On Developing A New Theory of Technological Change

Greenfield’s philosophical approach is strongly guided by skepticism, a demand that we judge things by their actual impacts in the real world, and not by any kind of promise or potential that might be offered from them.

This is the razor we need to apply to augmented reality, or 3D printing, or distributed autonomous organizations: what is salient is not anything their visionary designers may have had in mind when imagining them, but what states of being they are actually seen to enact… The most misleading aspects of this body of rhetoric perennially resides in the gulf between technoutopian claims about what some emergent innovation “might” or “could” gives rise to, on the one hand, and anything it has actually been seen to do on the other. Very often the claimed benefits never do come to pass, while the easily foreseeable (and, in fact, explicitly foreseen) negative consequences invariably do crop up, and are left for others to deal with. (pp.302-303)

The author insists that we need to do better at understanding what is being proposed by technologies, rather than cede that power to those who have the most the gain from our ignorance. He describes what such an effort might look like:

We need a better, more supple theory of technological change, more suited to a time in which our tools work as networks and distributed assemblages. That theory needs to help us understand how agency and power are distributed across the meshing nodes and links of our collective being, how to evaluate the effect on our lives of that which cannot be understood in isolation and cannot be determined in advance, and how to assemble discrete components in ensembles capable of prevailing over the recalcitrance of things and actually make change. (p.312)