’ve all come down to choices made, tides taken at the flood or omitted, or market niches appearing at the right or wrong moments. And, let’s face it, some actors have a greater say in the above than others.

If the leaders of a certain Greek city-state had shown more interest in that steam-spurty thingy or a pre-Revolutionary French gentleman-inventor hadn’t run his steam car into a wall, then microchip-punk would be the fad of today.

VHS beat the superior Betamax and cars powered by gasoline or diesel beat steam-powered or electrical ones, at least for 100 years. The ever-overflowing graveyard of technology is full of “inevitable” media. Some became part of the landscape, for while, but others were stillborn.

Secondly, technological determinism carries a whiff of historical inevitability. That sounds a bit Marxist and risks getting dropped from certain free-market think-tank guest lists, but not to worry because Herbert Spencer similarly used Darwin to flatter and justify the rising industrialists and robber barons. If you ever wanted to convince smart people, those most likely to vote, not to get involved in political choices concerning technology, citing inevitability is a great way to do it. If you like where it’s going, then just go with the flow. If you don’t, well, you can’t fight the flow.

It’s ironic that Kelly gets a good rating here, because a lot of people here are fighting hard (and writing their elected representatives) to have a say in how technologies are developed, even apparently inevitable–or at least recurring-ones like censorship.

Both objections to Kelly’s themes are covered, more coherently than I can hope to, in the Californian Ideology (1995)

It’s a bit long, but it also accidentally points out how the smart Silicon Valley geeks could be so comfortable in a Tea Party Movement that also contains selfish, homophobic, Jesus-shouting, anti-evolution cranks.

I also find the idea of the Amish ‘hackers’ both logical and odd. The Amish, at least in Lancaster, PA (which, btw, is far from the only cluster of Amish in the US, despite pop culture belief to the contrary) aren’t as committed to the non-tech lifestyle as many folks might think. Yes, they reject having tech in their houses…GENERALLY. But they willingly ride the electric train along Philly’s main line; they work in modern facilities using modern tools (my vinyl siding was just installed by an Amish roofer); they are willing to use non-tech products that were produced by high-tech processes. The Amish relation to technology is more subtle and nuanced than is often portrayed. And that doesn’t even count (as the Simpsons called them) ‘those Godless Mennonnites’. ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul

and short film/interview

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdogID589Mk

Ellul’s commitment to scrutinize technological development is expressed as such:

“What is at issue here is evaluating the danger of what might happen to our humanity in the present half-century, and distinguishing between what we want to keep and what we are ready to lose, between what we can welcome as legitimate human development and what we should reject with our last ounce of strength as dehumanization. I cannot think that choices of this kind are unimportant.”