IN a few decades, historians and philosophers will write about the early 21st century as a major crossroads in the evolving story of humankind. They will recall how it was at that particular historical juncture that cutting edge ‘smart’ technology changed the face of social interactions, and the meaning of time and space.

Technology has been at the forefront of many such defining moments throughout the modern era. But in writing history as grand narrative, important and decidedly murky aspects of the story inevitably get left out.

While our world would not look the way it does today without the contributions of modern science and technology, there have been significant fallouts as well — science and technology are, after all, cause and consequence of human effort, and the history of settled humanity is as much a history of exploitation and injustice as it is one of progress and prosperity.

Technology cannot be considered an ‘objective good’.

Technology cannot be considered an unambiguous and ‘objective good’ when one considers how often it has been at the service of empires and ruling classes throughout the modern era. Take, for example, the manner in which dam-building lobbies — donors; engineering, construction and mineral exploration companies; and state bureaucracies — continue to impose ostensibly apolitical technologies even when the impacts of their interventions are at least as ecologically and socially destructive as they are constructive.

In short I want to note simply that there is a significant debate to be had about the role that science and technology have played in shaping modernity at large. In this spirit, I believe that it is necessary to think critically about the direction that science and technology will take us in the future.

The speed with which the internet and ‘smart’ technologies are reshaping social relations is staggering. The instantaneous sharing of images, real-time video and the written word across the length and breadth of the planet stands out as the most prominent aspect of the ‘information revolution’, but wealth and other flows are also being transformed in unprecedented ways.

More than ever, the ‘smart’ world that we inhabit resembles the image of capitalist society that Marx depicted all those years ago — what he called a state of ‘generalised commodity production’. Put simply, just about everything in the social world can and is being made into a ‘thing’ that can be bought and sold, and the new information technologies are facilitating commodity flows at a scale unimaginable even a few decades ago.

There are many things one could say about capitalism as a state of generalised commodity production, but I want only to raise some anecdotal questions about cutting-edge information technologies.

First, more and more people with access to these technologies spend a great deal of time on screens espousing an identity other than their real one. That is to say that one can simulate an alter-personality that may bear almost no resemblance to one’s actual character traits. It is one thing to exercise the imagination but something else to abstract entirely from reality. Could it be that science-fiction films depicting a dystopic future in which the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ becomes blurred are actually an accurate indicator of where we are headed?

Second, children are literally becoming addicted to ‘smart’ technologies at an increasingly younger age. Parents who want a break from the hands-on business of child-rearing find it convenient to give kids a tablet or some other screen which keeps them occupied, sometimes for hours on end. Many parents might content themselves that their children are engaging with ‘educational’ mate­rial, but they neglect to consider the effects of screen addiction on the overall process of socialisation.

Third, while it is undoubtedly convenient to access information, recreational goods and services and even political ideas from screens without having to exit the comforts of built environments, a case can be made that too much ‘convenience’ actually encourages apathy. In the Pakistani context, for instance, I am convinced that the surfeit of political content on private television actually demobilises ordinary people inasmuch as they feel no need to be participants in politics, instead choosing to be pure consumers of talk-shows, televised ‘revolutions’ and so on.

In posing such questions I am not positing an avowedly anti-modernist position. I am simply following in the line of many critics of capitalist modernity that have underlined the fact that science and technology are not ‘objective’ facts which can and should be celebrated in and of themselves.

There is little doubt that cutting-edge technologies have potentially liberating effects for large segments of humanity, and could help to re-establish the balance between us and our increasingly fragile eco-system. But continuing to live in a world in which euphoria over technological developments glosses over the reality of social relations is a make-believe story with a potentially ugly end.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, March 13th, 2015

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