But isn't technology essentially neutral?
Technology has values embedded in it. By technology, I mean systems of technology, as opposed to tools. There is a certain distancing in modern technology, a certain coldness, a certain kind of standardization, inflexibility, and dependence on experts is another of its values. But with a simple tool, you can more easily imagine a state of rough equality, where people are not dependant on experts. That's the best way to read society: look at its technology, and you can tell what its dominant value is.
To take an example, in Indian urban society at least, cell phone technology has really taken off in recent times. What does it say about this society, according to you?
Well, instead of the face-to-face, we trade it for getting to be on the phone, all the time, often over nothing. Yes, we can talk to friends a thousand miles away, but we don't know our neighbours, we don't even want to know our neighbours, we're trained to seal ourselves off, and the technology helps us that way; we screen out everything, and pretend we are really in touch with people, when we're more isolated than ever. That's an easy measurement - how many people live alone, how many have fewer friends, do people visit each other less? - there is an entire sociological list of things. And that's what you get in the techno culture. So there are certainly values there with mobile phone technology, not to mention the value of the likelihood of getting brain cancer, and poisoning the earth when they go into the land.
You don't just stop with technology. You say that human reason itself is not value-neutral.
The Frankfurt School of thinkers came up with that, about instrumental reason. Reason isn't value-free. It could be a reason that pretends it's objective and scientific but it's actually inclined toward being a tool of domination. It's just an abstraction to say, 'reason'. You need to ask what kind of reason it is.
How is non-instrumental reason different from instrumental reason?
Non-instrumental reason has an awareness of what the dominant reason, if you will, is really involved in, what is its project. We don't look at the hidden assumptions all that often. For example, we take domestication for granted, and it's nothing but more control and more domination at deeper levels, colonising nature at deeper levels. For instance, GM foods and cloning and nanotechnology - they drive domestication even more, down to the molecular or atomic level. But if I weren't operating in the sphere of domestication, I wouldn't be using reason as an instrument here, because, why would you want to control nature? Pre-domestication, you take what nature gives, and that's great, you don't devise all these ways to fence it off, and breed what you want, and try to figure out new levels of control.But this is the logic today, and it's certainly not value-free.
People would argue that all this technology and domestication and mastery over nature are necessary to feed an expanding population.
Well, various leftists, including Noam Chomsky, say that too, except that the unnaturally high population is related to the civilisation project. That's when the population started going up. Overpopulation is a symptom more than anything else. Population would start going down if you unplug things like domestication.
But is it really possible to do that today? To unplug technology and the mindset it has created?
Well, it's not like pulling the plug, or let's do this tomorrow. It could not happen that way, as the population is very high. But you could go in that direction, start figuring out the way to undo it, as a conscious project. That would be more appealing than the prospect of all these people in entire blocs who will starve to death when the power goes out, because they don't have any skills, and then there could be food riots and then what? It's not a pretty picture. I think the responsible way is to think through that and start getting equipped, and turning that around. Chomsky and other people call us genocidists. Well, if anybody is genocidist, quite frankly, it's them, because they don't want to have any discussion of things like this. And it's weird that they aren't more concerned than they are about all these millions of people in megalopolises all around the world - they are screwed if there is a crash. Nobody is allowed to think about it or even put it out there.
How can any such change come about unless there is change in policy at the level of the state and government, where all key decisions get made?
No, that's a dead end, that's the trap of the system. They want us to keep playing that shit, you know, keep on voting, which really means, vote for the slightly less awful person than the other. That guarantees that we're stuck in this shit. No, no, that can't be the answer, that just enables, legitimizes, and reproduces the lie of democracy. If we keep on doing that, then there really is no hope. The first and easiest thing is to drop out of that - don't vote, don't play the game the system sets up for us to play.
So you say the state has to be kept out of it?
Completely. You can't get rid of civilization by recourse to the state. You can look at it historically: when and why does the state appear? Or cities, or any institution, starting from division of labour and domestication. The state and all those things are part of the prison that holds it together.
What do you think of work?
This is another thing Marshall Sahlins pointed out: the more symbolic culture there is, the more work there is. And it's true. We are working more and more, I mean, what happened to the promise of technology? None of these things have worked out the way the way they were proclaimed. Now, in the US, if you take a couple, they are both working; often each is working more jobs than one; all stressed out, they've got no time for their kids, and all the rest of it.
Is there a way of organising life that does not revolve around production and consumption?
Production and consumption is the paradigm of a mass society: mass production means mass consumption which means mass culture, which means mass media, mass everything, and the 'massified' world, becomes less healthy. That's not the way to go, and I think that's a reasonable statement.
How was your meeting with the Unabomber?
I visited him when he was in county jail in Sacramento. We have the same ideas, but not the same tactics. The media are always trying to say, you agree with the Unabomber, don't you?!! But yes, the thesis that technology is autonomous and decides pretty much what happens is true. It's even truer especially when we let it go without even treating it as an issue.
Comments
