Lessons From the Amish

Having grown up near Pennsylvania Dutch country, I know surprisingly little about the Amish. The extent of my knowledge includes only the great variety of delicious deserts they make. So, I have to take the word of Kevin Kelly, who has spent much time with the Amish, in order to understand their approach to technology.

According to Kelly's research, there are very few examples of any cultures prohibiting the use of technology. Of course, many people decide not to drive, watch TV, or pay for data plans, but it's not often that we as a nation, culture, or society say 'No' to technology. The Amish, however, do this all the time.

Amish love their scooters

I had always thought that the Amish were anti-technology and lived in an unchanging world. In fact, they are obsessed with technology. Early adopters try out new technologies and the community sees what happens. Right now, for example, they're experimenting with solar power and cell phones. Standard land-line phones are typically housed in shacks far away from homes. Cell phones will likely be limited to areas outside the home, such as vans, if they are adopted.

That's right--the Amish use electricity, automobiles, refrigeration, genetically modified crops, and many other modern conveniences. But they use them in their own, deliberate ways. Kelly notes that:

• They are selective.
• They evaluate new things by experience instead of by theory.
• They have criteria by which to make choices.
• The choices are not individual but communal.

What is the problem that the Amish have found with many new technologies? They disrupt the strong familial and communal life that they cherish. These values are so important that the Amish make sure everyone who is a part of the community wants to be there--young adults are free to live like non-Amish for a few years during a period they call Rumspringa before they freely choose to be Amish.

Amish solar paneling--look carefully

For us non-Amish, it is very difficult to make choices about technology for society at large, since it is not clear what criteria we all share. Even individually, it is hard to resist the push of smartphones, automobiles, or running shoes.

Even if we agree on what we want from technology (a pretty big 'if' in today's political climate), it's very hard to know what a technology really is until is has gained widespread adoption. Edison only considered the phonograph as a vehicle for music as an afterthought. Ford couldn't have imagined the drive-through's, cruisin' music, or urban sprawl made possible by automobiles. These 'second-order' effects happen because technologies are constantly being adapted for new uses and being combined with other technologies. For this reason, it's impossible to decide that a technology is bad a priori.

Based on the principles of Amish experimentation, Kelly suggests that we adopt the following goals:

• Anticipation
• Continual assessment
• Prioritization of risks, including natural ones
• Rapid correction of harm
• Redirection, not prohibition

These are still a tall order, but they're more reasonable than trying to achieve Amish-like levels of consensus. The principles are the same: open discussion, experimentation, observation, and risk-assessment.  Let's try it out and then talk about it.

Do Technologies Have Politics?

I've been exploring the idea that technology isn't just a collection of things which can be used interchangeably for either good or ill. Technologies shape the world and the range of choices we have. For example, in my last post, I suggested that real-time technologies may have effects for the ways we do finance. Our question today is: if technologies can shape financial decisions, can they shape politics as well?

Riot!

It's one thing to say that technologies are used for political ends and another to say that technology is political. The latter is Langdon Winner's claim. If politics is about power and authority, then at least some technologies are political if they embody, define, or exert the power of some people over others.

Technologies are obviously political when they are used as tools of control. It is often feared that new computer technologies will allow governments to spy on people in order to control illegal activities. But forms of control can take much subtler forms. For example, when Robert Moses designed many public works in New York City in the mid 20th century, he designed them so that people could not get to them via public transportation. The overpasses he constructed have a clearance of only 9 feet--far too low for buses and those who would ride them to get to Jones Beach. Similarly, many people don't realize that the grand boulevards of Paris were designed by Baron Haussmann in the mid 19th century as a form of riot control.  As a Penn State alum, I can tell you that narrow streets are much more conducive to riots than open fields.

These are examples of technologies being used to empower some and dis-empower others. But are some technologies inherently political? I think so. Marx and Engels called for factory workers to take over control of 'the means of production,' but Engels later argued that the very technology of industrial manufacturing requires a division between workers and elites. How can you run a factory without a boss?

Winner endorses solar power over nuclear energy because it can be decentralized and doesn't require the scientific and bureaucratic elites who make decisions without the knowledge of anyone else, as in the case of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. For months, the Japanese government and TEPCO lied to people about the seriousness of the accident. Countless polls show that support for nuclear power is at an all-time low across the world, with Germany abandoning future plans for construction. Nuclear fallout is an issue, of course, but I think people are really worried about the forms of power that are inseperable from nuclear energy.

Visit Japan, future skate park capital of the world.

Technologies that shapes public opinion and collective decision-making are also inherently political. Before the invention of the printing press, it would have been impossible to have democracy on anything other than a very small scale. Though it required a set of elites who broadcast information to information consumers, and though, as Walter Lippmann worried, most people would never get the whole truth, the dynamic duo of newspapers and democracy were better than any alternative. Pamphlets made the American Revolution possible.

I, for one, welcome our new search engine overlords.

Today, internet technologies are already reshaping power. The decline of major 1-directional or broadcast media, including newspapers, is heralded by some as the dawn of a new, more democratic age. Like much breathless optimism about technology, such claims should be taken with a grain of salt. Most internet traffic is routed through about five sites, a problem Michael Hindman terms Googlearchy. Most influential political bloggers are white males who went to ivy league schools. But there are many precedents for thinking that new technologies can undermine and recreate power in radical ways. These will be fought by the old guard and embraced by the new.

It comes back again to: what kind of technology do we want?

Technology and the Limits of Ethics

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Everyone--or almost everyone--knows the Golden Rule. It's some variant of: Do unto others as you'd have others do unto you. There's the negative form of Confucius:  What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others. The Ten Commandments tries to lay it out in a bit more detail with its well-known thou shalt's. In fact, many people have tried to show that all ethics are really rooted in the principle of reciprocity. Whether or not this is true, it does not tell us whether or not ethics should be about reciprocity. Why shouldn't ethics evolve over the course history, much in the way science has? Is there anything technology can teach us about ethics, or ethics about technology?

Philosopher of technology Hans Joas argues that, despite the vast differences between religious beliefs and traditions, ethics principals typically share the following four features. See if you agree.

• First, they are usually anthropocentric. The Golden Rule is explicitly about humans and their relation to other humans. Any consideration of animals, ecosystems, geographic formations, or interstellar bodies must be for the sake of humans.
• Second, ethical principles typically refer to immediate actions and problems we currently have . They don't mention future generations or even our future selves. The Ten Commandments says to honor thy father and thy mother, but not your children or children's children.
• Third, ethical principals are about the things we do, not the beings that we are. You cannot turn the Golden Rule into a statement about being, such as become who'd others would want you to be. 
• Finally, ethical principals treat technology as ethically neutral or ignore it entirely. Technologies are simply means to ends. It is the ends that are important--the means can be ignored.

Joas argues that recent technological developments have put all of these assumptions into question, and for two reasons. First, technology has increased the range of consequences beyond immediate human interactions. For this reason, knowledge has become essential to being ethical. Today many ethical arguments start with questions like, "Did you know that your chicken comes from..." or "Did you know those clothes are manufactured by the people in..." or "Did you know that such-and-such company gives funding to..."  It is no longer sufficient simply to consider the situation at hand.

Second, technology has made the future of humanity uncertain. We can eliminate human life forever or we can extend it indefinitely (at least, in principal). We will soon be able to create genetic superpeople. Even everyday actions like driving or eating implicate thousands of people around the globe and may have consequences for future generations. And it's not just about people. It is no longer a given that the Earth can heal itself no matter what we do.

What would ethics grounded in the reality of today look like? It's hard not to think that the future of ethics is politics--both state-centered politics involving legislation and treaties as well as as decentralized collective decision-making about the world we want to leave for the future. The latter is already happening at the water cooler and on blogs. Is this enough? Is ethics fine the way it is? Or do we need a prophet of a new set of commandments for the Internet Age?

From My Cold, Dead Hands!

Do guns kill people or do people kill people? A famous NRA spokesperson might say that a gun is just one of many tools a killer could use--the problem is not guns, but people. Educate people, and you'll solve the problem. Gun control supporters, on the other hand, argue that putting a gun into someone's hands changes them. It makes them do things they wouldn't do otherwise. If you remove access to guns, you'll remove the main cause of violent death.

Whether or not you are politically inclined, you've probably had a similar discussion that centered around a technology like firearms. For example, are hackers social deviants who just happen to create malware and viruses? Or does the internet and the availability of free software tools create malevolent coders? Similarly, do smartphones make people terrible bores at social events, or do they provide anti-social people an excuse to opt out?  Finally, and in a more positive vein, are people smarter today, or do we just have better technologies, like Wikipedia?

These questions come down to the same thing: What is the cause of an action? Is it the technology that is a means to the action (this might be called the materialist explanation)? Or is it a person's intentions or ability to do something (this might be called the sociological explanation)? Should we blame things or people?

Maybe these questions are not framed quite right. Sociologist Bruno Latour helps us break out of these nature/nurture debates with what is called Actor-Network Theory. According to Latour, both a gun and a person are actors or causes. (Since it seems strange to call an object an actor, he uses the word 'actant.') A gun + a person is a new actor. A person doesn't simply use a gun, nor does the gun simply alter a person. The technology creates new possibilities for a person, but a person creates new possibilities for a gun.

Of course, all advanced technologies involve a chain or network of actants. In the case of guns, this might include political states ordering guns and determining who has access to them, factory workers manufacturing guns, and users of guns, such as armies. Without a network like this, guns could not make sense. Latour says, "747's don't fly--airlines do." That is, a 747 would be worthless without a network of thousands of people, concepts, and things.

Furthermore, any component of a technological device (including the device itself as a whole) can be treated either as a black box or as an almost infinite chain or network of actants. For instance, computers involve software, wetware, and hardware. Hardware involves hardware components like hard drives. Hard drives involve other components, like magnetic tape. Magnetic tape implicates the historical development of manufacturing processes, the logical abstractions of information theory, and the decisions of many decentralized people, including programmers, users, and business people. When talking about the technology of a speed bump, Latour says that it's "ultimately not made of matter; it is full of engineers and chancellors and lawmakers, commingling their wills and their story lines with those of gravel, concrete, paint, and standard calculations."

The meaning 'obey the speed limit' is translated into 'protect your car's suspension' by the technology of the speed bump

So, what is to blame? People or guns? Latour's answer is: the entire network of actants (guns, gun owners, engineers, and manufacturers), which are themselves products of years of experimentation and learning. Unfortunately, this answer is probably not very satisfying to political junkies. It cautions us to be careful about what we develop, but what about what has already been developed? It is much harder to change an existing network than the two proposed solutions: education or the banning of guns.