If you're new to PEL and don't know what "New Work" refers to, go listen to our episode interviewing Frithjof Bergmann, or my short precog on the topic, or check out the videos on the New Work channel I manage, or read one of the many articles I've written here about it (like this one).
There's a "Worldwide Conference" coming up on New Work in Detroit on Oct. 18-20 that I'll be attending, so check it out if you have a serious interest. Hopefully a lot of the speakers will be taped, and I'll try to interview some folks and maybe write up an article for publication somewhere fancier than this blog. If you go, find me and introduce yourself! Details on the conference are at reimaginingwork.org.
I described in our Walden episode how Thoreau powerfully gives the intuitive grounding for New Work, i.e. that jobs, in the way they come to most of us, are positively unhealthy, and certainly fail the meaning-of-life test, meaning that whatever it is that we're supposed to be doing (if that "supposed to" phrase means anything in this context), or whatever it is that we would really find meaningful, chances are, your job isn't even close, nor are most other people's jobs.
But what do we do about this? Thoreau says, in essence, that we have to give up our appetite for luxuries and live simply, minimizing economic/social entanglements. So insofar as you can live off the land, do that. It's easy, he says, to make some money working at your own pace at something you don't mind, and some is all you need to get whatever you need to live.
But as I pointed out in that discussion, there are two problems with this argument. First, economic calculations change with the times. Today's highly regulated and market-saturated society requires we pony up a lot more cash just to live, much less live somewhere without heaps of crime. On the flip side, lots of technology, and the results of that technology, have become much cheaper, so that, for example, a very minimalist lifestyle today most likely would include wi-fi of some sort.
Second, his argument simply doesn't work when you involve a family. Maybe in his time, a husband could simply make his wife and children live according to whatever crazy-ass "principled" lifestyle he fancied, but it's more likely (based on his own lack of romantic entanglements) that other people are part of the bother that he thinks we should minimize involvement with. It's hard to tell from his personal life given how young he died (age 43)... Despite never being married, he did propose to someone, and in any case the experiment of Walden is not presented as a fundamental, ultimate lifestyle, and we (or at least I) don't know how literally he thought one could apply the lesson of simplicity to his post-Walden, more socially engaged life.
(As a side note, some scholars have ventured that Thoreau was a closeted, non-practicing homosexual. I have no idea if that's true, but it would be very ironic if this guy who championed being true to yourself instead used chastity and turning away from people altogether as a way of sublimating his socially forbidden desires.)
If a simplicity-driven lifestyle can't be supported within the context of having a partner and maybe kids, then it simply can't be a feasible goal for general adoption; Thoreau may have found a vacation from the discontents of civilization, but not a recipe for curing them.
I found when presenting New Work ideas to the PEL community last year that some of the folks most likely to embrace its (and Thoreau's) complaints about jobs were highly resistant to Bergmann's proposed solutions, which involve what he used to call "high-tech self-providing" but more recently has re-termed "community production." This involves using technology to make production much more efficient, so you actually can do it with very little money, and not have to sacrifice comfort in favor of austere, back-to-nature asceticism. In fact, community production is principally (though not solely) designed to work in concentrated, urban areas, where there's an actual community, and, not coincidentally, where there's the most poverty and crime and decay now.
I'm more than aware that a complete picture of community production and the economic calculation that would prove "yes, you can live this way viably and comfortably" is still wanting, and I can't provide that here. But I think we know enough about the possibilities now to be able to argue about an approach to the problem: I claim that Thoreau's anti-technological bias is a major hindrance in thinking about realistic ways to solve the work-life problem. Likewise, his insistence upon do-it-yourself individualism closes off essential avenues, and by extension the anti-government sentiment that for libertarians today trumps all other concerns makes solving this fundamental problem much more difficult.
This is the source of my concern voiced during the podcast that Thoreau was basically talking out of his ass. Wes said that as an essayist, Thoreau is asking you to reflect on your moral intuitions, and that the alternative to his approach would be constructing some kind of system and basing your social/moral claims on that.
I don't think this is the problem with the anti-technology argument. Heidegger actually had a system (most recently talked about on our blog here) for justifying his anti-technology claims, and I still think they amount to unsubstantiated, sentimentalist bullshit.
Yes, as Wes pointed out, there are clear ways in which our lives can be dominated by technology, as with any other obsession. Just as you have to put in time taking care of your house, you have to put in time unfragging your hard drives and fighting viruses and deleting spam and all that crap. You can use more technology to make those tasks easier, one could make the argument that it's a never-ending cycle: it's always something.
And that kind of sentiment, "it's always something," much like "and that's how they screw you!" is the essence of crank-dom. Thoreau's claim is that whenever you invoke technology to answer a problem, you create more problems with the technology than make the benefit worth the effort. Many similarly argue that whenever government tries to solve a problem, the very fact that it's government doing it creates more of a problem. Or you could argue that whatever benefit a corporation provides, they extract even more in cost. (That's the point of economic transaction!)
What kinds of claims are these? They're not straightforward universal claims, because then you'd only have to come up with one instance where, e.g., a government action produced more benefit than harm, and the universal would be refuted. Now, I expect some people are such cranks that they'll insist on the exceptionless truth of these claims, but we can more reasonably take them as generalizations, as truisms.
One could then have an argument using historical examples of why technology or government or business is more often than not more of a pain than a boon, but I think that this rather misses the point, because the claims are not just generalizations about history, but somehow statements about the essence of the phenomena/institutions in question, such that no matter how many holes we plug, these things will never work.
It is a goal of computer manufacturers to make them as user-friendly as possible, and I'd argue that it's much much easier now for a technologically-deficient older adult to use a computer than it was in 1982. A computing device like the iPhone or X-box geared to a narrower set of purposes than a full computer is even easier. These advances prove that the ideal of technological transparency, where your device actually works, and so functions as a tool ready-to-hand (to use Heidegger's terms) instead of an obstacle present-to-hand, is reasonable. So no, it's not "always something" in terms of more crap for end-users to take care of, and the fact that more challenges come up results from further advances, as when the computers in an office became networked together, and then connected wirelessly, and then available through Citrix and the like to at-home use of work computers. The advances enabled not only efficiency, but (especially the last) increased freedom.
Tele-commuting is to me one of the most literally liberating advances of recent years, but the anti-technogist can still make this argument: Yes, you can work from home, but that's given employers the opportunity to make you work from home in addition to working at the office. Your job has become 24/7, and your freedom has actually shrunk. But clearly, this isn't a technological problem: it's a political one.
Foucault described the pernicious technological advances exemplified by "the panopticon," i.e. more technology means more ways for powers-that-be to exert their control over us. But the answer isn't to get rid of technology (in fact, David Brin argues that technology also gives us the ability to watch the watchers), but to fix the underlying political dysfunction. Per our Oppenheimer episode, technology gives us more power and so brings conflicts that were already in existence to a head so they need to be dealt with.
If blacks and whites hate each other (or Americans and Chinese, or star-bellied vs. plain-bellied Sneeches), but live largely in different geographic areas, then overt conflict is minimalized. If you use technology to bring them together, then there are more avenues for communicating messages of hate, yes, but also an acceleration of a dialogue toward shared understanding. To give a dramatic analogy, if members of the hating groups had a button they could push and kill members of the other group, then, after a lot of initial death, that conflict would certainly come to head and have to be dealt with.
In this light, technology is not always good in its immediate consequences, but forces us to deal with social problems more rapidly than we otherwise might have to. But what about the more Heideggerian (and Waldenesque) claim that merely living technologically puts us out of sync with nature? That we're no longer living fully human lives?
This sentiment is broad and vague enough that it's hard to counter. If taken to an extreme, it means that we shouldn't use electric lights, heat, or even a roof over our head (caves are better!). By working with tractors instead of hoeing land by hand, are we no longer Man Farming as Emerson was concerned with, and so living an authentic life? By communicating with someone over the Internet, we're not hearing a real voice, looking at a real person, and this certainly deprives us of some elements human contact that we need to get elsewhere, but is using such technology essentially dehumanizing? Is the fact that I wear boots mean I'm no longer in touch with the soil? At an extreme, imagine an astronaut on the moon, who can't walk outside without protection, whose air has to be purposefully generated and conserved: would that be a life missing something essential to true humanity, and even if so, are the real effects of our present and anticipated technological advances harmful in this way?
On what grounds do we allow in some technology but not others? I think that we have to evaluate each piece of technology (and society!) individually to see if it helps make life more satisfying or not. (Note that there's the separate, ecological question of how living certain ways harms the environment. That's important, certainly, but is irrelevant to Heidegger's formulation at least: we're concerned in this discussion with what makes life, for us, worth living. Of course, any technology that turns our air to ash, kills off animals and other features of nature that make life more satisfying, etc., will matter impact this discussion.)
These discussions should be very familiar: For instance, television can clearly be harmful, as anyone know lived through the days where you actually had to watch commercials, and where every show had to aim at the least common denominator of idiocy. So parents nowadays often have pretty well thought out approaches to what their kids can watch and how much. As with alcohol, masturbation, video games, and even books, intemperance is a constant temptation for adults, with no real mechanism available beyond individual self-control to keep us from indulging until we screw up our lives. Technology now allows us to watch TV via phones on a near-constant basis if we want to do that. So this is another pre-existent form of conflict, a problem, that technology forces us to actually confront. If you have an addictive personality, and you now have more access to substances that might screw you up, then you have to deal with your personal problems.
Ultimately, there's simply a great deal of room for individuals' tastes to determine their attitudes toward technology. Some clinical findings might tell us that certain video games or media are harmful when taken in certain doses, or that staring at a screen for too much of your day can screw up your eyes, or that cell phones give you brain cancer. Other things we can discover by ourselves, such that binge watching or all-night video-game sessions leave you groggy and probably boring. (Likewise, reading too many formulaic romance or mystery novels, or being obsessed with going to live sporting events, or any number of other low-tech behaviors can have negative consequences.) None of this adds up to a blanket denunciation of technology that any reasonable person should need to pay attention to.
And back to the central point, none of this should make people interested in solving the problem of work rule out, in advance, potential technological solutions. I think in the case of Thoreau, he used some technology (his hammer, his knowledge of building, board other people had already cut from trees, nails made in factories, etc.) while eschewing other technology in a somewhat arbitrary way, so he could feel he was being pure and principled while still really taking advantage of the very thing he was railing against. So maybe instead of aiming for purity and naturalness, we should just try to clearly and without prejudice examine all the available options for solving our problems. If you're not a crank, it shouldn't be hard to admit that some technologies are on balance helpful, and some aren't; government actions if actually successful are fine, even if historically there have been a lot of mis-administered fuck-ups; corporate actions aren't necessarily evil just by being corporate. And yes, there's "always something," always some new challenge to deal with in the light of some advance (like, say, the challenges that come up in a new relationship), but that doesn't mean that advancing wasn't worth the effort and we should just stop.
-Mark Linsenmayer
I think that Thoreau should be put in the context of 19th century industrialization, which was very dirty, destructive of nature and exploitative of workers. One only has to read a Dickens novel or a bit of Marx to see the damge done by the very rapid growth of industry. I’ve read that life expectancy declined during the early years of industrialization because crowding in newly built cities brought tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. Thoreau was hardly alone in being freaked out by the process of industrialization, although his solution was a bit extreme.
Conditions in some developing third world countries are pretty bad these days. Look at how Ebola spreads in African cities with minimal sanitary protection. Modernization in the third world today seems to produce a fundamentalist backlash rather than Thoreau’s, as far as I know.
However, technology used today is far cleaner than that of Thoreau’s day and working conditions far more decent in developed countries and even in middle-income countries. Marx, in positing technology as liberating, seems to have been a more perceptive critic of early capitalist industrialization than Thoreau was.
I never got the impression that we should take Thoreau too seriously. The term back to nature isn’t a meaningful term. The universe produced humans and we are as much a part of nature as anything else. Yet the products of human technology do seem different then other things. With a gun and the proper clothing a person can survive living off of ten square miles of land but they would have little time for anything else. The gun and clothes aren’t natural whatever that means. We are social animals so it’s not natural to live alone but once we live with others human society becomes all important and that’s not natural either. I think that people would like to live comfortably in the woods the way the animals do. That would seem natural. it can be done with a change in genes and a lot of technology but people will want to go home again. I think the term back to nature is a great starting off point for a nice relaxing day dream. When it’s over we can wake refreshed and rejoin our “unnatural” world.
You’ve grossly overstated Thoreau’s anti-technological sentiment, which, even in Walden, is much more skepticism than Luddite-like crankiness against technology for technology’s sake. He uses tools right and left in Walden (not to mention that he’s a farmer over those years, a deeply technological endeavor). In his life, he was a surveyor and pencil-maker — both significantly technological endeavors for the times. I agree that much of his criticism of technology is political — that the purveyors of technology are less interested in “making life easier” than in making money and getting people dependent upon gadgets that they don’t really need. That technology often removes freedom by adding burdens than enhancing freedom. At bottom, his criticism is against simple faddishness and for thinking through whether you really need the technology you embrace or whether it’s really going to present more problems than it will solve. Technological development is riddled with presenting at least as many problems as it solves and/or simply trading one burden for another. As a somewhat trivial, though relevant example, the advent of powerful computer wordprocessing did *not* make writing problem sets or syllabi faster when I was an undergrad physics assistant, it actually made it take longer and made it more irritating. Why? Because the standard for what ought to be produced in terms of layout and professionalism increased. All that the wordprocessing did was make it easier to do professional layout jobs, good on the one hand, but bad on the other because the standard of production went up for trivial reasons. I spent many, many more hours getting the layout right than in actually writing the problems. The standard of work increased and the burden on me increased — it did not decrease. A less trivial example is the automobile, which, on the one hand produces the ability to travel farther more easily but quickly turns into dead-eyed commuting for hours and hours for many people, including myself for 15 years. (And no, the technological solution of tele-commuting is far from a universal solution to the problem, both due to the kinds of work required (plumbers and experimental physicists don’t telecommute) and the problem it presents to properly working *with* people, which is deeply important for many sorts of work, both for the work itself and for the satisfaction of that work.) So, I would agree that rejecting all technological developments out of hand amounts to “crankiness”, but I don’t think skepticism about their true benefits does and I think you’ve mis-placed your own irritation about technological skepticism on Thoreau’s head.
“127. A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological support-systems. When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel much faster and farther than a walking man. But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man’s freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one’s own pace one’s movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price. Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional. Since the introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that they HAVE TO depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own movement than when driving a car. Even the walker’s freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway. (Note this important point that we have just illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.)”
Guess the source….google will find it quickly.
Questioning technology doesn’t mean that one is Ted Kazcynski. 🙂
Did you guys (PEL) ever consider an episode dealing with the Unabomber and the substance of his manifesto? It’s certainly a giant can of worms, but an interesting can nonetheless… Or is it just too controversial a topic?
I’m a technology skeptic myself, in the sense that I think it’s helpful to question the risks and benefits of the technological progress as a whole, and to look at possible trends in technology that may be detrimental to society. The good of technology in society can only be measured in relation to a definition of the good, and as you guys have talked about, the good is not an easy thing to pin down. Some themes in Ted Kazcynski’s ‘manifesto’ mirror themes in Thoreau, albeit taken to a simplistic extreme, although Kazcynski’s reasoning is not without nuance.
Mark agrees that we ought question the risk/benefit ratio of each individual technology taken on its own, but he appears averse to taking a critical meta-view of the technological process itself. The advancement and spread of technology has its own structure and dynamics apart for any individual product of technology, so we ask, what is the harm in taking a critical look at this process as a whole? This perspective is not the same as making ‘universal’ claims about all technological products taken together. I am not claiming ‘all technological products are bad’, but rather asking us to look how the spread of technology changes the human condition. Saying technology makes our lives better, tout court, is a universal claim that ought put one on the look out for crankdom, just as simplistically saying technology is bad ought to. We can make arguments either way, and for this reason, I think crankdom is found in the strength and clarity of the argument, and not in any particular view. And further, it all comes down to questions of value. Not everyone values a peaceful society-although many do. Not everyone values fast-food chains and mega supermarkets-although many do. Some people simply enjoy striving for a meaningful existence, whatever that might mean.
I suspect, for instance, the appeal of ISIS to some, even to westernized people, is that the goals and values of technological society are for many unfulfilling. Not everyone values the creation of a disruptive startup company, climbing the corporate/academic ladder, wielding political power, or becoming a famous pop star, actor, of youtube sensation. These goals are largely created and advertised within the technological-industrial society, yet many people view these societal ideals as hollow, meaningless pursuits lacking in value. And here I can see where the concept of New Work becomes helpful–to provide other ideals for people to pursue.
Here’s another, by a more famous and less infamous individual:
“Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal”
Hello Mark et al.,
I mostly agree with Dylan’s take on Thoreau and technology, but would further add that the context of his living in the early to mid-nineteenth century may explain the author’s hyperbole. And that the word “technology” is wanting in its overly broad application. I believe Thoreau to be concerned with technology on the grand scale. The technology of the “Railroad” is that of a large system, not of an isolated technological implement like the hammer. A hammer is a technological one-off; the functioning railroad is an apparatus built by the toil of many thousands, with each life wasted or lost represented by a wooden “sleeper” upon which its ceaseless wheels ride.
As such I believe Thoreau to be warning us not so much against technology per se, but as to what cost any individual should pay for the seeming benefit to one’s self or another. A calculation must be made: is the result of the endeavor worth the effort and cost required? For Thoreau I believe his answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no, but it is our responsibility as humans to make the calculation soberly and thoughtfully, for how else can one live “deliberately?”