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Reader 03 Intro Contd
It is not as if a discourse of technology does not exist. Its arguments and narratives are well known, and in some cases over-rehearsed. It can be recognised by the rhetorical cycle that moves from myth and invention to hype and glorification, flipping occasionally in the direction of moral outrage, and silenced in the end by expert witness and ethics committees.
Sarai Reader 03 seeks to extend the terms of discussion by asking what other imaginary space there may be, besides the imperative to consume, the irrepressible desire to shop for the next gadget that comes our way, and the whine of the perennial victim of the machine, with which we can envision technology’s presence in our lives.
The titanic proportions of ‘technology’ provoke the question of subjectivity. Are the machines too large, too fast, too invasive, too small for us to get a cognitive, and existential grip on them? But an unvarying narrative of scale, of ‘how much’ technology is or can be, how much ‘out of control’/‘in control’, how mega, how nano, how liberating and how oppressive, makes it impossible for us to escape the trap of reiterated banalities. We need another language, another way of thinking, doing, criticising and celebrating technologies, technologists and technicians.
Is it possible for those of us who refuse to take on the mantle of techno-expertise to shape the field, to ask the questions that need to be asked about where we are taking the machines, and where the machines are taking us? Or are we condemned to be Homo Consumens forever? Is the supra-technical position only there for the chief scientists that oversee the field, steering their multi-million dollar research programmes? How can technology be shaped by those of us who are outside the laboratories?
Michel Foucault’s use of the term “technologies of the Self” assisted a generation in the critical understanding that technology was about a lot more then dams and railways. Yet, a few decades later, the proliferation of his ideas is confronting us with another dilemma. What if everything is technology and there is nothing left untouched? Can we then begin asking questions about the possible technologies of resistance, even as we battle with our knowledge of the actual technologies of power?
In Shaping Technologies we undertake re-readings of past debates, and anticipations of future ones, weigh utopian visions against dystopic nightmares, perhaps to arrive at assessments that suggest sobriety and a ‘cool’ consideration of the cold touch of the machine, as well as of the heat of the fuel that animates it. We report the latest on surveillance, excavate histories of tech novelty, envision possibilities and examine blueprints and read the road maps to the futures that lie before us.
By doing all this we intend to ask: what kind of ‘technological culture’ exists, or may exist, outside of the cybernetic feedback loops of global products and services of capital? What space can we claim for freedom and function, safely out of reach of the apparatus of the state and the machine of the corporation? What leverage (to use a machine metaphor), if any, do we have to act – in haste, with urgency and intelligence – in these times?
Our work at Sarai is both with and about technology. Not only this Reader (which could never have been edited without editors discussing contents online, and contributors sending in articles and images by e-mail), but everything that we do is enabled by the choices that we make about which machines, techniques and software to use, and how. Our practices are inflected by the technological choices that we make on an everyday basis. This is because we give primacy to the realities of urban South Asia, and to the different histories and practices of communications that exist within this world.
These are histories of improvisation and creativity with machines. These are contentious and fraught legacies of the interaction of the daily lives of people and the agendas of power. All of this brings in its wake specific and everyday political questions. Our intent is to always ask – “Who controls and governs the flow of knowledge that accretes to a particular technology or a practice?” This insistence on qualified questions and particularity of contexts is distinct from general, ideological statements for or against technology in the abstract. We are conscious that in articulating this insistence, we are registering a refusal to enter the binary of technofetishism and technophobia that marks the frugal discourse on technology that exists in contemporary South Asia, especially in India. To do this is to refuse to celebrate big dams or nuclear power (as the governing technocracies of South Asia have done), and at the same time to refuse to buy into the largely anti-technological rhetoric of what has passed for an ‘alternative’ political and cultural imagination. For us, the contents of this Reader suggest that the search for a third way that neither fetishises nor condemns is possible, and timely. In its own way, the Reader is itself a gesture of affirmation towards this possibility.
Editorial Collective
Delhi/Sydney/Amsterdam
February 2003
Sarai Reader 03 seeks to extend the terms of discussion by asking what other imaginary space there may be, besides the imperative to consume, the irrepressible desire to shop for the next gadget that comes our way, and the whine of the perennial victim of the machine, with which we can envision technology’s presence in our lives.
The titanic proportions of ‘technology’ provoke the question of subjectivity. Are the machines too large, too fast, too invasive, too small for us to get a cognitive, and existential grip on them? But an unvarying narrative of scale, of ‘how much’ technology is or can be, how much ‘out of control’/‘in control’, how mega, how nano, how liberating and how oppressive, makes it impossible for us to escape the trap of reiterated banalities. We need another language, another way of thinking, doing, criticising and celebrating technologies, technologists and technicians.
Is it possible for those of us who refuse to take on the mantle of techno-expertise to shape the field, to ask the questions that need to be asked about where we are taking the machines, and where the machines are taking us? Or are we condemned to be Homo Consumens forever? Is the supra-technical position only there for the chief scientists that oversee the field, steering their multi-million dollar research programmes? How can technology be shaped by those of us who are outside the laboratories?
Michel Foucault’s use of the term “technologies of the Self” assisted a generation in the critical understanding that technology was about a lot more then dams and railways. Yet, a few decades later, the proliferation of his ideas is confronting us with another dilemma. What if everything is technology and there is nothing left untouched? Can we then begin asking questions about the possible technologies of resistance, even as we battle with our knowledge of the actual technologies of power?
In Shaping Technologies we undertake re-readings of past debates, and anticipations of future ones, weigh utopian visions against dystopic nightmares, perhaps to arrive at assessments that suggest sobriety and a ‘cool’ consideration of the cold touch of the machine, as well as of the heat of the fuel that animates it. We report the latest on surveillance, excavate histories of tech novelty, envision possibilities and examine blueprints and read the road maps to the futures that lie before us.
By doing all this we intend to ask: what kind of ‘technological culture’ exists, or may exist, outside of the cybernetic feedback loops of global products and services of capital? What space can we claim for freedom and function, safely out of reach of the apparatus of the state and the machine of the corporation? What leverage (to use a machine metaphor), if any, do we have to act – in haste, with urgency and intelligence – in these times?
Our work at Sarai is both with and about technology. Not only this Reader (which could never have been edited without editors discussing contents online, and contributors sending in articles and images by e-mail), but everything that we do is enabled by the choices that we make about which machines, techniques and software to use, and how. Our practices are inflected by the technological choices that we make on an everyday basis. This is because we give primacy to the realities of urban South Asia, and to the different histories and practices of communications that exist within this world.
These are histories of improvisation and creativity with machines. These are contentious and fraught legacies of the interaction of the daily lives of people and the agendas of power. All of this brings in its wake specific and everyday political questions. Our intent is to always ask – “Who controls and governs the flow of knowledge that accretes to a particular technology or a practice?” This insistence on qualified questions and particularity of contexts is distinct from general, ideological statements for or against technology in the abstract. We are conscious that in articulating this insistence, we are registering a refusal to enter the binary of technofetishism and technophobia that marks the frugal discourse on technology that exists in contemporary South Asia, especially in India. To do this is to refuse to celebrate big dams or nuclear power (as the governing technocracies of South Asia have done), and at the same time to refuse to buy into the largely anti-technological rhetoric of what has passed for an ‘alternative’ political and cultural imagination. For us, the contents of this Reader suggest that the search for a third way that neither fetishises nor condemns is possible, and timely. In its own way, the Reader is itself a gesture of affirmation towards this possibility.
Editorial Collective
Delhi/Sydney/Amsterdam
February 2003
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