Jumping On--and Off--the Technology Bandwagon

There are a lot of reasons for the surprisingly strong showing of Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, but one of the most important and least discussed among them is the profoundly unsettling impact of technological change.

Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, captured some of this angst in testimony to the National Governors’ Assn. on Feb. 12: “The fallout from rapidly changing technology has created a marked degree of uncertainty and insecurity among a significant segment of our work force.” Buchanan’s success with this theme has prompted Bob Dole and other Republican candidates to talk about middle-class anxiety for the first time.

They could say a lot more than they have. In a landmark 1988 book, “In the Age of the Smart Machine,” Harvard researcher Shoshanna Zuboff told a story about how pulp mill workers once decided whether paper pulp was ready to move to another stage in the pulp process by reaching into a vat and tasting some of it. Once the plant was automated, these workers were removed to a glass booth, where they watched the process in abstract form on computer screens. The change resulted in both disorientation and dissatisfaction among the workers.

Not only is technology creating a volatile economy that demands a high tolerance for anxiety and stress, but many people are not at all comfortable in the abstract, ephemeral world of high tech. Zuboff’s interviews with workers reveal a deep ambivalence about technology among Americans. People who once held physical labor and manual skill in high regard are now feeling the contempt of the high-tech elite.

At the same time, they regard the stressful, abstract world of high-tech work as something less than fully human. Workers have reason to fear that we’re turning into--in the vivid phrase of Samuel Butler in his 19th-century novel “Erewhon”--”machine-tickling aphids.”

Clearly, the polarization of the economy into two classes--”symbolic analysts” (the term Secretary of Labor Robert Reich coined to describe the sophisticated and educated) and everyone else--is also having a long-term effect on technological development itself. As money ascends to a smaller portion of the population, corporations concentrate their R&D; and products on those who have money to spend. The result is that many, if not most, new technological products are little more than toys for the rich.

The “good life” of the past, which linked ambition with consuming and owning new and improved technologies, no longer seems quite as compelling now that so many material desires have already been satisfied. How hard can we expect people to work for talking computers, digital TVs or high-tech golf carts? And yet if we don’t strive for such things, our economy will nose-dive.

Similar contradictions of our technological mania are becoming apparent to everyone: over-engineered cars that spend most of their time in gridlocked traffic, high-definition TV for shows that are not worth watching, a frenzy over information in the face of a declining reading public, enthusiasm over technology in schools that are otherwise nearly broken beyond repair, less time to enjoy life while we’re surrounded by “timesaving” devices.

People whose minds are not clouded by technophilia know, almost instinctively, that something is seriously wrong when there is such an immense disparity between all the cheerleading about technology and what actually vexes us as a society. And this disparity is made worse when the only solution we’re offered by our leaders is more of the same.

This is why so many people who are polled about what era they wish they could live in typically answer the ‘50s--before the consumer-technology express reached its current disorienting speed. Buchanan and his supporters fall into this camp. Bill Clinton and the pro-business Republicans have no answers for people who are rapidly becoming exhausted by the pace and the turmoil of technological change, and with no end in sight.

Unfortunately for this country, this split in our society has manifested itself in two competing ideologies about technology, both of them nonconstructive extremes: radical technophilia and recalcitrant Luddism. The former is reflected in Bill Gates’ book, “The Road Ahead,” which was the No. 1 bestseller in the country for several recent weeks, and in the pages of Wired magazine, among other publications. It is also represented in the tiresome speeches of politicians who constantly bang the drum of “progress,” even though no one can adequately say what that word means anymore.

A Luddite trend can be found among some intellectuals, some environmentalists and some true radicals, such as the Unabomber. But Luddism is also a growing, nonarticulated trend among working-class Americans who have, not surprisingly, focused on the employment effects of technological change and who are taking out their frustrations on established politicians. These people are ripe for the picking by extremists like Pat Buchanan and therefore a potential danger to all of us.

What is missing from our national conversation about the future, so far, is some rational debate about how technology can be configured to solve real problems, instead of being used primarily to make more products destined for landfills. This debate should make technology a tool, instead of making us a tool of technology. If our alternatives are either a return to the somnambulant and repressed ‘50s, or to live with our heads stuck in the abstract ether of cyberspace, we’re courting permanent and ominous class warfare.

Gary Chapman can be reached at [email protected]