Technology: If We’ve Made a Problem, We Can Probably Fix It — if We Want To

With a climate change summer upon us, and days of 100-degree-plus heat in our mile-high city, and the miseries of a 20-year drought, I’ve been thinking about French philosopher Jacques Ellul again, particularly his two great books: “The Technological Society” and “Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes.” As critical as Ellul is of a world dominated by human invention and the checkered history of the arts of persuasion, he also implies clearly that if we are ever to break the stalemate of human-caused problems like climate change and actually start to do something to save ourselves, technology and a benign form of propaganda will be our principal tools.

Generally speaking, the opposite of planned obsolescence is the rule of thumb that if we make it, we can fix it. And likewise, if we sold it, we can sell its opposite. It’s all in the motive and in the expectations. I’m certainly not a worshiper of technology, nor do I think I’m a slave to it. But with a pacemaker implanted in my chest, I know I wouldn’t be alive without it. And as a journalist for much of my life, resisting the manipulations of commercial and political propaganda, I’m not fan of advertising and public relations, propaganda’s sanitized techniques. Yet I’ve spent my life collecting and consuming information, much of it crafted to be either legitimately or nefariously persuasive.

I also know that both technique and persuasion are merely tools — powerful tools, to be sure, like guns and slogans — to be used for both good and evil. Guns kill people because a gunman wants them to. Guns don’t kill by themselves. Slogans incite riots at the U.S. Capitol, because certain people want them to. Some technologies are more inherently dangerous than others, and some propaganda techniques, like the Big Lie, are more potent than others.

That’s why both technology and propaganda have such an ominous aura about them. My generation railed against “technology” as enslaving us, taking over everything and distorting human self-regard to the point of fatal Faustian arrogance. In the 1960s, we looked for what was known then as “appropriate technology,” “small is beautiful” techniques, tools we could use that wouldn’t use us, that were more beneficent than deadly. And, of course, “propaganda” after Orwell, WWII and McCarthyism was regarded as the great monster, so easily abused and so hard to control that it seems to almost always go to the dark side.

But intervening years have added additional perspectives to both realities. The dissemination of the polio vaccine, the anti-smoking drive, the art of not wasting water, the project of recycling (for all its flaws), the push to “Think globally, act locally” (a phrase coined by Ellul) and, recently, the COVID “quarantine” in which much of the world, though not all, literally changed its mind and its way of life almost overnight — were all the direct effects of massive information campaigns. Propaganda “by any other name” as Shakespeare would have said, is still morphing behavior through the sale of ideas by manipulating and exploiting the media. But like technology its uses are dependent on motives and expectations.

Technology is the art of combining science, engineering and imagination to solve problems, real ones and ones created just to sell a product or win a war. Anyone who uses a smartphone, has a smart watch (with its billions of tiny transistors), uses a computer, had to “duck and cover” during the Cold War as a kid, searches the internet, reads a book made on a printing press, drives a relatively new car or is alive because of a medical procedure has had direct experience of what it means to be alive in a technological society.

We spend most of our lives in a world dreamed up, invented, designed and manufactured by humans like ourselves. If we’re in towns and cities and scan our immediate environments, we will see virtually nothing other than the objects and processes dreamed up by human beings, unless we gaze out a window, and even then the smog will be technologically derived. The weather is now influenced and almost a byproduct of the unintended consequences of human technology and the brilliantly sinister manipulation of the media by Big Oil and Big War companies that profited astronomically by continuing to spew the pollution of all too evilly motivated and maliciously ignored but completely understood unintended consequences.

But if you’ve made it, you should be able to fix it. If you’ve said it, you can say its opposite. I don’t think it’s naïve to believe that even climate change, a technological problem, has a technological fix, or a multitude of them. I don’t think it’s Machiavellian to believe that using the techniques of persuasion to help people help themselves is a malign use of the media.

Tens of millions of us would be dead right now if we hadn’t stopped smoking cigarettes. We stopped smoking because of a masterful and relentless information campaign, and because the information we received from science was eventually confirmed by our own experience. Yes, Big Tobacco had addicted us to cigarettes, by a malign technology that probably included addictive enhancements of nicotine and by a massive and relentless sales campaign that both created and reinforced our impulse to relax with a smoke and look cool doing it.

I’m always disappointed by fatalism when it comes to climate change. The June Bulletin of the AARP, for instance, seemed to ignore such possibilities. The lead story was about how climate change is affecting our lives. It had a tone of resignation to it as well as a list of sensible suggestions of how to cope with a seemingly hopeless and out of control problem. It sounded like the AARP’s editorial board felt their readership had little left to do but adapt, that climate change could not be remediated, that we didn’t have the technological imagination, or the political will, to pull it off.

Maybe they are right. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The devil is in the details, of course. Profit, power and control can be profound agents for pure evil. But when you look at the technological society, you can see it as a world that works on a million different levels, a technological world of houses, roads, huge buildings, billions of products and every one of them, from salt shakers to dry transformers on telephone poles, products of human know-how, invention, imagination and even our obsession with efficiency.

Ellul is right when he said that a technological society is based on rationality, artificiality and universalism. And that it “eliminates or subordinates the natural world,” which is something human beings have been trying more or less to do, in order to survive, for millennia. This may be technology’s ultimate negative consequence. Unlike the natural world, when we leave it alone, the technological society is a human product with human frailties built into it. Human societies of all kinds have been battling those frailties — with religions, social contracts, theories of human nature and moral philosophies — somewhat successfully for the history of our species. Why not now as well, battling climate change with counter-technologies and persuasive arguments, ones counter to the initially unintended consequences of pollution for profit? Is there danger in trying to use persuasion and propaganda for honorable ends? Perhaps. But there’s greater danger if we don’t.

Propaganda is designed to thwart choices that go against the object of persuasion. Manipulation of the media is a technique of “sociological bondage,” Ellul says, reducing complexities to dangerously simplistic arguments that catch people up “in the web of information they have been given.” Ellul says propaganda “induces a sort of hypnosis in the individual, who cannot get out of the field that has been laid out for him” through the technologies of persuasion.

Just as a technological society is totalizing, taking over everything, so is a society like ours woven from webs of persuasive information that bombards us for good or ill at every instant, a totalizing web conveyed through a totalizing technology.

But how technology and propaganda are used, and for what ends, is always a matter of motivation and expectation. We have made this world. And we can still fix it and change it with the tools we used to create it. I don’t think it’s cynical or arrogant to believe that. We have created continent sized islands of plastic debris in our oceans that people will make fortunes cleaning up, if profit incentives and social pressures persuade them to do so.

Persuasion helped create the technological society. The war of ideas pretty much left technique to its own devices. And those who profit massively from it will always want to be left alone to make their mint, free of social pressure and responsible persuasion deflecting them from pursuing more profit for good or ill. But this is not how it has to be. If our society expects differently and wants differently, chances are we will eventually get the difference we want, more or less. And that might be enough for us to stop and reverse even climate change.

Motive and expectations control both technique and information. The rigors of human-caused climate change are no different. They are the unintended consequences of a fossil fuel technology, undetected at first, then willfully denied for the sake of profit. How do we persuade and invent our ways out of the heat and drought climate change is causing in the Southwest?

It’s probably not enough just to stop doing what caused climate change, though it’s a start. We have to start actually undoing what we’ve done, reversing it, and not at the pace of the market but at the pace of the imagination.

Not trying is as fatal as denying.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it

(Image by Sanya Hyland)