Niels Boeing

The Open Technosphere

Some preliminary thoughts on technology and a future left politics of technology When people talk about technology and the future in the same breath, there is often a mix of bold forecasts. Ubiquitous sensor-nets, robots that free us from the labour of war as well as everyday life or the convergence of man and machine are quoted. However, what actually comprises technology in the beginning of the 21st century remains obscure. This is not surprising as such scenarios are developed by trend scouts and business strategists. They hardly have any interest to portray technological developments other than being exciting and marketable. The public that has been exposed to a breathtaking technical change in recent decades accept such statements shrugging. Not because they knew better. Actually the understanding of technology is not nearly as deep as that of the economy or democracy. Technology is just there: a growing collection of tools which are designed for good or bad, which can be properly used or misused. But there is no way to inuence how this collection evolves. So one has to adapt and make the most of it. This vulgarised version of a traditional engineering view of technology prevents a deeper, more comprehensive analysis and has no political consequences. Thus I will rst analyse the special character of todays technology that I call the technosphere and then sketch two options how technology could evolve from elements that are already here now. From Technology to The Technosphere Philosophers of technology in the 20th century have agreed in that technology is more than the artifacts it produces. The context of its use has also to be taken into account as well as its embedding in social systems. The German theorist Gnter Ropohl thus speaks of sociotechnical action systems. Andrew Feenberg writes in

Questioning Technology: Technology is the medium of daily life in modern societies. This sets the scope of the phenomenon called technology. In a rst step I dene technology as a shaping of the world by mankind in order to satisfy its needs. This process already begins in the early history of mankind so man could be characterised as a zoon technikon (technical being). In the beginning the needs are exclusively of biological origin but soon the process of shaping produces new ones. To give a contemperary example: the invention of magnetic recording tape, the Compact Cassette, in the Sixties only gave way to the desire of having a portable device to listen to personalized music in any situation. The solution was the Sony Walkman introduced in 1979. Technology this is the second part of my denition is also recursive: it gives answers to questions that arose only from itself. Already the earlier 20th century thinkers of technology have tried to systematize technology historically. Jos Ortega y Gasset distinguishes in his Meditation on Technics along the process of construction three phases: the technology of coincidence in classical antiquity, the technology of the craftsman from late antiquity onwards and the technology of the technician with the beginning of the Early Modern Times. Taking up Don Ihdes amplication-reduction scheme in Technics and Praxis and Gnter Ropohls forms of technical knowledge in Eine Systemtheorie der Technik I would like to propose another distinction. I see three kinds of technology that arose in succession but today exist simultaneously: 1. Direct sensual technology the working principle of the technical system is immediately accessible to the human senses and thus can be comprehended by observing and trying. This oldest form of technology uses mechanics, re and simple chemical processes. 2. Indirect amplied technology the working principle of the technical system has to be inferred from other artifacts the effects of which are only accessible through some level of preceeding technical

knowledge. An example are lenses in technical optics invented in the Renaissance. The discovery of electricity and progress in chemistry reinforce this development in the late 18th century. 3. complex cognition-machine-dependant technology this is the next step in abstraction as the working principle has to be translated into sensually comprehensible information by machines like computers. Technical systems become black boxes and their inside is only accessible to experts. They create metasystems the effects of which get interwoven. This kind of technology has been established in the second of half of the 19th century. Parallel to this increase in complexity the range objects to be shaped by technology has widened: from natural materials like wood or stone on the macro-scale down to the building blocks of matter. The atomar structures of materials and the molecular processes in cells are redened as technically exploitable spaces. On a bigger scale whole landscapes are subjected to a technical redesign. Also the scope of shaping is expanded: Initially it was artefacts that were used in a conned space like the plough on a eld , now some technical systems like the Internet or aviation span the whole of planet Earth. Natural environments are replaced by technical ones. Or at least they are considered as such when scientists think about fertilizing the oceans with iron particles in order to increase algae populations that in turn could absorb more of the greenhouse gas carbon-dioxide. The trends outlined here show a development of technology that becomes more complex, comprehensive and spatially encompassing. This new quality leads to the formation of the technosphere: a global technical metasystem that stands in competition with the biosphere and the geosphere equally vast and with comparably complex and fast causal chains. The technosphere is a world that modern man not only creates with technology but also comprehends with it. Organisms are no longer creatures but biological machines that can be optimized. Moreover man starts to reconsider himself as a potentially technical thing that can be both subject and object to the new technosphere.

This totality has been stressed already by some thinkers of technology, e.g. Jacques Ellul or Martin Heidegger (whose remarkable thoughts about technology are somewhat neglected in his common reception). In the The Question of Technology Heidegger gives the example of a power station in the river Rhine. It is no longer merely a river but a provider for water pressure. The power station subdues the river which is only a standing reserve (Bestand) from which one can demand something. The whole world becomes an enframing (Ge-stell) that is the essence of modern technology. Here some questions arise: Why has the technosphere developed? Has this development been inevitable? Is it good or bad? How will it evolve? Can we control it? Let us acknowledge the fact that a large part of mankind already lives in the technosphere or will move into it rather sooner than later. We can regret this from a religious perspective but it is not conceivable that we could dismantle it in a planful manner even if we wanted to. The technosphere could only be taken to pieces by a military or natural disaster on a global scale as Jacques Ellul remarked in The Technological Society (as a third cause he sees a divine intervention in the course of history). If we look closely at the circumstances that gave rise to the technosphere we discover that it has a twin brother: capitalism. It is capitalism that eventually led us beyond our ancient human disposition as zoon technikon. Whereas the zoon technikon made inventions out of coincidence or because of a problem that had to be solved capitalism is driven by the idea of technical innovation: new products must be developed in order to secure the prot that is imherently necessary to this economic system. This is achieved by applying new technology that enables new goods and services. In earlier phases of capitalism this feature was not always obvious. But now globalization presents us with an innovation

process that is autonomous and automatic. Innovations often have no other reason than the requirements of the market where an older product has to be beaten. The recursive character of technology becomes dominant in capitalism and creates an accelerating interplay between investment and innovation. This spiraling movement leads technology also into territories that were not considered as technical ones not long ago: culture, communication, organisms or the human body. It is this movement that nally caused the change from mere technology to a technosphere. To put it differently: There would be no technosphere without capitalism. This in turn means that, given the current supremacy of capitalism, a freeze of the technosphere in its present state is highly unrealistic. Year by year the technosphere differentiates further and colonises new areas of life and the world. So what comes next? At the moment I see two possible developments that I call the "closed" and the "open" technosphere. Whereas the rst intensies dominant features of capitalism, the latter takes up opposite trends already observable which however are weaker because they don't spring from capitalist logic but from political reasoning. The Closed Technosphere My analysis is based on two perspectives that I consider crucial for technology in the 21st century: access to and employment of technology (in German: "Zugang" and "Umgang"). Access means the possibility to analyse technical systems and appropriate them in a productive manner. Employment means the possibility to use technology safely and self-determined. Regarding these perspectives we can observe several closing mechanisms: access to technical knowledge is tied to economic terms and so becomes more and more closed for a growing number of people; employment of technology requires stricter economic preconditions; the possibility of a self-determined use is limited by

assumptions of the world that are directly incorporated into technical design; the complexity of technical systems obscures their interactions as well as the interactions with the environment. Let me give some examples. The more the success of capitalism depends on further innovations the more technical knowledge becomes a ressource that has to be subjected to the concept of property as "intellectual property" and controlled. This is important for two forms of knowledge introduced by Gnter Ropohl: "technological law-based knowledge" and "structural rulebased knowledge". They comprise the core of any technical innovation and are protected by patents from open access by others in order to secure a temporary monopoly for the innovator. It is a mechanism that sets in early in the development process: When I asked HewlettPackard's Stanley Williams at a conference if he could provide technical details of the nano-processor he had presented just in the form of some slides he denied that question referring to patent protection. And this although the crossbar latch processor is only an early prototype, more a research object. Not only in computer technology, also in biotechnology and nanotechnology artifacts are converted to black boxes in this way. Only "functional rule-based knowledge" is left to users so that they can handle the respective technology. A truly productive appropriation is excluded as long license fees cannot be afforded. How employment of technology is limited can be observed in the Developing World. At the "Mercato" in Addis Ababa, the biggest market in Eastern Africa, all kinds of technology are available. But what people offer in the numerous booths is mostly out of date or defective and a far cry from what one can get in the centres of the Western World. Because of a lack of capital for investment in new technology people are left with a bricolage of old stock from the industrialized world that is by no means a self-determined way of employment of technology. How assumptions shape technical design shows an anecdote that at rst

glance would appear peripheral. I had rented a Mercedes A-Class car (because I don't own a car): every time I started the engine the doors were locked automatically. That surprised me because in Germany this feature is not yet very common. Obviously the designer had anticipated the dangers of modern trafc as well as the possibility to get robbed in the car while waiting at a trafc light independent from how likely this is at a given place (in German towns this probability is still near zero). But assumptions incorporated into technical design can have stronger consequences than that. As Langdon Winner wrote in The Whale and The Reactor it can even promote segregation: in the 1930s the American architect Robert Moses made the bridges on the highway from New York City to Long Island so low that public busses could not pass underneath. So people without a private car that is: the lower classes of that time had no chance to reach the beaches of Long Island because there was not yet a public rail link. So these two examples show how technology is more than plain artifacts and always has a social context. Complex technical systems can have unforeseeable causal chains as can be seen in the big power outage in the North-East of the USA and Eastern Canada in August 2003. The nal report stated serious faults in the control system of the energy provider First Energy and in the interfaces to neighbouring power grids. The consequence was that First Energy was not able to aggregate a detailed overall view of the whole technical system at any given moment. That this major accident happened in one of the most industrialized regions of the world was also due to a lack of investment in newer technologies, thanks to economic deregulation, strong competition and prot orientation. Such developments are not really encouraging with regard to bold forecasts in robotics, biotechnology and nanotechnology as made for instance last year by two researchers from British Telecom. Their scenarios that run until 2051are depicted as liberation from present problems and as purposeful, even inevitable progress. However one

should read them as what they really are: innovation programmes for a research and capital intensive hightech-complex that are promoted independently from actual needs of the public. In an increasingly closed technosphere they would probably intensify economic inequality and political control as well as produce more major accidents. The Open Technosphere Since the Sixties there have been approaches to counteract this development and open the technosphere if only slightly. Here "open" has three meanings: as open design, as tranparancy of technical structures and as freedom to make deciscion how to use technology. Making technical knowledge a freely accessible ressource has been advanced and practised by the movements of Free Software (Open Source Software) or Open Access to sciencitic knowledge. Another, not yet widespread approach is to open up hardware design. In the OScar project (for Open Source Car) in Germany a group of automotive engineers works on a car that one day could enable the appropriation of car construction beyond today's production by a few international car manufacturers. At the same time the knowledge that theses movements provide could foster a "sociotechnical system knowledge", according to Gnter Ropohl a prerequisite for an "enlightenened employment" of technology. The Internet is an example for a technical infrastructure that is partly transparent. It is based on open standards for data transmission that are developed, tested and released by international bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium or the Internet Engineering Task Force. These standards are taken out of the capitalist logic of closing mentioned above. They enable not only an open access to this technical system but also a potentially safer employment as its processes and faults are easier to comprehend. The movements against nuclear energy and the opposition against genetically modied organisms have demanded the freedom to decide

about the employment of a new technology. Unlike most engineers they don't conne their view to the artifact itself but take the social and political context into account. That their activities have collided time and again with the law is telling evidence of tight control measures in a closing technosphere. But the opposition was also constructive: in building up an independent supply of renewable energy rst in minor projects, now an important part of the energy sector they gave users a real choice which technology to employ. This three-fold opening-up of the technosphere is an expression of political values beyond the inherent logic of capitalism. It has to be secured in political action because it won't evolve just by itself. Too powerful are the institution of private property that has no explicit social responsibilities, the maximization of prot inherent to the current system and the values of efciency and control which are partially incompatible with an opening-up of the technosphere on a larger scale. If this opening-up is gaining ground it will also change the way of industrial production drastically. Especially an open technical design could lead to highly decentralized production in novel hightech-studios where the distinction between manufacturer and consumer gets more and more blurred. The possibility of a "personal fabrication" that has evolved in industrial Rapid Prototyping and Rapid Manufacturing could instead give rise to the "prosumers" as some researchers put it. They would create technical systems for locally or regionally dened needs that they formulate and analyse themselves at the same time. This development could also close the "fabrication divide" between industrialized and non-industrialized regions the existence of which for instance Neil Gershenfeld has stressed. However, precondition for a success are those developments in computing, material science and nanotechnology that have helped establish the technosphere. This validates the point that it is not the acceptance or refusal of modern technology that is at stake. For they provide the tools to guide the technosphere of the 21st century to a humane and sustainable path (although I am well aware that this comes close to a pact with the devil

for some skeptics). Emancipatory or left politics of technology has spent a lot of ressources in the past decades ghting a politico-industrial technocracy and describing possible dystopias that could arise from it. That was not enough. A new generation of thinkers of technology has worked since the Eighties to overcome this decit, because in the words of Andrew Feenberg: "The fate of democracy is therfore bound with our our understanding of technology." What we need is a new political theory of technology that can transfer democracy to the eld of technology itself. The thoughts I have introduced here are meant as a contribution to this ongoing project. To crack the black boxes and open up the technosphere must be the core of future left politics of technology.

2007 This text is licensed under the Creative Commons licence BY-NC-SA 3.0. Contact: [email protected]