Абсурд и вокруг: сборник статей

One of the features of the technical world is uncertainty. Technical progress does not know where it is going. This is why it is unpredictable. It always has both positive and negative effects, and they are inseparable; technical progress also creates more problems than solutions. On that point Ellul says: «using techniques always pays off in the short term and then brings disaster»[277]. The last factor contributing to an increase of uncertainty of the future of techniques are internal contradictions of the technical system and society. For instance, a vulnerability to accidents grows proportionally with the size of organizations. Similarly, the more powerful a technique is, the more it disturbs the world. Some people think that the techno-discourse is a discourse about humanity and the ways of advancing it; of course, by the means of techniques. Some humanists, on the other hand, think that the technique can be saturated with traditional values. Today's culture only has an operational value detached from tradition, molded by the technical progress and economic needs. A human being enslaved to work in the position of the technical individual is not alienated by the mere fact of that position, but by the structures of power and meaning that operate contemporaneously with it.

When the power of industrial capitalism societies locked human beings in such positions, the psychic and existential economies involved were open to other futurities than just the technological; for example, the political. That such futurities no longer exist- or no longer bear the same meaning- does not mean that they were not real; indeed the direction of cultural and social progress through new dispensation of the technological, in spite of its nobility in ascribing integrity to past manifestations, and in desiring the unification of the social, cultural and technological fields in a different order of possibility, relies upon a model of past blindness and present insight which is in itself historically circumscribed. With one word, bad culture chases out good culture. Despite many statements, man has lost control over technical development.

If technique is the event of creation whose paradigms in history have been lost (paradigms of values and belief, as well as more specifically material paradigms of existence whose effects are unknown since they are particular of individual experience), technology is the ideology of power divorced from ethical, precisely because it excludes negativity, specially the negativity of its own blindness. Yet it always requires an ethical adjunct: particularly we can reject the fear of the omnipotent robot by arguing that machines are always going to be in the service of man. But this assurance comes not from within technology, since it requires a consciousness of the negative even if we only reject it as unreal.

Technology always defines itself as insightful, in the claims to give access to creativity. But we should not forget that technology is industrialized power. Let's take for example information technology. Information technology seeks mediation as a supreme value, thereby occluding the problem of the economic hegemony exercised in the world by those economies that control technology. By claiming a mediating role, by situating the idea of finality within outmoded metaphysics, technology projects negativity into the non-technological. I would like to make a digression to this point — Nuclear power is a symbol of our civilization. However, as Gunther Anders points out, «it is not a symbol of our civilization just because it is an innovation in physics (although that is true), but also because the its possible effect or probable effect has metaphysical nature, which is not true about any previously man-made effect. I call the effect of nuclear energy metaphysical, because the adjective „periodical“ presupposes an ongoing development of history and continuation of future periods. We, the ordinary people, cannot rely on this presupposition, because as Anders noted, „The period of change of periods ended after 1945“[278].