What Does it Really Mean to be Pro-Technology or Anti-Technology?
Distinctions and Nuance Matter
I’m working on a piece about digital technology that explores some of the pointed criticisms of social media and smartphones leveled by a variety of people – religious and secular, traditionalist and cosmopolitan, liberal and conservative, mainstream and conspiratorial, techno-optimist and card-carrying reactionary. Throughout it, I kept struggling with the urge to go off on defensive digressions about how talking about the potential harms of social media shouldn’t be construed as an anti-technology position.
Eventually, I decided to write a piece teasing out what it really means to be “pro-technology” or “anti-technology,” and why the majority of people are somewhere in the middle. It’s easy to dismiss the fringes, but far too often dismissiveness is applied so indiscriminately that anyone who disagrees with us is, by definition, not worth taking seriously.
At times, many of us are tempted to feel that, “anyone more pro-technology than me is gullible and anyone more anti-technology than me wants to return to the Dark Ages.” (Or, if not about technology, we’re tempted to feel that way about COVID, or some other issue.)1
My goal in this essay is to elucidate some of the nuance and distinctions that exist without the conversations about digital technology, and technology more generally, so that we can have more honest conversations on the subject.
Hopefully, this essay will prove clarifying. When I publish the essay on digital technology, I’ll link to this one to save myself the trouble of reinventing the wheel.
Some Background:
I’ve never been a big fan of digital technology, but despite the accusations of my critics I’m not a Luddite on the subject. As with most technologies, there are pros and cons. Almost everything in life comes with tradeoffs, and while there are certainly benefits that come from social media and smartphones, there are also harms. We have to take the bad with the good, but we can attempt to do what we can about the bad, while taking fuller advantage of the good.
The Internet has given billions of people access to the greatest wealth of knowledge in the history of the world. But, given human nature, many humans squander that access watching porn and cat videos.
Smartphones have eroded our privacy, but they’ve also contributed to dematerialization, meaning that we can accomplish more while using fewer resources.
Social media has given millions of kids something to do while they hide in their bedrooms from their parents. But even social media has benefits: it allows millions of people to share thousands of selfies, engage in public shaming and humiliation, and send death threats to their favorite celebrities. Just kidding – those aren’t benefits. Some actual benefits might be that social media has revolutionized marketing and facilitated business networking, perhaps decreasing productivity but still increasing economic growth (but I don’t have any data for that).
Actually, I’d argue that – for all the attention social media gets – Venmo and PayPal and Zelle are far more beneficial and important than Facebook or Instagram. The former have lowered the time cost of conducting transactions. They have facilitated easy and secure payments and money transfers, allowing for business (especially across vast distances) to be conducted faster and easier than ever before. Digital payment removes “friction” from life, which means we see a sudden increase in people lamenting its loss. But not all friction is good and most people don’t miss it.
All of which is to say that digital technology is a mixed bag. And even if you disagree with the previous paragraphs, you probably agree with that statement. Which brings me to my larger point.
Most People Hold Complicated Positions on Technology:
There are some tech-loving futurists, and there are some actual reactionaries. But most people aren’t either. The majority of people would agree that there are pros and cons to most forms of technology, and that they take specific technologies on a case-by-case basis.
Increasingly, it seems common to accuse critics of digital technology of reactionaryism or Luddism. But, interestingly enough, you never hear the same accusations leveled at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, despite the fact that the former group doesn’t actually want to un-invent the internet and the latter actual does want to eliminate an entire technology from existence.2
Someone might say that that comparison isn’t fair, because “nobody actually thinks nuclear weapons are a good thing.” Actually, there are people who make serious arguments in favor of nuclear weapons (including people not employed by the defense industry or national security/intelligence community). But let’s take a look at a list of other technologies, which I think will prove that the majority of people don’t wholeheartedly embrace technology writ large and many people reject certain technologies that they consider to be “bad,” even if they don’t think of themselves as being anti-technology:3
- Nuclear power (fission or fusion)
- Genetically modified crops (we could even get more granular and talk about the differences between particular genetic modifications)
- Animal breeding
- Aircraft supercarriers
- Nuclear submarines
- AR-15s
- Cars
o Self-driving cars
o Electric cars
o Gas-guzzlers
o Standard transmission cars
o Automatic transmission cars
o Cars with lane-assist and other safety innovations
- Vaccines (we could get granular here and talk specific ones)
- Technologies involved in terraforming and climate engineering (such as cloud seeding)
- Space solar power
- Money/Currency
- Cryptocurrency
- Artificial Intelligence
- Virtual Reality
- Performance-Enhancing Drugs
- SSRIs
- Psychedelics
- Airplanes
o F-35s
o Supersonic passenger jets
- GPS
- Precision Guided Missiles (which rely on GPS)
I could keep going, but this list should be enough to show that most people hold complicated positions on different technologies and very few people are actually Kool-Aid-drinking futurists or “life was better in the Stone Age” reactionaries. It really boils down to prudential questions about the side effects, pros and cons, use and abuse, and tradeoffs of individual technologies or particular types of technology.
The reason for this list is to illustrate that critics of digital technology are not necessarily any more reactionary than critics of blockchain, or nuclear power, or artificial intelligence, or weapons. Rather than dismiss people as Luddites (about any piece of technology), we need to engage with their arguments on the merits to determine whether or not they have valid criticisms.
Maybe, when it comes to digital technology, the question we should be asking isn’t, “is digital technology good or bad,” but instead, “Is there a way we could be using digital technology better?” I think the answer is, “Of course.” Maybe that better way looks a lot different from the way we currently use it. If I had my druthers, a “better way,” would include, “using it less, being more physically active when we are using it, using it for research and learning rather than to gratify our worst impulses, treating the people on the other side of the screen as human beings, and using digital technology to enhance our real lives and our physical social lives rather than as a distraction from or a replacement for them.”
So, my position on digital technology is, “it’s complicated.” And, if I had to bet, yours is, too.
The Vast and Strange World Out There:
Distinctions are important. It’s tempting to use terms like “anti-technology” to describe anyone who criticizes something that you like, but that elides the vast gulf that exists between people who think Twitter should get rid of the retweet button and people who think that the invention of electricity was a mistake. And doesn’t include the people who judge a technology on the basis of its environmental impact or its (supposed) demonic influence. It takes work to tease out the nuances between complicated positions on complex topics, but the alternative is to make everything you or I don’t like into a straw man.
In fact, teasing out nuances might teach you something about yourself. Many self-described “pro-technology” types might read the list I provided above and realize that they’re only “mostly pro-technology.”
Above all, we should avoid the temptation to be a “radical normal,” a term I coined to describe believing that anything outside of a narrow Overton window is extremism, while rejecting all distinction and nuance. When it comes to technology, this sometimes means conflating reducing one’s dependency with wholesale rejection of mainstream life.
For example, a “radical normal” might elide the difference between mild self-sufficiency (owning a whole-house generation as a hedge against power outages) and autarky (growing all of your own food, generating all of your own electricity, collecting all of your water, etc.). Or, they might ask a friend who says she is planning to take a Tech Sabbath if she’ll stop using pencils and utensils.
On the other side, a “radical normal” might say that anyone who strikes them as “too ready for the metaverse” of wanting to escape reality.
There are people who cut themselves off from mainstream society to pursue an autarkic simple life. And there are people who can’t wait to live like a character in Ready Player One. But most people aren’t either.
Interestingly, “radical normal” are the people who would benefit the most from reading the proudly extremist crowd, if only to demonstrate how much of a gulf there is between their definition of extremism and actual extremism.
All of us have the temptation towards dismissiveness and elision. Nuance is hard and strawmanning is easy. You might say I’ve strawmanned the “radical normal” position, and perhaps I have.4 Or, you might say that I’ve engaged in appalling elision by writing about “digital technology” as though it were a single thing, rather than a complex collection of various apps, platforms, devices, software packages, hardware integrations, servers, algorithms, lines of code, processors, etc. etc.
For brevity’s sake, I’ll end here, though. We could spend all our time teasing out subtleties and cataloguing differences. I think it’s fun to learn about people who are a little bit… crazy on the subject of technology, whether it’s the anti-moderns or the futurists ready for the “singularity.” But, at the end of the day, all I really care about is that we can have an honest discussion about the technologies we use and the way we use them and the harms and the benefits. Which we can’t if we can’t make distinctions or understand nuance.
I certainly have a long way to go, myself. But with the exception of some very patient and humble individuals, I think many of us struggle with dismissiveness.
At least, the majority of critics of digital technology don’t want to end the Internet. A few do.
This is a list that ranges from the popular to the controversial. As far as the rumors of my techno-skepticism go, I’d be willing to bet that I’m more bullish on several of these (nuclear power) than many of my readers. And there are others that I’m actively against (AI), personally dislike (VR), or feel ambivalent towards (cryptocurrency – there are good and bad arguments on both sides as far as I’m concerned).
Although people have said things to me that are pretty close to what I describe.