(Photo credit: Hans Splinter (2014) medieval blacksmith. https://flic.kr/p/oQwsKr (CC BY-ND 2.0 DEED))
Lynn White Jr, an American professor of medieval history at Princeton, wrote a book entitled Medieval Technology and Social Change, first published in 1962, in which he argued that the appearance in tenth-century Europe of two technological innovations, the plough and the stirrup, set off a chain reaction of economic and social change that led directly to urbanisation, western democracy and capitalism.
White’s breath-taking argument epitomises what is known to agrarian historians and development economists as single-factor technological determinism. Technological determinism presupposes that positive economic and socio-political change invariably springs from the transfer of advanced technologies to technologically under-developed societies, and it demands unquestioning compliance and deference on the part of these societies.
For technological determinists like White, the medieval historian, and for present-day technology evangelists, technology precedes culture, society and environment, and exists apart from them. As Barbara Drygulski Wright describes it in the 1987 book Women, Work, and Technology: Transformations:
‘[T]echnological determinism is the view that technological discoveries and applications occur according to their own inner necessity, from laws that govern the physical and biological world, and that they, in turn, unilaterally affect social reality. From the perspective of technological determinism, human beings have few alternatives in response to technology besides enthusiastic or resigned acceptance.’
Technological determinism’s intellectual heritage can be traced back to the Enlightenment. During the eighteenth century, technology came to be regarded as a powerful agent of social change, one exemplified by the popular metaphor of the clockwork universe. The USA was to be the natural seedbed of this ideological movement, once Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson recognised the power of industrial technologies to deliver the morally and materially prosperous republican society that they associated with the goals of the American Revolution. By the end of the nineteenth century, technological determinism had become dogma, one that justified bourgeois interests while distracting attention away from the discontent and suffering experienced by the new class of industrial labourers. And beginning in the early twentieth century, technological determinism began to pervade American advertising and popular culture, as the force that was expected to fix the economy and deliver the legendary promise of American life.
For ‘baby boomers’ of the 1950s and 60s, White’s generation, the advertisers’ mantra ‘Progress is our most important product’ was part and parcel of the American Dream. During the 1960s, the vision of a technological utopia lay at the heart of ideas about American identity, liberty and prosperity. Previously, technology had been the fix for mundane problems of everyday existence, and now it emerged as one of the core values of American life. Now journalists and intellectuals began to refer to the United States as ‘the technological society’. And now they set out to defend their country’s values from European dissenters led by Martin Heidegger and Jacques Ellul, and others closer to home, such as Herbert Marcuse, Langdon Winner, and, supremely, Lewis Mumford.
No intellectual of White’s generation can have been unfamiliar with the figure of Lewis Mumford. By the time White was writing Medieval Technology and Social Change, Mumford had been leading a charge against the technological society for almost 40 years. For Mumford, the technological society represented an unnatural subversion of the principles of human evolution, according to which culture and society precede technology, not vice versa as White was now prepared to argue. And Mumford predicted that grave consequences awaited those societies that failed to redress the balance. In the first volume of his last and most pessimistic book, Technics and Human Development: The Myth of the Machine (1967), Mumford, wrote: ‘[o]ur age is passing from the primeval state … to a more radically different condition [where we] will have not only conquered nature, but detached [ourselves] as far as possible from an organic habitat’.
Mumford predicted that the ‘dominance seekers’ (corporations and governments) were busy erecting what he called a ‘megamachine’, which he characterised as an invisible, global entity incorporating all the technical and scientific apparatus, and the bureaucratic hierarchy, necessary for total domination. With the advent of this ‘final totalitarian structure’, the individual ‘will become a passive, purposeless machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions … will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalized, collective organizations’. In the face of the advancing megamachine, and the midst of Americanisation in Vietnam, Mumford delivered a defiant message:
‘For those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours … Each one of us, as long as life stirs in [us], may play a part in extricating [ourselves] from the power system by asserting [our] primacy as a person in quiet acts of mental and physical withdrawal – in gestures of non-conformity, restrictions, inhibitions, which will liberate [us] from the domination of the pentagon of power.’
In reaction, White’s technological determinism appears as a historical justification of the technological society, and a polemical defence of that society’s moral and political values in the context of Cold War paranoia and the ‘Red Scare’.
It mattered not at all to White that critics quickly debunked the empirical basis of his thesis. Hilton and Sawyer, in a review of the book published in 1963, pointed out that the stirrup and the plough had been introduced to medieval Europe perhaps as early as the seventh century, a couple of hundred years before White claimed. But for White, such criticism was irrelevant. In Medieval Technology and Social Change, White is exporting to and imposing on medieval Europe a modern, distinctly American, ideology, in much the same way that American corporations were then exporting commodified symbols of American supremacy, including land mines and Agent Orange, without regard to culture, society or environment. His paradigm was a product of the present, and in White’s present the past constituted a weapon to be used against the opponents of the ideals of the technological society and its future.
How much current techno-optimism, much of it highly deterministic in ways White might have recognised and admired, is similarly political? Whose interests and values are protected and advanced in these euphorically told future histories about how, for example, generative AI will ‘transform’ education, healthcare and society? And whose interests and values are destroyed without a care? Remember, IBM Watson has been ‘leveraged’ since 2014 to ‘transform’ the oil and gas industry, as James Bridle evidences in Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for Planetary Intelligence (2023), by enabling the exploitation of previously hard-to-access reserves of fossil fuels, in full awareness of the irreparable damage done as a result.
We don’t have to accept this with enthusiastic or resigned acceptance. We can choose to defy and liberate ourselves from the domination of these perverted histories and stolen futures.
Matthew Moran 