Ambivalent About Technology

May 4, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston


In “The Magnificent Ambersons” the film by Orson Welles set in the early 20th century, the college-aged George is skeptical about these new “horseless carriages.” George is not a character that you take to. He’s something of a young fogey, and the film seems to be setting us up to reject his curmudgeonly attitude towards progress.

Yet Jack — Joseph Cotten as the voice of wisdom —  has this to say:

I’m not sure George is wrong about automobiles. With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization. May be that they won’t add to the beauty of the world or the life of the men’s souls, I’m not sure. But automobiles have come and almost all outwards things will be different because of what they bring. They’re going to alter war and they’re going to alter peace.

Of course, this kind of prediction is much easier when you’re doing it in a 1942 film, but the line is taken directly from Booth Tarkington’s novel written in 1918. Then Jack adds

May be that in ten to twenty years from now that if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn’t be able to defend the gasoline engine but agree with George — that automobiles had no business to be invented.

Here’s a clip of more of the conversation.

I saw this film at the Harvard Square Theater many decades ago, and when the audience heard this “no business to be invented” line, they burst into applause. The same thing probably happens when the film is shown today.

Which is all to say that our ambivalence about technology goes back at least a century. We’ve made our peace with the automobile. We know where we stand. For the Georges and Jacks of today, the focus of uncertainty and anxiety is the computer-Internet complex and all its offspring – Facebook and Twitter, Tinder and OK Cupid, League of Legends and Grand Theft Auto, etc.  On podcasts and TV, in op-eds and books, critics are wringing their hands about the epidemic of, variously, depression, loneliness, sexism, racism, terrorism, and other ills that this technology has brought.

Yet I keep imagining that these same people also have deep discussions about which apps to download or which new smartphone to buy, comparing the iPhone and Pixel in the same way that some people in that movie audience might later have been scoffing that the Ford Mustang was really just a dumpy old Falcon with a smarter-looking body (I told you this was a long time ago), and you’d be better off with a Camaro. Nor does anyone, then or now, notice the seeming contradiction. In part, it’s the “elsewhere effect.” Those evils that technology has caused are happening somewhere else — to other people, to “society,” not to me and my friends. In part, that’s because we think of “society” as other people, as though we ourselves are not a part of it. We like to maintain the illusion of our own autonomy, an autonomy we are less willing to grant others. And in part, it’s because we just don’t know why we do what we do. Or to put it more charitably, we are unaware of many of the causes that affect our behavior, thoughts, and feelings.

For the individual, technology is seductive – it’s so convenient, and being among the first in your circle to master the latest gizmo is so cool. So even people who are uneasy about technology and social change at the general level may still, as individuals, want to be in the tech vanguard.

This is basically the point that Philip Slater, in The Pursuit of Loneliness, was offering at around the same time that the audience in Cambridge was applauding Joseph Cotten’s reservations about the automobile in “The Magnificent Ambersons.”

While we think of ourselves as people of change and progress, masters of our environment and our fate, we are no more so than the most superstitious savage, for our relation to change is entirely passive. We poke our noses out the door each day and wonder breathlessly what new disruptions technology has in store for us. We talk of technology as the servant of humanity, but it is a servant that now dominates the household, too powerful to fire, and upon whom everyone is helplessly dependent. We tiptoe about and speculate on his mood. What will be the effects of such-and-such an invention. How will it change our daily lives? We never ask, “Do we want this, is it worth it?”  [snip] We laugh at the old lady who holds off the highway bulldozers with a shotgun, but we laugh because we’re Uncle Toms. We try to outdo each other in singing the praises of the oppressor, although the value of technology in increasing human satisfaction remains at best undemonstrated.

This is brilliant, but Slater omits something. He writes here about technology as though it were a few stand-alone gadgets —  a car, an iPhone, a drone — or else some incomprehensible monolithic force.  But along with the gadgets come powerful economic institutions, the bulldozers in Slater’s analogy, and the people who have become dependent on their success —  the bulldozer driver and manufacturer, the road construction crews and companies, and of course Ford and GM.