Haven't we heard this "liberated by technology" talk before? Let's see . . .
The old system of capitalism was supposed to collapse of its own contradictions. The new system of communism was supposed to be born in a traumatic revolutionary transition. And we were supposed to eventually advance to the higher stage of history when people could live freely in natural surroundings.
And, as Karl Marx mused, we'd be able to "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, write literary criticism after dinner." And one of the driving forces of these historical changes would be the perfection of industrial machinery that would liberate people from the drudgery of factory work and allow them to do whatever they wanted.
Or that was the general ideal for generations of Marxists, communists and socialists of various persuasions.
It didn't quite work out that way.
Americans in general are fond of the notion of technological progress, too. From the beginning, we've made the connection between new technologies and better democracy. The steamboat, the telegraph, the television were seen as tools for a more democratic republic -- an empowerment of the citizenry.
But none lived up to the initial hype.
That's the perspective of Howard Segal, a historian of technology at the University of Maine, and the author of "Technological Utopianism in American Culture" and "Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America." He says Americans' bedrock belief in technology -- the trust that technology can solve our problems -- is naive, shallow and seriously misplaced. Europeans were cured of their enchantment with technology after they saw some of its ultimate fruits in the cataclysm of World War I. Americans began to lose their enthusiasm as they realized the horrific effects of atomic bombs and the real dangers of nuclear power.
Yet here we go again: chasing after the illusive ideal of a more decentralized, democratic, wired world.
It's no coincidence that technology's allure is so powerful today. It's all bound up with a frustrated sense of Manifest Destiny. That's the position of Phil Bereano, a professor of technical communication at the University of Washington in Seattle.
America is not a society that deals well with limits, he says. In the 19th century, we could head west and gobble up land. Through most of the 20th century, we could carry a big stick around the world and pretty much get what we wanted. But for the last couple of decades, Americans' relative economic position in the world declined. We've had to face up to our limits.
So today we're frantically looking for the next frontier, the limitless expanse where we can pursue our destiny. In other words, we're primed for a technological quick fix.
Which brings us back to Marx. There's an eerie similarity between the basic gist of his theories and the historical vision of Alvin Toffler, the popular futurist who advises one of the most powerful people in the country: House Speaker Newt Gingrich. That's a point made recently by Hendrik Hertzberg in a lacerating critique in the New Yorker magazine.
Hertzberg says that both Marx and Toffler see history divided into three progressive stages: agrarian, industrial and postindustrial. Both see a nearly irresistible force of history driven by technology. Both see a very painful dislocation as society shifts between ages. And both project a vaguely defined decentralized future: a techno-utopia.
We all know what happened when Lenin, Stalin and their followers took Marx's theories and tried to turn them into a better society. Who knows what disasters might follow the pursuit of today's techno-utopian dream?
