Pro-technology propaganda

From Wikinfo

Propagandists promote technologies for political reasons, to gain commercial advantages or to improve living conditions.

We know little about the propaganda early homo-sapiens used to promote technology except that they visually idealized the subject of their pursuit. They painted on walls images of animals they hunted. Throughout the middle ages, alchemists, whose ultimate goal was to discover a process to transform lead into gold, were continually funded by kings and lesser principalities. The philosophers' stone represented the elusive agent needed for this elemental transformation. More recently, examples of propaganda in support of technology can be found in public health campaigns, commercial advertisements, academic policies, popular entertainment, political speeches and in military propaganda.

In popular discourse, debate often coalesces around pro- and anti-technology ideals. A strict analysis reveals the term "technology" to veil a euphemism in colloquial arguments that appeal to belief and emotion. Analysis of pro-technology propaganda includes both a general review of how propaganda supports the spread of various technologies, investigation of how the term "technology" is popularly used euphemistically for a group of technologies, and how that implicit group of technologies is promoted.

Belief in or skepticism of "technology" offers themes for popular literature, art, opinion and political platforms. Popular debate about "technology" often revolves around the reliability of a belief in the likelihood of beneficial discovery and invention. Google searches returned 7,320 entries for the euphemistic phrase "promise of technology" and 778 for "threat of technology".

The debate at other times hinges on whether a particular group of technological endeavors are worthwhile.

In many cases, the euphemism appears in informational contexts that have little persuasive intent. The term "technology" permeates academia, with Google returning 292,000 instances of the phrase "technology in education". But the term is not a euphemism when it implicitly refers to a group of technologies in a specific context. In that case, technology means "applied human ingenuity as it is seen in this context." And technology means the latest machines to many people simply because that is the most apparent technology. In fact the word technology is applied even to simple things like a glossary, which admittedly can be a tool for cognitive dissonance.

Thus it appears that the techno-fix is built in to Western culture. Accordingly, it is difficult to say what constitutes simple advertising or marketing or other "need creation" of a possibly benign sort, and what is simply pro-technology propaganda that furthers the maintenance and development of a military-industrial complex. See below for more on that.

historical vs. innovative

In rhetorical uses by parties on both sides of any technology debate, the euphemism "technology" poses a false dilemma of technology or no technology that aggrandizes the more proximate question of "this technology or that technology." There is always some technology in use already being displaced, thus it is a question of an historically tested vs. innovative (and probably untested) technology in use. It is always much easier to keep using an older method, even if ineffective, thus pro-technology propaganda may actually be a normal reaction to inertia:

A 1996 issue of Midwifery Today explored "The Threat of Technology." The technologies explored were not the historic technologies of midwives, but rather were a euphemized set of technologies implicit of machinery. In popular discourse, "technology" is widely used as a euphemism for the technologies in use at a particular time. Both sides in a broad popular debate appear to often agree "technology" means technologies employed in home, commercial or government settings of our time.

technology and the "good life"

Consumer technology tends to solve small problems for the consumer which may become large problems for the society. A case in point is the automobile, which was certainly heavily promoted as the source of freedom for most families as early as the 1920s.

Corporations and industrial associations promote the spread of what they and some of their critics call "technology" through scholarships, grants, press releases, conferences and other informational techniques that can be tools for propaganda. Through the 20th Century, whatever technology was the latest topic of interest in the news tended to fuel art, fiction and popular non-fiction literature. Companies, and governments often managed perceptions of their technological decisions by influencing how the public saw those technologies.

Generalization is common in everyday speech, and does not always mask propaganda. Some critics of the direction of modern technology dampen the euphemism by defining which of their values they are promoting, such as those advocating "appropriate technology" or "sustainable technology." Corporate and industry writers sometimes take care to specify which technology they are discussing, using an adjective such as "water treatment technology" to summarize the general topic.

"preparedness" rhetoric

However, most less-than-benign pro-technology propaganda is that which in one way or another enables the military-industrial complex. A pronounced tendency to promote technologies useful in war has been especially evident in developed nations since the end of World War II; these nations have considered their eminence and control of developing nations' resources to rely at least in part on a superior mastery of technology.

Before World War I there was a similar feeling that technology would lead only to good. World War I smashed this belief among the public in most countries.

Between World War I and World War II, pro-technology propaganda focused on automation and industrialization and the rhetoric of preparedness which had dominated only in elite circles prior to World War I. In the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics this was masked as "industrial progress" propaganda.

In the German Third Reich, the "preparedness" was more overtly and honestly military, industrial workers and farmers who effectively employed automation were often portrayed as heroes and model citizens. Art of this period uses tractors, highways, factories, hydroelectric dams, etc., as icons of society's noble struggle to overcome provincialism.

These were of course exactly the infrastructures required to prepare for war, as well; and this glorification of technology and efficiency provided the ideological context required for war propaganda. In this context, war, which often engenders technological advances, is seen as part of the healthy society's struggle to advance. Commercial exploitation of this propaganda (e.g. General Motors' promotion of private cars and freeways in Los Angeles while it purchased and retired electric railways) was probably subordinated to the state's purposes.

post-war technologies

After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the developed nations shifted their focuses to aviation and nuclear technologies. These technologies represented new sources of nearly unlimited warmaking power. Some speculations about the possibilities of aviation, e.g. personal helicopters, and nuclear power, e.g. home atomic plants, or nuclear car engines, seem ridiculous today, and were ridiculous then. However, promoting such images made it easy to justify massive expenditures in aircraft research and nuclear weapon design; the promise was that these technologies would 'trickle down' to citizens' daily use. In retrospect, these claims were usually untrue. The space program ironically provided the most spinoffs per research dollar, in part because it focused on life-support technologies instead of life-ending ones.

In the 1960s, chemistry ("the green revolution" in pesticides) and biology (especially drug research) began to be heavily promoted as sources of higher agricultural productivity, and higher citizen or soldier reliability. The drugs which proved to cause erratic behavior were quickly banned, like LSD. Ill effects of pesticides, which were known at the time through such authors as Rachel Carson, were hidden by a greenwash of chemical industry propaganda, and not exposed until such disasters as thalidomide set new standards in corporate liability.

1970s pro-technology propaganda focused on television, computers and telecommunications which were promoted as part of Marshall McLuhan's benevolent ideal of the global village. Ironically, McLuhan's work built strictly on the prior work of fellow Canadian Harold Innis, whose theory was that communications and transport technologies were the key to maintaining a continent-spanning imperialism. Ithiel de Sotha Pool, Nicholas Negroponte, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson and other pro-information-technology advocates began their visible work in this decade, although their influence did not peak until the 1990s dotcom boom when mostly-American technologies were beginning to dominate the infosphere.

1980s genetics and the early molecular engineering proposals were the subject of a vast speculative array of fictions, and ethical warnings. Most of the latter seem to have been created specifically for the purpose of saying "I told you so" at a later date, since those who issued the warnings worked, and continue to work, almost exclusively on technology creation and promotion, and with a few notable exceptions (Bill Joy, Joseph Weizenbaum, Hugo de Garis, Ray Kurzweil) put almost no energy into the ethical questions. A particularly poignant example is that of the Foresight Institute, whose founder K. Eric Drexler devoted most of his early work to warning of the extreme dangers of nanotechnology (the end-state of molecular engineering) but put only a very small proportion of his own time, or his promotional effort, into getting social scientists or ethicists seriously investigating the questions he raised. Rather, he published guidebooks and manuals full of "how to" designs that simply accelerated the technological "singularity" he predicted. Meanwhile genetics had issued similar warnings, breezed past them, and by the 1990s was facing all the ethical dilemmas, e.g. human cloning, predicted in the 1980s.

1990s and current issues in pro-technology propaganda tend to focus on robotics, persuasion technology, proteomics, virus engineering, genetic modification to a previous unknown degree, fusion power, and a more credible range of "green" technologies: hydrogen power (promoted as an energy source when it is in fact merely a medium to transmit power that must be generated by some non-hydrogen means), solar power (feasible but leading to a lot of toxic waste disposal and centralized manufacturing dependencies in the case of solar panels), insulation options including the infamous urea formaldehyde which had to be removed from many houses. These latter have the merit of being small-scale and yielding generally measurable results.

communication and persuasino technologies

The promotion of blog, crit, wiki, email, text messaging and other "communication tools" often comes with a fair dose of propaganda. It may be that these are even more amenable to centralized control than web or television or radio production, especially as bot and mook technologies "improve" and create a nearly-seamless persuasion technology.

There is also the question of violent video game impacts on psychology of teenagers, and its "dual use" potential to train soldiers for urban warfare. Artificial intelligence and cognotechnology are endpoints of this thinking, which seems to evoke mind control and omega point images of an apocalypse, actively promoted in concert with some political leaders (see weapons of mass deception).

Outside of their obvious effect, accelerating technological competition in war and in the workplace, impacts of pro-technology propaganda are hard to measure or predict. Aside from a general tendency to promote science and technology education over humanities or ethics education, with obvious dangers attending that, there may be many lower-tech alternatives passed by in favour of "high tech" options with questionable benefits. A particularly disturbing example of this is the Malaria therapy for AIDS which was abandoned apparently at the behest of drugcos seeking to market their expensive designer drug therapies. The extreme danger of this strategy is borne out by the effects of antibiotic treatments, which accelerated bacterial evolution to the point of so-called superbugs.

questioning the technology promotion mindset

In his essay "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us", Bill Joy offered that the rise of robotics, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence had real potential to obsolete and eliminate the human species, as the culmination of this obsession with technology, and denial of the primacy of the human body (a theme many postmodern and feminist and Green philosophers also comment on).

Pro-technology propaganda, by accelerating competition between humans and ultimately providing tracks of evolution that exclude or extinct humans, may be among the most dangerous of all modes of propaganda. Some consider it morally equivalent to pro-war propaganda even if peace is the avowed goal of spreading or "improving" a technology. After all, this same argument was used to "improve" nuclear weapons, surveillance, and computers.

Also see: surveillance technology.