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Praise for culture and technology

Jonathan Sterne, author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format and The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction

This book is part of the Peter Lang Media and Communication list. Every volume is peer reviewed and meets the highest quality standards for content and production.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the "Deutsche Nationalbibliografie"; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

© 2015 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006 www.peterlang.com

Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.

Lawrence Grossberg and Stuart Hall Teachers and mentors without peer

Source: Linocut attributed to James Belvedito, 1933, Library of Congress, Harmon Foundation Inc, Records: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/91783820/

List of Illustrations ........................................ ix

Acknowledgments .............................................. xi

Introduction: On the Need for a Primer ........................ 1

I: Culture and Technology: The Received View............... 3

1. The Power and Problem of Culture, The Power

and Problem of Technology ........................... 5

2. Progress ......................................... 13

5. Control........................................... 59

7. Appropriate Technology ........................... 87

8. The Unabomber .................................... 97

III: Cultural Studies on Technological Culture............ 105

9. Meaning.......................................... 107

10. Causality........................................ 117

11. Agency .......................................... 137

12. Articulation and Assemblage...................... 149

13. Politics and Economics .......................... 165

14. Space and Time .................................. 179

15. Identity......................................... 197

16. Critical Conjunctures ........................... 215

Notes ....................................................... 231

References .................................................. 243

Index ....................................................... 259

Figure 1: Industry ....................................... vi

Figure 2: Potomac Electric Power Co. Electric Appliances. Waffle Iron .................................... x

Figure 3: Bibel und Brille des Kanonikus ................ xii

Figure 10: Old Water Wheel on Creek to North of Convent................................................. 75

Figure 11: A Sledge Hammer in the Hands of a

Husky Iron Worker ............................... 76

Figure 12: Nature Meets Technology ........................ 86

Figure 13: Ted Was Right .................................. 96

Figure 14: Electric Oven. Setting Electric Oven II...... 105

Figure 15: All in All Just Another Hole in the Table...... 106

Figure 16: Train Wreck at Montparnasse Station ....... 116

Figure 17: Footprint on Earth............................. 136

Figure 18: Dew on Spider Web ............................. 148

Figure 19: Workers at Work ............................... 164

Figure 20: Space and Time ................................ 178

Figure 21: MMW ........................................... 196

Steam Pump ..................................... 214

Figure 23: Miscellaneous Subjects. Telephone, Directory and Globe ................................................ 230

Figure 2: Potomac Electric Power Co. Electric Appliances. Waffle Iron

Source: Photography by Theodor Horydczak, ca. 1920, Library of Congress, Horydczak Collection: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/thc1995000607/PP/

OUR DEBTS ARE MANY. Our families, first and foremost, deserve our sustained gratitude for, well, just about everything. Jennifer thanks Kenny Svenson, Pam Pels, Joe Pels, Linda Jantzen, Sue Slack, Laura Pagel, and a whole pack of dogs. Greg thanks Elise Wise, Catherine Wise, Brennen Wise; Donna and Tracy Wise; Sue and Carl Dimon; two dogs, and one cat.

The scholarly friends who have inspired and supported us constitute the most treasured part of the intellectual life. Thank you to Lawrence Grossberg, Stuart Hall, James Carey, Langdon Winner, Patty Sotirin, Kim Sawchuk, Sarah Sharma, Matt Soar, Jonathan Sterne, Anne Balsamo, Gil Rodman, Greg Seigworth, John Nguyet Erni, Mark Andrejevic, Steve Wiley, Ted Striphas, Charles Stivale, James Hay, Gordon Coonfield, Toby Miller, Andrew Herman, Ron Greene, Mehdi Semati, Meaghan Morris, Paul Bowman, Jody Berland, Jeremy Packer, Melissa Adams, Bryan Behrenhausen, Phaedra Pezzullo, Rob Poe, and Rob Spicer. Jennifer thanks the Department of Humanities at Michigan Technological University, especially her colleagues and graduate students in communication and cultural studies. Jennifer thanks Kette Thomas, Sue Collins, Stefka Hristova, Randy Harrison, Nate Carpenter, Mies Martin, Becky Soderna, and Wenjing Liu. She also thanks the Communication Department at North Carolina State University for support as a visiting professor. Greg thanks the faculty and staff of the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University, especially the folks in Communication Studies.

For enduring friendship outside the academy that brings balance and perspective to our lives, Jennifer thanks Melvi Grosnick, Terry Daulton, and Kathy and Chuck Wicker. Greg thanks all the Allens, Christians, Figueroas, Gelvins, Grells, Keiths, Marxs, Melchers, Villegas’es, Watsons, and Youngs, not to mention the wonderful folks at Dance Theater West (especially Frances Smith Cohen and Susan Sealove Silverman) for being our village. In addition, Greg would like to thank Sherrie and the good folks at White Cup Coffee for letting him camp out there for long stretches of time during the final editing of this book.

Source: Painting by Jan van Eyck, 1943, Wikimedia Commons, The Yorck Project, ZenodotVerlagsgesellschaftmbH wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jan_van_Eyck_059.jpg

On the Need for a Primer

TECHNOLOGICAL CULTURE HAS the power to shape attitudes and practices, but its power often goes unnoticed or is underappreciated. Every day it becomes increasingly important to understand and alter our relationship with technological culture. This is especially true when, as is so often the case, technological culture is shaping attitudes and practices that do not serve the interests of sustainability, equality, and peace. The scramble for non-renewable resources that both constitute and fuel technologies has contributed to strife, and sometimes war, of global proportions. New digital media technologies have enabled surveillance at a scale previously unimaginable. Inequitable delivery of health care is exacerbated, as expensive techniques of biotechnology are made unevenly available. Technological trash salts the earth and skies with pollution and provides toxic work for the most disadvantaged laborers on the planet. Global climate change, the fallout from all this technological madness, is widely denied in practice as the human imagination lives out the fantasy of unstoppable and infinite growth.

The stories that dominate education and the media are those that assert that technology is all good, all about progress, all about becoming superior kinds of human beings. That there is good is undeniable, but we have collectively lost perspective, lost the ability to critique the complexities of the technological culture in which we are immersed. Perhaps we haven’t lost it, because we may never really have had it. But now, with the consequences so seriously global, we need desperately to acquire this skill. We offer this book as a primer for that project.

Culture and Technology is a primer in three senses: 1) it is an introduction to the contributions of many generations of scholars and engaged individuals who provide helpful guidance for understanding technological culture, 2) it is an introduction to a coherent cultural studies approach to understanding and critiquing technological culture, and 3) it is a spark to light the fire of conscious and responsible engagement with technological culture.1

This is a much revised and expanded second edition. A lot has happened in the world since the publication of the first edition in 2005, and we have responded accordingly. We, Greg and Jennifer, have also learned a lot from the students who have used the first edition and from readers from all over the world who have sent us feedback.

A new first chapter considers more explicitly how we use a cultural studies concept of culture. A new final chapter adds the concept of the conjuncture as a tool for analyzing technological culture, a change that results in a transformed conclusion. In addition to these new chapters, we have completely rewritten most of Part III, which lays out our approach to cultural studies as it applies to technological culture. Two glaring lacunae in the first edition have been corrected: the chapter on space has become space and time; the chapter on politics has become economics and politics. What were two chapters on identity have been reconsidered as one. And the chapter on definitions has been corrected to reflect its real intention: it is about meaning. Throughout the book, we have updated examples where newer ones were more useful for understanding contemporary experience. We have incorporated many new technological developments: new social media, cloud computing, biomedia, Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance, the proliferation of e-waste, climate change, and so on. New research by remarkable scholars has been added, for example Sarah Sharma’s work on time and Natasha Dow Schüll’s work on addiction to machine gambling.

We do not profess to, or even attempt to, place before you contemporary technological culture in all its Technicolor intricacies. That isn’t possible. Instead there is a fourth sense in which we offer our work here as a primer. When painting a room that that is already painted in strong colors, you begin by applying a primer, a first thin coating of paint, after which you paint with a fully new color. The primer conditions the surface so that it is receptive to the new paint. This book is meant to be such an initial coating. It engages the brightly colored stories that currently color our understanding of technology and culture. It applies the primer, on top of which you are encouraged to contribute colorful new paint: to engage technological culture in your own circumstances, whatever and wherever they are, with theory, tools, and strategies meant to make the world a better place.

Culture and Technology

The Received View

Figure 4: Chrysler Tank Arsenal

Source: Photography by Alfred T. Palmer, ca. 1940–1946, Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photography Collection: http://www. loc.gov/pictures/item/oem2002009934/PP/

Figure 5: Compact Fluorescent

Source: Photograph by Giligone, 2008, Wikimedia Commons

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Compact_Fluorescent-bw.jpg

The Power and Problem of Culture, The Power and Problem of Technology

WHAT YOU KNOW TO BE TRUE MATTERS. When you know something, you act in accordance: your beliefs and actions support what you know to be true, correct, and good; your beliefs and actions resist what you know to be false, wrong, and bad. Once you really know something, it is difficult to shake loose from the power of those convictions that guide thinking and behavior to learn something new or different. What is true for the individual is even more pronounced at the broader cultural level. When a culture accepts that something is true, its political structure, economic structure, institutions, laws, beliefs, everyday practices, and systems of reward and punishment will be shaped in that knowledge.

Unfortunately, what is widely accepted as true does not always serve us well. When everyone knew that the universe was geocentric, it made good sense to arrest Galileo Galilei and repress his heliocentric cosmology. It took generations to achieve general cultural acceptance of the knowledge that the earth revolves around the sun. But before heliocentrism became widely accepted, certain religious institutions maintained power over thought and practice, and scientific enterprise was marginalized and discredited. Sometimes, in spite of broad cultural consensus, it pays to struggle with complacent knowing and “worry” your way to better stories about how the world works.

The knowledge you are least likely to question is often based on what you accept as true without question, because that knowledge is most strongly supported by the structures of culture and everyday life. The more powerfully aligned the structures and beliefs of a culture are, the more difficult the opportunities for change, even when change is, in practice, positive. Two things you probably know a lot about constitute the topic of this book: culture and technology. You know a

lot about culture, and you know a lot about technology. However, we submit that much of what you know about them does not, in all likelihood, serve you—or the broader culture—well. We offer some alternatives that we believe will serve us all better.

You Know a Lot About Culture

We all use the word “culture” often and commonly, as if we understand what it means. But do we really know what we are talking about? Raymond Williams’s insight ought to give us pause: “Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.”1 In tracing the use of the term, Williams considers its many historical and contemporary meanings, including: the implication of tending or cultivating (as in agri-culture); the distinctions between human (cultural) and material realities, between symbolic (cultural) production and material production, between culture and society, between culture and structure; the attribution of having something special when one is cultured; the designation of a separate popular culture as opposed to high culture; the characterization of national differences (as in German versus French culture); and the related naming of subgroups or subcultures within a national culture (as in hipsters or rural America). Sociologists have a number of quite different definitions for culture, as do anthropologists. There is very little agreement, it seems, when it comes down to it as to what culture means.

Let’s look at some aspects of Williams’s definitions. Despite differences there seems general agreement that culture is the domain of human organization and activity in engaging the “rest” of reality. However, in practice we hear the occasional assertion that some animals have culture too (from complex social organization to active learning and change to artistic practice). Some definitions imply some discrimination, expressed in the differentiation of either humans from others or between human groups. And there is not only differentiation but clear hierarchies implied: there is one culture over here, another over there; or this group has culture (and power and status) and that group does not; or culture is over here and over there is something else such as something material (like a technology), a structure (like an institution), a non-human being (like an animal), or a human considered less than cultured (like a homeless person).

By describing culture as “a whole way of life,” Williams means that it is the formation, arrangement, and organization of what we think, believe, value, feel, and do. However, culture is never static; rather, it is a process that entails changing relationships between what is old, what is new, and what is being reconfigured (the term we will introduce later is rearticulated). The process can

The Power and Problem of Culture

be seen as driven by the interrelated work of tradition and selection. On the one hand, culture is shaped by the work of tradition: that is, the meanings, values, artifacts, and practices that are handed down to us, that we learn (and learn about) from families, churches, schools, and so on. These include works of art and expression that are said to contain the values and worldview of a culture. On the other hand, culture is shaped by the work of selection: the selecting, challenging, arranging, and living of the artifacts and ideas in everyday life in the interactions with changing material conditions. Culture is thus a process whereby tradition is reconfigured in historical conditions of everyday life. Culture is both the traditions we are born into and how these are challenged (or reinforced) through our experiences of the world (and changing social, historical, and material conditions). At any particular time in the process of change, culture will express dominant values, feelings, beliefs, affects, and practices, but it will also carry with it residual features from earlier times or social formations (for example, there are still people who believe that the earth is flat) and emergent features that are new ideas and processes (for example, biotechnology is introducing new conceptions and practices of what it means to be human).3 The particular formation manifest by the relationship of dominant, residual, and emergent processes at a particular point in time is what Williams means by culture as “a whole way of life.”

To claim that “culture is ordinary” is to acknowledge that these cultural processes occur within the variety of practices that constitute everyday life. These include the whole range of activities in which people engage and within which people make meanings in their lives: from everyday expressions and practices such as a conversation over dinner or commenting on a tweet, to institutional structures and activities such as education or the practice of designing a new technology. Everyone participates in culture, therefore, because everyone engages in the practices that constitute their lives in relation to the lives of others. Culture is not the sole purview of the “cultured,” and popular culture (like reality television) is as much culture as high culture (like opera). The work of culture is thus pervasive: there is no culture over here and material reality over there. There is no culture over here and society over there. Culture is the process that connects the elements of everyday life, whether symbolic, structural, material, or affective.

The approach to culture advocated here requires sensitivity to the way in which contemporary culture has been shaped by tradition and selection. Tradition and the work of selection are powerful, in that they shape what we know to be true and influence everyday life in myriad ways. This approach also requires a willingness to recognize that culture changes. It changes in ongoing processes of selection, in the ways that tradition is challenged by our experiences, and will continue to change in directions of which we cannot be certain. The shape and direction of change are the result of individual changes of mind, of the efforts of individuals and organizations to do things differently, of structural changes in institutions, and of responses to changes in material circumstances (for example, the depletion of a natural resource).

Formal schooling still teaches that technologies are the spawn of genius inventors: Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, Gutenberg invented the printing press, and so on. You know you are supposed to know them, that list of often-memorized inventors. You may or may not know what a cotton gin is. You may or may not know that Gutenberg really developed a particular version of moveable type and that print technology is centuries older. The details are less important than the lesson you learned about where technology comes from: invention is the purview of individuals, geniuses for the most part.

Because these lessons are often combined—the desirability of the object and the belief in the technologically driven evolution of the human into a superior being—you have likely learned that, as James W. Carey once said, “Technology is the central character and actor in our social drama, an end as well as a means.” He added, “at each turn of the historical cycle it appears center stage, in a different guise promising something totally new.”4

O 9

You have also likely learned, crucially, that technology and culture are two separate things. That is why, for example, this book is titled Culture and Technology; it’s a familiar construction. In this case, however, the West’s scientific orientation, with its propensity to compartmentalize things into mutually exclusive categories, renders most people ill-equipped to understand interconnections, interrelationships, and the ways that any identity, artifact, or practice can be multiply inflected. Culture and technology are not identical, but they are not independent, isolated phenomena either. Of all the arguments we make in this book, this is no doubt the most difficult to learn anew. But without understanding interconnection, what we introduce later as articulation, we might as well be living on a metaphorically flat earth. The challenge we set out for you as you work your way through this book is to consider the ways that technology is cultural (and culture is technological), that is, the multiple ways that they are connected—articulated—to the values, feelings, beliefs, affects, institutions, and practices that constitute everyday life. We also encourage you to consider why and how that matters and how it might be different.

The stories we tell about technology, as illustrated above, matter. Stories about technology and culture look and feel different than stories of technological culture. Although the term is unfortunately clunky and inelegant, we use the term technological culture specifically to encourage resistance to compartmentalizing culture and technology. The term is meant to promote an understanding that culture has always been technological, and technologies have always been cultural. Technologies are integral to culture and not separate from it. There was no, is no, “technological age.” Human culture has always existed in relation to what we understand to be technologies: from voice, stone, and fire, to clock, computer, and nanotechnology.

Because the stories matter, because the stories are part of the received tradition (our elaboration of Williams’s concept of tradition), they remain powerful. Thus, if you want to understand contemporary technological culture, you have to understand the power of the received tradition (what we call in this book, the received view of culture and technology) as well as its problems. It is important to look at the work performed by the received

tradition of culture and technology. Our goal is to provide you with an alternative to these stories, an alternative called technological culture. Technological culture acknowledges interrelations and interconnections. While we wish to emphasize this alternative, we also want to leave you with an appreciation of how powerful and tenacious the stories (that is, the construction of “culture and technology”) are.

This primer is divided into three parts. This first part maps the received tradition. By mapping we mean exploring the cultural context, that is, the interconnections and interrelationships among values, feelings, beliefs, affects, institutions, and practices that have contributed to the formation of contemporary technological culture. To do this, we locate major themes, threads, questions, and contradictions in the way our (primarily American) culture deals with technology. In particular we explore the power of conceptions and practices of progress, convenience, determinism, and control. We explore their development in relation to a changing landscape of other cultural forces. We recognize that this received tradition is extremely powerful, but it is also one that warrants resistance.

Part II illustrates the fact that there has been, and indeed there is, resistance to the received tradition. We have chosen to illustrate this through consideration of representative kinds of resistance: Luddism, Appropriate Technology, and the Unabomber. In discussing each of these responses, we consider the ways they variously take up and resist the themes and practices in Part I. We point to the strengths and weaknesses of each of these forms of resistance. We also use them to “set the stage” for the intervention we propose in Part III. Some of what we learn from these forms of resistance is very useful, but some of what we learn we quite clearly dismiss as unacceptable or problematic.

Part III explores our proposed cultural studies approach to technological culture. It is an approach deeply steeped in theory that originates in cultural studies, but which has been developed by looking specifically at the concrete case of technology. We approach this task through the elaboration of key concepts in cultural studies with an emphasis on how they can be used to understand technological culture: meaning, causality, agency, articulation and assemblage, politics and economics, space and time, identity, and the conjuncture. It will be clear to the reader that throughout this book, from this first chapter on, we have been working with and building a case for the approach we advance specifically in Part III.

We conclude the primer with suggestions for engaging the future with the powerful tools which cultural studies provides. We look at issues (called problematics) which crop up across our contemporary technological culture, and discuss strategies of intervention. The goal is to better understand our contemporary conjuncture so that we may work to transform it in ways that are more just and equitable.

Figure 6: Conical Parachute

Source: Unknown artist, ca 1470s, Photograph by Lynn White, 1968, British Museum

Wikimedia Commons: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Conical_Parachute,_1470s, British_Museum_Add._MSS_34,113,_fol._200v.jpg

The Meanings of Progress

IMAGINE IF YOU WILL, standing at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the launch of a new ocean liner. This is a proud moment: a crowd is cheering, a band is playing. Why is this such an important event? Is it that the ship is the biggest ever, or the most luxurious, or the most sophisticated? Is it that the ship uses the latest instrumentation for guidance or the most efficient and powerful engines? Perhaps it is all of these things and more. But this ship launching is also an important moment because it is an example of progress. This new machine is evidence that the human race has moved forward, a sign that the race as a whole has improved, that life is now somehow better because this ship is in the world.

Perhaps this example of an ocean liner has reminded you of the story of the Titanic, which in 1912 was the biggest, fastest, most luxurious ship ever launched. It was the unsinkable ship. When the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage, it seemed a slap in the face of progress. Some wondered if we had overreached our place in the world and trusted technology too much.

In US culture, the idea of progress has been closely allied with the idea of technology, and vice versa: technology is progress, just as progress suggests more and new technology. But we have also begun to question this relationship between technology and progress. Is more technology always better? Is the world a better place now than it used to be? The purpose of this chapter is to examine the idea of progress: what progress means, and how technology gets involved. We will look at the story of progress that has been central to the telling of a US story (a story of the Industrial Revolution and the new frontier), and we will also look at how this story is often used as an argument to sell us new technologies, to denigrate other countries and peoples who do not share this story, and to control populations. Finally, we address the fact that it is largely seen as heresy to question the idea of progress and its relation to technology. Indeed, it is easy to dismiss ideas simply by claiming that they oppose progress, and it is easy to condemn a person simply by saying that he or she is standing in the way of progress.

The dictionary definition of progress is to move forward. If we are walking, we’re said to progress down the street. If we’re beginning to accomplish a task, we are said to be making progress. When you have read the first chapter of this book, you have made progress. That is, you’ve done more than before and are on your way to completing the project.

The dictionary meaning is, however, only the beginning of what progress means in an everyday cultural sense. To move forward is to move in one direction: forward as opposed to backward. Consequently, movement forward implies a direction or goal. Similarly, making progress toward the completion of a task implies an end point. Progress, then, in its cultural use, is not just movement forward, but movement toward something: a goal or endpoint. If a patient is said to be making progress, they are moving toward the goal of health. If a disease is said to be progressing, it is advancing, presumably, toward death.

In broad cultural terms, progress is often used to underscore the belief that humankind, as a whole, moves forward. Robert Nisbet, a sociologist who wrote extensively on progress, put it this way:

Simply stated, the idea of progress holds that mankind has advanced in the past— from some aboriginal condition of primitiveness, barbarism, or even nullity—is now advancing, and will continue to advance through the foreseeable future.1

In addition, as Nisbet sees it, this advancing is not mere movement, but a movement toward something. We aren’t marching blindly into a future. Rather, we are advancing toward what we envision as a utopia on Earth. Things will get better and better, and eventually we will achieve what we understand to be “the good life.” Progress shows us how far we’ve come, what we’ve achieved, and how much better life is now than it used to be. It also reveals to us where we think we are going.

The Goals of Progress

The goals or endpoints of progress may be strongly felt, but they are usually unstated, left for the cultural critic to determine by carefully “reading” the culture. However, whether a goal is stated or not, it typically takes the form of what is considered to be “the good life.” Most people have a sense of what, for them, the good life entails. It typically involves some of the following: family, community, happiness, leisure, health, wealth, harmony, adventure, and the accumulation of things, though not necessarily in these terms or in this order. Overall, however, two types of goals are associated with progress: material betterment and moral betterment. Material betterment might mean that life is more comfortable, that we are healthier, and that we have more things, more conveniences perhaps, as we discuss in Chapter 3. Moral betterment might mean that spiritually we are more enlightened and that we treat each other better and with more tolerance.

The goals of progress (again, usually assumed as part of unstated cultural knowledge) usually match the fundamental values of a society. Progress at a particular moment in the development of culture could be “a chicken in every pot,”

indicating a democratic value of universal health and physical well-being; “a car in every garage,” indicating the values of widespread personal mobility and private ownership; the absence of war or violence, indicating the value of peace and spiritual enlightenment, or a combination of all three. In any given historical context, understanding the assumed goals of progress is crucial to understanding that culture. Consequently, cultural critics who want to understand technological culture must focus on the everyday practice of culture in order to determine what people think the good life is and the role technologies play in attaining it.

In examining the contemporary relationship between culture and technology, one tendency that has been identified by cultural critics is that people often conflate or collapse the sense of progress as something merely new (merely moving) with progress as material and moral betterment (moving toward utopia). For example, using e-mail is said to be progress in relation to the postal service; that is, it is something new, a moving forward. But this newness tends to be equated—without questioning—with the sense of progress as material and moral betterment. Thus, it is assumed, life is better and we are better people with e-mail as part of our cultural experience. When we make this assumption explicit, we can see that the equation is not necessarily true. However, culturally, the tendency to equate the development of new technology with material and moral betterment typically operates without making the assumptions explicit. In part, that is how assumptions gain their power. To interrogate them explicitly is to demystify their power. To facilitate that process and untangle the confusion, we will explore two issues. First, we work to untangle the conflation of newness with material and moral betterment by examining the issue of criteria for measuring progress. Second, we explore the history of the idea of progress as it has come down to us in order to reveal the way this conflation has come about. And, finally, we explore the consequences of this tendency toward conflation.

The Importance of Criteria

How do we know if we are moving forward or not? How do we know if life is better? How do we know if we have progressed? In short, how do we measure progress? Measurement always involves criteria: the standards of reference that allow you to judge. A yardstick is a standard of reference that allows you to determine if one machine is taller than another. But finding an appropriate yardstick to measure progress is especially difficult given the qualitative nature of many of the goals of progress. How does one measure betterment? Happiness? Harmony? Spirituality? Morality?

Because it is much easier to count tangible things, it became common to use the measure of more things as a measure of progress. For example, if we produce more grain than we used to, that’s progress. Or, now that more than 80% of US households have a computer, that’s progress. Sometimes a measure of more (or fewer) occurrences of something indicates progress. For example, if the Internet has more traffic, that must be progress. However, if the mortality rate declines, that is, if fewer people are dying, that too would be considered progress.

The problem with relying on the numbers of things or occurrences as a measure of progress is that doing so reduces progress to those things that can be counted, losing sight of the qualitative, moral dimensions of progress. Simply put, more is not necessarily better. For example, technology writer Kevin Kelly presents an argument for progress based almost solely on quantifiable criteria. To the objection that material advances are not meaningful and “only intangibles like meaningful happiness count,” he writes: “Meaningfulness is very hard to measure, which makes it very hard to optimize. So far anything we can quantify has been getting better over the long term.”2 But just because a task is difficult, like considering “meaningfulness,” doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing.

More technology and new technology have been widely used as the yardsticks for progress. There are at least two reasons for this. First, because we most often think of technologies as things (as opposed to processes or practices, see Chapter 9), they are easily measured. To the degree that the culture accepts that more things equals progress, more technology is equated unproblematically with progress. Second, technologies in our culture are often identified as exhibiting and promoting still-potent key values of the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century: notably, scientific objectivity, efficiency, and rationality. When we value science and scientific objectivity, it is a small step to value its applications. More and new technologies—as applications of science—come to mean progress. When we value efficiency, it makes sense to value the technologies that allow us to produce more and to undertake new tasks more efficiently; that is, to achieve maximum output for minimum work with minimum resources. To the extent that technologies are about achieving efficiency, technology is progress. Finally, technologies are themselves seen as rational objects. They objectify the power of reason and ratiocination to order the world and achieve particular ends. These ends can be measured; we can chart their progress. As Braden Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz summarize: “For many, technology embodies the modern ideal of applying rationality to the betterment of humankind.”3

From those criteria considered above, a main criterion for measuring technological progress has been the value of efficiency, the ability to complete a task with minimal energy, effort, and expenditure. A vehicle is more efficient if it goes farther on less fuel. We work more efficiently if it takes us less effort to achieve the same results. The measurement of efficiency often takes the form of a cost/ benefit analysis and this is often related to issues of profit. Modern studies of efficiency can be traced back to the work of Frederick Taylor in the early 1900s.4 Taylor observed, measured, and timed factory workers as they did their tasks, and then worked out ways for them to do their jobs with less effort more quickly and thereby produce more.

The focus on efficiency as the criterion of technological progress has led to complaints of the dehumanization of workers. Machines are more efficient than humans, so humans are urged to become more machinelike in order to become more efficient. Workers in factories are often taught to perform a task in a particular—efficient—way. They perform a task, and only that task, over and over throughout the day. However, humans are ultimately considered far less efficient

than machines: humans require greater and less-predictable energy input in the form of food, rest, entertainment, and so on. Consequently, replacing humans with machines is often seen as embracing efficiency, that is, as progress.

Given the widespread cultural commitments to scientific objectivity, efficiency, rationality, and the ease with which one can see, measure, and count technologies, it is hardly surprising that the mere existence of more and new technology often becomes the only, or primary, yardstick of progress. It is also not in the interest of those who benefit from the production of technologies to call into question the goals of all this progress. This leads the culture to focus more on the criteria than the goal. In other words, we assume that the means of achieving progress (technology) is actually the goal itself. We say, “progress equals more technology,” not “progress equals the better world created by means of technology.”

When technology is seen as the driving force of progress, and this concept is linked to the position that technology shapes culture (a widely held position, as we discuss in Chapter 4), the outcome is a moral imperative on behalf of technology. Technology, and only technology, is what makes the world better. We often hear, “you can’t stop progress;” but what is often meant is, “you shouldn’t stop progress.” To the degree that progress is measured by technology, we are told that we should not stand in the way of technology. We are thus taught to accept things in this culture in the name of progress, even if what we are accepting is harmful to ourselves. David Noble provides the following example:

A few years ago my mother lost her job to a computer. A legal secretary, she had worked for the same firm for nearly twenty years before being unceremoniously “scrapped” with two days’ notice and no pension. The computer created jobs for less-skilled workers and eliminated those of the more-skilled people, like my mother, for whom “retraining” would have meant unlearning. (She was too old to “retool” anyway.) So there she was, home on a Monday morning for the first time in many years, reflecting upon her all-too-familiar plight. She complained about having no job, about the way she was fired after all those years, about the new workers who do not know half of what she knows, about having no pension and the fact that she wasn’t getting any younger. But, for all her anger, she was resigned. Shrugging her shoulders, she repeated to herself as if she had to convince herself, “Well, I guess that’s progress.”5

Progress and technology have become articles of near-religious faith held in the heart of North American culture. To question them, to stand in the way of progress and technology, is considered to be heresy. We will return to this notion of heresy at the end of this chapter. But first, to fully appreciate how seriously this heresy is taken, we underscore the importance of the story of progress and technology in the development of American culture.

The Story of Progress in American Culture

James Carey and John Quirk once wrote, “America was dreamed by Europeans before it was discovered by Columbus.”6 The United States was to be the place where excesses were held in balance: balance between industrial technology

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and nature, balance between technological betterment and moral betterment, and balance between what has been called “works” (better technology) and “days” (a better life). In this section we chart the development of this story of balance.

By the time Columbus accidentally stumbled upon the Americas, Europe had already had a long and violent history. Civilizations had grown, expanded, and collapsed into darkness again, while new empires had risen. America was seen as a place where civilization could start anew, released from the burden of wars and empires. The Americas were also seen as a new Eden, untouched by the crowding and pollution of European cities. This was a pure place of nature that could redeem Europe. Though the Americas were used primarily as a source of material wealth and resources for war, industry, and empire in Europe, the idea of America as a special place has remained.

When the United States fought for independence, the struggle was seen not only as a political one, as in the creation of a new state, but as a revolution in the conditions of humankind advocating the principles of democracy, freedom, and liberty. Although these principles were echoed in the French Revolution of 1789, the American Revolution was different in that it occurred in the New World. Whereas nature had been exploited and despoiled in Europe, the new country was to embody a balance between nature and the best of what manufacturing technology could offer. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Let our workshops remain in Europe.”7 Historian Leo Marx famously referred to this balance as the ideal of “the machine in the garden.”8 In the New World, technology and nature would work in harmony.

US leaders such as Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were not naive, however. They knew that this balance would not happen on its own and were well aware of the dangers and damages that industrialism could cause.9 There were those who saw technology and industry as ends in themselves, but Jefferson knew that this viewpoint would upset the balance. He emphasized that technology was a means of achieving progress, not an end in itself. A balance had to be struck between material prosperity as the mark of progress and moral and spiritual growth as a mark of progress. The implication is that the nation needed to focus on the goals of progress rather than solely on the means. Franklin, for his part, refused to take out individual patents on his inventions, arguing that the good of society was more important than individual gain.10

Unfortunately, the idealism of these founders was diluted. The lure of profit and material wealth became too strong. As the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth, the Industrial Revolution was heating up. Industry expanded, more goods were produced more cheaply, and soon canals and railways opened the country up to the easy movement of goods and people. Life was prosperous, and the new machines were the most obvious sign of this prosperity. In these times, the view of progress that prevailed was highly technocratic; that is, the adoption of technology was seen as inherently good. Steam engines and railways meant progress in themselves, and the country lost sight of the moral and spiritual dimensions of the term. Ralph Waldo Emerson asked in 1857:

What have these [mechanic] arts done for the character, for the worth of mankind? Are men better?... ’Tis too plain that with the material power the moral progress has not kept pace. It appears that we have not made a judicious investment. Works and days were offered us, and we took works.11

The rapid geographical expansion of the country aided this strong sense of progress, the idea that the United States was constantly moving forward into the future. The frontier experience shaped the character of US culture in crucial ways. As it was seen at the time, civilization strode across the continent, taming nature, the landscape, and the inhabitants with a sense of Manifest Destiny, which is the belief that the continuing expansion of the country across the continent was ordained by God.

One of the first great symbols of this progress was the steam railroad conquering the frontier, a “machine in the garden.” Historian Merritt Roe Smith describes a popular allegorical painting of the 1870s titled American Progress. The painting depicts a beautiful woman floating across the landscape, a star on her forehead. This figure has been—and still is—used to depict liberty, as she does in the Statue of Liberty, but she was also made to stand for progress. In her right hand is a book; with her left hand she is laying telegraph wire. At her feet are stagecoaches and covered wagons. Behind her follow three railways, and back in the distance, bathed in the rising sun, are an iron bridge and a city. Before her, running away into the darkness, are Native Americans, bear, and buffalo.12

Underpinning this vision of Manifest Destiny and progress is evangelical Protestantism. In particular, Calvinism taught the principle of predestination: that there were a chosen few who would inevitably succeed because they had been chosen by God. Applied at a national level, this meant that the United States was God’s chosen land, which infused the national character with a fundamental optimism about the future.13

The promise of the machine in the garden was tarnished as the nineteenth century progressed, and the pollution, environmental destruction, and slums of Europe were recreated in the New World. In addition, the bloodiness and destruction of the Civil War shook the faith in the country as a place of peace and prosperity. With its brutal war and industrial machines, how could the United States be regarded as the land of progress?

In spite of setbacks the notion of technological progress remained strong, largely due to the excitement over yet another new technology as a symbol of progress: electricity. Unlike the menace of large machines, electricity appeared clean, mysterious, even supernatural. When applied to communication, first in the form of the telegraph, electricity was seen as revolutionizing the country. Prior to the telegraph, communication had been synonymous with transportation. Messages traveled at the speed of horses, carts, ships, or trains. But with the telegraph, one could communicate instantaneously with people hundreds of miles away. One became aware of a sense of simultaneity, the knowledge that others were living their lives at that moment across the nation. The telegraph also made a profound impact on the economy in that it helped to create a national market for

goods and enabled arbitrage, the practice of buying low and selling high. Before the telegraph, it was difficult to find out how a crop was doing in Ohio or how production was at a factory in Pennsylvania. The telegraph provided the commodity market with more accurate and immediate information.14

Electricity transformed street lights, shop-window displays, department stores, drawing rooms, and thereby the nature of city life, both public and pri-vate.15 Light sources changed from hazardous torches, open flames, or gas lights to relatively safe lightbulbs and filaments. As we moved from the “primitiveness” of the open flame to the science of electric light, we experienced progress for which technology was deemed responsible.

Electricity continued to be the symbol of progress through the middle of the twentieth century. The electrification of more and new technologies, in particular household appliances, and the growing availability of electricity to many parts of the nation were taken as evidence of progress. Large-scale projects like the Hoover Dam, completed in 1936, provided electric power to the Southwest. In 1933 President Roosevelt created the Tennessee Valley Authority, a Federal corporation charged to develop the Tennessee River system to promote navigation, flood control, and the production and distribution of electricity to wide regions of the Southeast. Projects such as these can be seen as a continuation of electricity as the primary symbol for progress. Eventually, in the wake of concern over atmospheric pollution caused by coal-burning power plants and the environmental destruction caused by electricity-producing dams, electricity began to wane as a symbol of progress.

Nuclear power, awesome in its own right, replaced electricity as the dominant symbol of progress and continued the tradition. Eventually, nuclear power too revealed a darker side to technological progress in the form of the nuclear bomb and the threat of radioactive contamination. The debate over the status of nuclear energy as progress (or not) is still quite obvious. For example, Japan is currently struggling over how much to rely on nuclear energy in the wake of the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

The most recent symbol of progress is the digital computer, which has dominated the American imagination since the 1950s. The computer differentiates itself from other electrical technologies in that it, unlike technologies that mimic the physical work of humans, supposedly mimics the work of the mind.16 The progress implicitly embodied in the digital computer is the ability to process more data and an expansion of the concept of thinking. There are people who argue that computers may some day progress so far beyond human capabilities that we could create—some say have already created—technological super-intelligences that surpass the capabilities of any human, what has been called by some the “Singularity.”17 Though this possibility is the stuff of fantasies and nightmares, as articulated in any number of science-fiction novels and films, there are those who see the surpassing of the human as a positive development. Humans are hindered from evolving or progressing further, these people argue, by the limitations of the human body. The true goal of human progress is the expansion of the mind according to some; and if we could somehow abandon the body, we would truly evolve.18 We would become “post-human.”19

Beyond the more fantastic images of the post-human, digital technologies allow us to progress because, as MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte has put it, what we used to accomplish by physically moving atoms around—for example, shipping books or delivering newspapers—we can now accomplish by sending bits of electronic information instantaneously and cheaply from place to place.20 Instead of having to work with physical models of cars, buildings, or even bodies, we can create virtual representations of them in computers and submit them to any number of virtual tests and stresses.

Two Concepts That Underpin and Help to Sustain This Story: Evolution and the Sublime

In the stories of these American revolutions, from 1776 to the information revolution of today, technology has played a principal (determining) role in our conceptions of progress, to the extent that we have confused the profusion of technologies with progress. The machines themselves, not the goals of progress, have come to play center stage. This story of progress has been given additional heft because it draws on two other powerful concepts: evolution and the sublime.

Progress and evolution are often conflated, in part due to a pervasive conflation of conflicting definitions of evolution. A pre-Darwinian meaning asserts that as we evolve we are likewise progressing; that is, we are becoming better, more perfect human beings. In other words, as we progress toward something, we are evolving into something better or more advanced. Evolution is thus given a “pro-gressivist” twist in this version, a meaning that still does linger today. But this understanding of evolution is not consistent with the Darwinian theory of evolution. We think of it as the misunderstood version of evolution. Raymond Williams writes, “as the new understanding of the origin of species spread, evolution lost in biology its sense of inherent design.”21 That is, the older, progressivist version of evolution presumed that we were progressing towards a particular state of being, following an inherent design. Darwin’s theory removed this sense of design or ideal future form. Evolution according to Darwin is the slow adaptation of living creatures to environmental conditions over the course of generations. Groups that survive are “selected” on the basis of randomly occurring genetic mutations. Those that do not survive do not adapt to changing environmental conditions and do not pass on their particular genetic attributes to future generations and thus are not “selected.” The idea of natural selection is often oversimplified to the idea of “the survival of the fittest,” which purports that surviving generations are better and more advanced: stronger, faster, smarter, and more complex. But this is not necessarily the case. They are instead merely better adapted. In general, the direction of evolution has been from the simple to the complex, from single-celled organisms to multi-celled ones. However, this in no way guarantees the survival of better or even the most complex organisms in the face of changing environmental conditions. Cockroaches are, after all, more “fit” to survive a nuclear war than humans. So even though less complex organisms might be better adapted to changing environmental conditions, we are unlikely to evolve back into single-celled creatures anytime in the near future. Consequently, evolutionary theory resists

the notion that humans are necessarily better or more advanced than other species. We have merely evolved differently.

Evolution, in its misunderstood, pre-Darwinian version, underpinned the idea of progress in the nineteenth century and beyond by providing a scientific version of the principle of Manifest Destiny and evangelical Protestantism. According to this version of evolution, it was “natural” that the nation would achieve greatness since it was, as was widely believed, at the forefront of technological development. Further, technological and national “might,” linked to this misunderstood idea of evolution, promoted the belief that “might makes right,” for only the fittest survive.

The second concept that undergirds progress is the notion of the sublime. The idea of the sublime involves a glimpse of perfection, the sense that one is viewing God or God’s work. The sublime is awe inspiring, an overpowering combination of two seemingly contradictory affects: dread and reverence.22 Dread of overwhelming power, majesty, and perfection, and reverence for it. David Nye points out that there is a particularly American turn of the concept, which concerns us here. The sublime becomes a means of bonding individuals into a greater unity. This sublime is often marked by ritualistic invocations in public life and secular pilgrimages (that is, they become vacation destinations). He writes,

Americans have long found the sublime more necessary than Europeans, so much so that they have devised formations of the sublime appropriate to their pluralistic, technological society. Precisely because American society is so pluralistic, no single religion could perform that function. Instead, ever since the early national period the sublime has served as an element of social cohesion, an element that was already quite evident when the first canals were dug and steam engines were first harnessed to trains.23

The United States possesses its share of sublime wonders such as Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, and the Rocky Mountains. Leo Marx saw behind his idea of the machine in the garden another type of sublime: the technological sublime. The advance of technology at the time seemed divinely inspired, and people stood in awe of the large steam engines or of electricity itself. The technological sublime thus refers to the almost religious-like reverence paid to machines. These machines were much more powerful and majestic than individual humans and held out the promise of being able to achieve perfection. Whereas hand-made goods have irregularities and imperfections, those made by machines, potentially, do not. The technological sublime, then, carries with it a fear of being overwhelmed, an attraction to the beauty of the perfection of the machine and its products, and, most of all, a reverence for the awesome power of the machine.

The technological sublime that Marx described was what we would call the “mechanical sublime,” the divine nature of large, industrial machines. But when the machine began to fail as an untarnished symbol of progress after the Civil War, electricity took on the mantle of the sublime, what James Carey and John Quirk call “the electronic sublime.”24 In contrast to the smoke, soot, and grease of mechanical engines, electricity seemed pure and clean. Electricity is intangible;

its nature is almost mystical. People even feared the new electrical telegraph lines that sprang up in the mid-nineteenth century. It was said that when the wind blew over the electric lines they produced an eerie moaning sound, and people went out of their way to avoid them.

More recently, as the symbols of progress have shifted yet again and electricity has become commonplace, our feelings about electric technologies have shifted. For the most part, electricity is now seen as polluting, and nuclear generators as dangerous. Where once we waxed poetic about turbines and railroads, electrical dams, dynamos, and nuclear reactors, our imaginations now soar with effusive paeans to digital technologies, especially as they relate to the Internet, smart phones, and cloud computing. We are faced with what we may call the “digital sublime.”25

We discuss these notions of evolution and the sublime here to better understand the power of the story of progress. Why would so many people accept technology as progress without question, even if it damaged them, as it did David Noble’s mother in the earlier example? We are persuaded by progress because we are persuaded by the logic (logos) of the argument that it is better to be efficient, rational, and scientific. We are also persuaded by the ethic (ethos) of the argument of evolution that progress is inevitable and necessarily good, because we trust science and scientists, and believe in a misunderstood conception of evolution. And finally, we are persuaded by the deeply emotional argument (pathos) of the sublime; persuaded by our own feelings of fear, awe, and expectation.

The Uses of the Progress Story

Stories are not neutral. We tell stories to make a point, to educate, to persuade, to entertain. Stories have their uses. It is important to emphasize that what we have sketched above is a story, though it might seem like history. Culturally, we are all acclimated to accepting history as the “Truth” about the way things actually happened. But in telling history, one is telling a story. History, like any story, is always told by someone to someone else for a particular purpose. Told by someone else, the story might be different. For example, a Native American, Canadian, or Mexican version of American progress since the settling of the New World would be different from what we have described. Stories are told for different reasons: to persuade us to go to war, to persuade us to buy a product, to convince us that what our ancestors did was correct and justified, or to make us feel comfortable (or uncomfortable) with our place in the world. We have told the story above as much as possible in the terms in which it is usually related; this does not mean that we agree with this story or the justifications that it provides. It is, however, a powerful story with powerful cultural uses and consequences.

The story of progress as told above has been put to four major uses in the United States: to promote a version of “a better life,” to sell us things, to judge others, and to control populations.

Promoting a Better Life

Robert Nisbet argues that the progress story emphasizes that change is good and that change promotes a better life. He believes that as long as we continue to tell, believe in, and live the progress story, our culture will not stagnate but will continue to strive for perfection. The progress story is essentially a revolutionary story; it promoted, and continues to promote, both political and technological change. Many positive outcomes, services, and products can be attributed to telling, believing, and living the progress story, including democracy, sanitation, education, computing, and life-saving medical advances.26 The progress story thus promotes a particular version of a better life and underpins the affect to work toward it.

Merritt Roe Smith relates that in the mid-nineteenth century the working classes spoke out against progress because it was being used as an excuse to install new machines in the factories, thus putting them out of work. They understood that it is crucial to ask the questions: Progress for whom? Who benefits? And the answer was that it wasn’t them. But at the same time that they were contesting progress in the workplace, they were eagerly buying the new products that were being produced by these new machines. By purchasing these products, not only were these people supporting the country’s economy but also actively participating in what they saw as the future. In other words, they could put aside their own individual issues and participate in the broader sense of Manifest Destiny and progress.27

Technological progress is often a theme of advertising. We purchase things because they are New! Advanced! Improved! We purchase new computers because they are faster than old computers. We may also purchase a technological object because of its beauty or power (hence, part of the success of Apple computers). Look at advertisements for cars, smart phones, and home entertainment systems; they are replete with claims of new improvements, new possibilities, and awesome appearances.

Interestingly, explicit appeals to progress as a justification for buying seem to be diminishing. In fact, it would seem quaint, or old-fashioned, to defend one’s purchase of a new car as “progress.” However, Audi recently ran a television ad showing their newest vehicles as literally the latest step in human evolution, ending with the tagline: “Progress isn’t a philosophy, it’s a force of nature.” So the term still has a popular appeal. In general, however, appeals to progress and the sublime have taken a new form. We are now inclined to purchase technologies, not for a sense of the progress of civilization or for the appreciation of grandeur, but for their contemporary manifestation. The “cool,” the “neat,” the “rad,” or the “awesome” (depending on your generation) are what we think of as versions of the new mini-sublime. Think about the stores that cater to tantalizing buyers with gadgets: from the high-tech of Sky Mall catalogs to the low-tech pleasures of office-supply stores, cooking-supply stores, and hardware stores. Just think about how often, when presented with a new device, the response is simply this: “Cool!” “Neat!” “Rad!” “Awesome!”

In addition to the appeal of the awesome, a more considered justification for buying is frequently convenience. One might easily defend the purchase of a new car for its conveniences: air conditioning, remote starting, GPS locating, and so on. The ascendance of convenience, the topic of the next chapter, does not mean that progress is becoming passé; rather, it suggests that what constitutes progress has become closely allied with the value of convenience. While progress is still what is more, new, advanced, better, cool, neat, rad, or awesome, it is also more convenient.

Judging and Controlling Others

Civilized and Primitive: When Western European explorers first encountered the cultures of the Americas, Africa, and the South Seas, they were perplexed. These cultures were so very different from their own. The people had much less technology than the Europeans. Rather than concluding that these others were simply different and leaving it at that, Western Europeans drew on the story of progress to explain the situation.

In the received view, the story of progress presents a linear view of cultural development: It moves from simple to complex, and from less technologically advanced to more technologically advanced. It also concludes that every culture must progress in this way: first because progress is universal, and second because it is divinely inspired. The assumption is that these other cultures must be at an earlier stage on the same line as Western progress. Furthermore, these cultures could be expected to progress in the same way that Europe did until they eventually reached the level of European culture. Therefore, the story goes, they were deemed primitives who would one day be civilized; the criterion by which the progress of their civilization could be measured was, predictably, the technologies they embraced.

The progress narrative, then, was used to label cultures as either civilized or primitive. Those labeled primitive were considered less intelligent, less cultured, and beneath European culture. Colonization of primitives was not merely justified, it was considered a moral responsibility; for with assistance, primitives might be brought into the fold of a better, more evolved, civilized life. Hand in hand with colonization, labeling cultures primitive or civilized fed into the rise of nationalism on the one hand and on the forced technological development of cultures on the other.

Nationalism: A nation is a group of people recognized as having shared characteristics that unify them as a single entity. The group as a whole seems to have a unified identity. Beyond the less formal categories of membership or citizenship, being a member of a nation involves a shared identity and an emotional bond. For example, we may be citizens of the United States, but we might think of our nationality as American. Nationalism is devotion to one’s nation, a pride in one’s national accomplishments. Two fundamental aspects of the nation are, on the one hand, the recognition that there are thousands if not millions of others with whom you share this identity and, on the other hand, the recognition that there are millions of others who do not. Nation is not only a label indicating membership; it is

a means of differentiating us from them. The progress narrative is easily used as a means to differentiate nations, particularly to denigrate some and elevate others, and levels of technology have become part of the yardstick by which to measure and compare.

The practice of measuring the progress of nations with technology is dramatically illustrated by the great industrial expositions and world’s fairs of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Much like the modern Olympic Games, these events were opportunities for all nations to gather peacefully with an attitude of good will to share in the best of what each nation had to offer. But also like the Olympic Games, there was competition behind the exhibition.