One of the things that gives the mythology of progress its emotional power is the circular logic at its center. From within the confines of the myth, whats new is better than whatever it replaces by the simple fact that its newer, and whatever our technology happens to be good at is more important than the things it does poorly, especially when older methods did a better job of these latter than newer ones do. I had a useful reminder of this the other day, thanks to one of the readers of The Archdruid Report, who critiqued my recent post Technological Triage with a certain degree of heat. One of his central points was that technology is here to stay, no matter what the future holds, because its better than any alternative. What is certain is that technology will not disappear, he wrote: ...the engineers outlook and the scientists methods will continue to be applied to problems. And they will continue to provide better results for questions involving the physical world than magical thinking of any sort.
His comment missed a central point of my post, of course, which is that theres no such thing as technology in the singular, only technologies in the plural. The notion that technology is a single monolithic thing is a convenient bit of mystification, used to hide the fact that our society, like all others, picks and chooses among available technological options, implementing some and neglecting others. This needs hiding because most of these choices are made by influential members and groups within Americas political class for their own private profit, very often at the expense of the rest of the public. Wrapping the process in a smokescreen of impersonal inevitability is a convenient way to keep awkward questions from being raised via what remains of the democratic institutions of an earlier age.
