[Nettime-bold] RE: <nettime> Steven Levy: Tech's Double-Edged Sword

["Kermit Snelson" <ksnelson@subjectivity.com>]

I attended a lecture by Bill Joy on this subject at Stanford last year.  He
was clearly aware of the long history of ideas concerning the ethics of
science and technology, and had studied it for a long time with considerable
passion.  It was also clear that he had sought out and profited from the
assistance of many experts in the field.

The 60-or-so years of controversy over atomic energy that Geert mentions
were not only central to Joy's presentation, but were also applied to the
present age of KMD ("Knowledge-Enabled Massive Destruction"), extrapolated
forward to the year 2030 (the age of "spiritual machines" in Ray Kurzweil's
term) and traced back to classical Greece and Rome.  Among many, many
examples of how various fields of technology may be used for purposes of
destruction, he showed that what we call "biological warfare" goes back a
long way (e.g., the use of catapults in the Middle Ages to throw
plague-infested corpses into walled cities.) It is true that he didn't quote
Zizek, Butler and Negri, but he did manage to make do with far greater
thinkers:  Aristotle and Nietzsche, for example.

Whether or not one agrees with the solution he proposes ("avoid
democratizing extreme evil"), his lecture is sophisticated and extremely
relevant in the wake of 911.  In fact, one passage of his talk, in
retrospect, seems horribly prescient:

    "So what we're talking about here is whether we're going to give these
kinds of people illimitable power. It's hard to think about what that would
mean, but what I think about it is it's like Flight 990.  Remember where the
pilot probably crashed the plane?  Imagine if everybody on the plane is a
pilot and has a button to crash the plane.  How many people are going to be
pilots with you on the plane before you're not willing to get on anymore?
Imagine the whole planet is full of pilots.  How does that make you feel?"

And even if one isn't personally interested in the topic, there's a
wonderful, none-too-subtle swipe at Microsoft that shouldn't be missed.  An
MP3 audio recording and a somewhat imperfect transcript is freely available
on the Web:

http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_play_stream.html?stream_id=258

Kermit Snelson

> What do nettimers think of the double-edged sword theory? The 'discovery'
> that evil forces also use technology can hardly be called new. The rise of
> this discourse tells more about the collective dream, uphold by so many,
> that technology is something essentially good (which then suddenly, in a
> shockwave, gets 'misused'). Technology criticism, for example the one
> developed after Hiroshima, so dominant in the 20st century and
> particular in
> the post World War II period, seems to be forgotton. The
> unwareness of this
> rich tradition of thought by Bill Joy and now Steven Levy I find stunning.
> Both can hardly be called anti-intellectuals. They are not ill-educated.
> They are brilliant and have deep a deep understanding in information
> technology and its broader science context. Is it a lack in humanities
> knowledge? Have they never heard of the decades long struggles amongst
> scientists about the ethics of science related to atomic power? Or the
> enormous debates within cybernetic circles over exactly this issue in the
> fifties? We cannot expect from 'leading' technologists (and their
> journalists) to be aware of contemporary post-modern theory. Geek culture
> has associated itself with New Age and science fiction, not with Zizek,
> Butler and Negri. So be it. The least these thinkers could do is to show a
> basic awareness of their own history. Perhaps that's too much to
> ask. I read
> into the pop culture commentary below a cry for the need to teach the
> philosophy of technology. Technology is sophisticated, so why
> shouldn't its
> discourse? Geert

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