In his dense and yet seemingly effortlessly written monograph, After The Last Man: Excurses to the Limits of the Technological System, Toivo Koivukoski describes the techno-laden place in which we live as
“a world of integrated contradictions, of broadband empires and wireless tribes in which the rational is co-penetrated with the mythic; a hyperrationalized global technological system that provokes its own auto-rejections from within a world managed for transparency of resources and efficiency in their exchanges.”[1]
While Koivukoski urges that there should be a level of thinking that is deeper and more significant than a “technical manual concerned with network maintenance, but at the same time more rational than the mythic grand narratives that are having their renaissance”[2], it seems difficult for Koivuskoski to elucidate precisely what this meaning consists of.
Koivukoski’s book is a work of political science, so it unsurprising that his views focus largely on the inability of democratic, or technocratic, citizens to feel enfranchised, to enforce their political rights and freedoms from within a zone that is effectively depoliticised, disenfranchised, and unfamiliar: the world in which technological dependence is not only the status quo, but invisible, and only effectively understood in times of crisis, when technology fails . Thus, Koivukoski’s understanding of technology in our historical moment is that it may be understood as a political threat, as a Foucaldian force of disempowerment (invisible, unwritten, unannounced), which emerges from our deeper fear of technological governance, of total control being placed in the hands of those who are unsympathetic and automatic machines, or at least in the hands of those whose job is to program and operate such machines. For Koivuskovsi,
“[a]s citizens become estranged from the apparatuses of technocratic decision- making, and as technology itself becomes increasingly efficient and invisible in its ongoing operations those system of human artifacts [sic] upon which public order and private satisfactions depend start to seem more and more magical in their operations. And with the new superstition that has technology operating on automatic comes a heightened sense of fatalism, which is itself a cultural product of a hyperrationalized world shading into mythic modes and orders.”[3]
The fear that technology will assume human functions and become, as it were, a government in its own right, may be seen as even more insidious and invisible in its operations when Koivukoski’s definition of technology as devices and machinic artifacts is expanded to include science and technology. In contemplating the totality of advances in pharmocological medicine, cosmetic surgery, and other forms of scientific interventions into the human body, it is inadequate to conceive of the operations of technology as functioning only ‘outside’ of the mind or the body in the form of devices or networks. Similarly, it is not enough to perceieve that technology acts materially from within the human body, say, only in such forms as the ‘mirco-chipped’ human, the nanotechnological human, and the chemically rebalanced human (by SSRI’s, or even nootropics). Technology, rather, in addition to these examples, functions at the level of our thinking – we ’know’ technology, and by means of technology, we are enabled to encounter, or apprehend, further ‘ways of knowing.’ In this sense, technology may also be seen to form, at least metaphorically or analogically, a technological epistemology, which is actively ‘thought’ by its users.
It is possible that Koivukoski’s difficulty in elucidating the character of the kind of human thinking he seeks in relation to technology stems from his non-recognition of the epistemological ramifications of digital, and other, technology. And while it may be true that machines may not ever think ‘as’ humans (as Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus have argued), it may yet be possible to better understand how in many ways contemporary epistemologies, ways of knowing and what we know, are indebted to technological artifacts and their ability to prosthetically ’protect’ our knowledge, and to enforce, authorize and legitimate new techno-epistemologies. As Koivuskoski poetically notes
“[I]n this relationship between human beings and their protective prosthesis, it is important to be aware of the metaphorical likeness that shapes each in the image of each. For as we see technology as an extension of human functions, performing routinized or dangerous tasks for us, similarly we in turn appropriate technological functions to open up a reflective distance on our own operations , such that thinking may be conceived of as computing, remembering as data retrieval and willing as cost-benefit calculation.”[4]
Jean Baudrillard, of course, prepared an essay on the way in which Andy Warhol resembled a machinic mutant, a “Snobbish Machine”, in the late 1990s. For Baudrillard, Warhol’s practices were automatic, unsympathetic, inhuman.
The interrelationship between people who think, at least analogically, like computers, and those who materially imbibe other forms of science, such as by means of genetic manipulation or in the form of present-day psychiatric drugs, shall be a persistent guide in my further reading of Koivukoski.
[1] Toivo Koivukoski, After the Last Man : Excurses to the Limits of the Technological System (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008) xvii, 121 p. at xiv.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid. at 28.
