#technological fix

Image of Arctic Ice by Pink floyd88 a via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;. As we head into a ever warming world, some experts and politicians are embracing a possible solution to climate change called geoengineering. Theoretically geoengineering could slow down climate change, stop it, and maybe even remove carbon from the air. It sounds like…

When the IPhone 3G had been released, it was advertised with the tagline “There is an app for that”. The tagline itself has changed since then, but the attitude of Apple has not. I myself have not owned an IPhone in years (my finances have managed to convert me to Android), but before sitting down to write, I asked a friend if I could borrow his. Booting up the famous App Store, it’s obvious that it has changed a lot in its layout – but without meaning to sound like a shill for the company, it really does offer an app for the nebulous “that” to this day. Be it instant messaging, dating, food, fashion, health advice or just old-fashioned procrastinatory mobile gaming, they have it all – and that’s just in the top 200. The store is also home to plenty of fresh apps, a lot of them claiming to be the new solution to…well, pretty much anything. An article from 2013 references a now-gone WIRED headline, stating “Africa? There is an app for that!”. Honestly, it reminds me of that one search engine that devotes a majority of its revenue to planting trees. Technology is here to bring us salvation from whatever could possibly ail us.

Perhaps this fetishization of technological solutions is the most common manifestation of what’s popularly referred to, in hi-tech circles, as “solutionism”. This word originated as criticism: that it was too convenient to assume we can apply a quick, fix-like solution to all that is wrong with the world around us. It was soon appropriated, however, and became a mark of pride – the line of reasoning being that seeing everything as a problem ready to be solved is perhaps the most productive attitude can take.

Surely, this must be a new phenomenon, right? This attitude needs a flourishing technological environment, in order to inspire such faith in scientists – and our state of technological advancement is unprecedented. Surely, this must be a new state of affairs, and we don’t have any piece of history to look upon to analyse past mistakes and perhaps consider their implications!

Well, the author of this blog has had to suffer through three years of Latin education in high school, where he had to memorise a variety of sayings. One of these was “nihil nova sub sole”, which, roughly, translates to “we, as humans, have always been morons, and it’s not likely to change anytime soon”.

Meet Dr Alvin Weinberg. He’s made some bold claims regarding technological solutions in his life, and we probably should have learned from his hubris.

Facetiousness aside, it’s perhaps prudent to take a historical perspective on the issue. To do that, we need not look further than to the works of rockstar sociologist extraordinaire, Karl Marx. “Technology discloses man's mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.” This statement by him manages to summarize the importance of technology in a society so succinctly that it, in and of itself, is the basis of an entire school of social theory called “Technological Determinism”. (This tends to be the case with Marx – whatever he said, it usually ends up being relevant in someone’s theoretical paper.) However, if technology “lays bare [man’s] mode of formation of his social relations”, then it would stand to reason that changes in technology can achieve changes in society, right? Going further, could we also use technology to fix society – or human nature itself?

Well, this was how Dr Alvin Weinberg thought of the issue. He became so fixated on this idea that he can be credited with coining the term “technological fix” – the concept that a certain problem can be ‘fixed’, if only we can find or invent the situation-appropriate technology. Weinberg (1915 – 2006) was a nuclear physicist and a government consultant – and hopelessly optimistic in a time of rapid technological advancements. His career was active in the period after World War 2, when, amidst the recovery efforts, a new wave of scientific optimism was born. Initially termed as technological optimism, its proponents came to believe that a technocratic attitude – analysis and rationale – were the way for social improvement. Weinberg believed in this as well, but went further. He took the notion that any social issue can be resolved via technological innovation as a given, and made great effort to popularize this idea. “The neat trick [is that] social problems could be converted into technological problems”, he told a colleague of his.

The social scientist in me, of course, can’t help but sneer with contempt at the arrogance of the STEM-field scientist. This contempt, however, evaporates to be replaced with abject horror, on confronting what can perhaps be called Weinberg’s wildest idea in his lifetime.

The go-to parable of technological fixes in the era has been that of streetcars with foldable steps. The story went that originally, streetcars had stairs on their sides, and people kept standing on them, causing an obvious health-and-safety risk. They initially forbid people from standing there, then finding they did not listen, threatened them with a large fine. Still, everybody kept doing it, making the legislation unenforceable. The solution? Engineers made streetcars with foldable stairs, eliminating the issue altogether. It was this perspective they tried to apply to any and all problems, including changing human nature itself. Weinberg thought time has come for technology to eliminate war. His proposed solution? The H-bomb.

I’ll give you a few seconds to let the fact sink in.

(pictured: world_peace.exe)

Our man thought that the best possible solution to eliminate all war within mankind was, in the spirit of “speak softly and carry a big stick”, to come up with the mightiest stick of them all. “Before the H-bomb”, Weinberg said, “the problem of war was largely viewed as being insoluble unless we changed ‘human nature’, but by exploiting the crassest notion of self-preservation, the H-bomb offers a quite different ‘solution’ to the problem of war than the whole Judaeo-Christian tradition teaches is possible”.

Perhaps on consideration, the idea could have had some merits. After all, the destruction thermonuclear missiles would cause has indeed bequeathed a measure of reluctance on global superpowers. However, in the retrospective of more than half a century, war is really not gone from Earth. On one hand, while mutually assured destruction has been enough of a deterrent so far, we did have some close calls (the Cuban Missile Crisis comes to mind). On the other, while superpowers do indeed avoid conflict in our times, the situation gave rise to “proxy wars”, where the participants, instead of duking it out between themselves using their full military power, they choose proxies that they support – effectively subcontracting war.

The point of this little ramble would be to, as a social scientist, put up an something of a red flag, in case anyone is paying attention. It’s chilling to see that technological hyperfixation has blinded us in the past already. Of course, the H-bomb was not created as a technological fix – and thus, it’s perhaps not the ideal case for blind devotion to solutionism. However – at least for me – it’s the loudest example for sure. Social sciences are frequently the subject of mockery (I literally cannot count the times I have heard the phrase “it’s not a real science”) but give us this one thing: our issues are frequently mind-bogglingly complex. We operate with more variables than we could count (and no, that’s not a jab at how sociologists can’t do maths). This is not to say that we shouldn’t try to simplify our issues, or to try and apply technological fixes to problems around us. If we didn’t, how could any sort of progress occur? It would be ludditism to dismiss technology just for the virtue of being technology. Rather, we should slow down and check if we are not trying to put duct tape on a crack in the road by ignoring the true depth of the issue.

Aaaah. Must not read all the things. But definitely bookmarking this new article by urban geographer Federico Caprotti on eco-cities to read later.

A technological fix or technical fix refers to using engineering or technology to solve a problem.

An attitudinal fix refers to solving a problem or resolving a conflict by bringing about an attitude change.

Example: Tooth decay

Technological fix: treating the community water supply with a low level of sodium fluoride

Attitudinal fix: an educational campaign promoting good nutrition and taking better care of their teeth.