Some social implications of modern technology

In this article, technology is understood as a social process in which the technology itself (ie the technical apparatus of industry, transport and communications) is only a partial factor. We will not question the influence of technology on human individuals. This is because men are both an integral part and a factor of technology, and not only because they invent the machines or work with them, but because they constitute the social groups that direct its implementation. and its application. Technology, as a mode of production, as the set of instruments, devices and devices that define the machine age, [1]

The technique itself can promote authoritarianism as well as freedom, rarity as much as abundance, expansion of labour as much as its abolition. National Socialism is a striking example of how a highly rational and mechanized economy achieving the highest productivity can also work in the interests of totalitarian oppression and the perpetuation of scarcity. The Third Reich is indeed a form of "technocracy": the technical considerations inherent in imperialist rationality and efficiency supersede the traditional criteria of profit and collective well-being. In National Socialist Germany, the reign of terror does not rest solely on brute force, itself foreign to technology, but also on ingenious manipulations of the inherent power of technology: the intensification of labor, propaganda, the training of youth and workers, the organization of governmental, industrial and party bureaucracies - which constitute the daily apparatus of terror - all meet the imperatives of the highest technological efficiency. This terrorist technocracy cannot be attributed to the exceptional imperatives of the war economy. On the contrary, it is the natural state of social and economic social-nationalist shaping, of which technology is one of the main stimuli. industrial and party - which constitute the daily device of terror - all meet the imperatives of the highest technological efficiency. This terrorist technocracy cannot be attributed to the exceptional imperatives of the war economy. On the contrary, it is the natural state of social and economic social-nationalist shaping, of which technology is one of the main stimuli. industrial and party - which constitute the daily device of terror - all meet the imperatives of the highest technological efficiency. This terrorist technocracy cannot be attributed to the exceptional imperatives of the war economy. On the contrary, it is the natural state of social and economic social-nationalist shaping, of which technology is one of the main stimuli. [2]

During the technological process, new rationality and a new model of individuality have spread within society, different from (and even opposing) those who initiated the march of technology. These transformations are not a direct or indirect consequence of mechanization on its users or mass production on consumers; rather, they themselves are determining factors in the development of mechanization and mass production. In order to fully understand the full significance of these transformations, it is necessary to look briefly at the essence of rationality as well as the model of individuality subject to dissolution at the present stage of the machine age.

The human individual whom the representatives of the middle-class revolution have consecrated as the ultimate unity and the end of society bore in him values in stark contradiction with those which have taken hold of the society of today. If one tried to gather a single concept the different religious, political and economic currents that forged the notion of the individual in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, one could define this individual as the subject of a certain number of norms and standards. values on which no external authority should have control. These norms and values related to the most appropriate forms of social and personal life for the full development of human capacities and faculties. As a result, they constituted the "truth" of his individual and social existence. It was considered that every individual, as a rational being, was able to discover these forms of life by his own thought and that once this freedom of thought he was able to direct his action in view of their actualization. The task devolved on society was then to guarantee these freedoms to the individual and to remove the obstacles to his rational action.

The principle of individualism, the pursuit of individual interests, was implied by the idea that individual interests were rational, that is, that they were the result of autonomous thought, that they were guided and controlled by it. This rational individual interest did not coincide with the immediate interest of the individual who depended on the norms and demands of the social order in force, which order did not find its origin in autonomous thought and consciousness. but in the external authority. In the context of radical Puritanism, the principle of individualism placed the individual in opposition to society. Men had to shatter the system of ideas and norms received in order to find and seize those that conformed to their rational interest. They had to live in a state of constant vigilance, anxiety and criticism in order to reject the false and the irrational. In a society still irrational and based on false principles, such an attitude of a free man criticizing the established order, seeking to discover the truth and to put it into effect, constituted in itself a principle of agitation and opposition. This theme has never been so well illustrated as in this image of Milton "(...) a race of deceivers, who (...) took the virgin Truth, trimmed her beauty into a thousand pieces, and dispersed them to the four winds. Ever since that time the grieving friends of the Truth, at least those who dared to show themselves, imitating this careful quest for Isis to find the mutilated body of Osiris, went and came gathering one limb after another according to as they found them. [3] Such was the principle of individual rationality.

The concrete realization of individualism presupposed an appropriate economic and social context, that is to say, an environment suited to individuals whose work would be largely responsible for their social success. It has been held that a liberal society is such a framework for individualism. In the sphere of free competition, the tangible achievements of the individual, which has made its products and its action ( performance part of the very needs of society were the mark of his individuality. Over time, however, the process of producing goods has come to undermine the economic bases upon which individual rationality was built. Mechanization and rationalization have forced the weakest competitors under the domination of giant mechanized enterprises which, by realizing the domination of nature by man, have abolished the free economic subject.

The principle of economic efficiency favours companies whose industrial equipment is the most mechanized and the most rationalized. Technological power tends to the concentration of economic power, to the constitution of "vast units of production, large corporative enterprises producing enormous quantities of goods of a variety often surprising, industrial empires proprietors of materials, equipment and from the production of the extraction of raw materials to the distribution of finished products, entire industrial sectors dominated by a few giant companies (...) ". Technology "steadily increases power in giant hands by creating new tools, processes and products"  [4]

. Efficiency calls for complete unification and simplification, elimination of all "loss" and detours: it calls for radical coordination. There is a contradiction, however, between the incentive for profit which guarantees the smooth operation of the apparatus and the increase of the standard of living allowed by this same apparatus. "Since production is in the hands of profit-seeking entrepreneurs, they will have available surpluses after payment of rent, interest, labour and other costs. These costs will, of course, be kept as low as possible. "  [5]

. In these circumstances, the most profitable course of the apparatus dictates to a very large extent the quantity, form and type of goods produced. Within such a mode of production and distribution, the power of the apparatus profoundly affects the thought of those whom it serves.

Under the impact of this device  [6] individual rationality has been transformed into technological rationality. This is by no means confined to the subjects and objects of the great enterprise but characterizes the ambient thought and even the various forms of protest and revolt. This rationality establishes norms of judgment and favours in the individual the acceptance and internalization of the dictates of the apparatus.

Lewis Mumford defined the man in the age of the machine as an "objective personality" as a being who learned to transfer all subjective spontaneity to the machine it serves to subordinate his life to the factuality ( matter- of-factness )  [7] of a demystified world in which the machine is the agent and does so to him  [8] . Individual differences in ability, insight, and knowledge are transformed into a quantum of skill and training to serve the common standardized production framework.

Individuality has not disappeared. The free economic subject has rather become the object of a large-scale organization and coordination. Individual achievement has been transformed into standardized performance, with motivations, guidance, and evaluation of the individual's action being defined by predetermined tasks and functions external to him. The effective individual is one whose action is the adequate response to the objective requirement of the apparatus, his freedom being limited to the selection of the appropriate means for an end which he has not fixed himself. While individual fulfilment requires no external recognition and is accomplished in the very activity, performance is a rewarded activity whose end is limited to and consumed only to, its value to the apparatus.

11For the majority of the population, the original freedom of the economic subject was gradually submerged by the performance of assigned tasks. The world had been rationalized to such an extent, and this rationality had become a social power such that it remained for the individual to adjust to it without reserve. Veblen was among the first to derive this new factuality ( matter-of-factness) of mechanized production, from which it has spread to the whole society: "The role of the worker operator in the mechanized industry is (typically) to serve and assist the machine; his task is to keep pace with the machine and then help him through precise manipulations where the machine can not complete the work itself. His job is to assist the machine, not to use it. On the contrary, it is the machine that uses the worker. For the technological system, the ideal mechanized device is the automaton. "  [9]Mechanized production requires knowledge oriented towards "an immediate seizure of opaque facts in relatively exact quantitative terms. This type of knowledge assumes that the worker has a particular intellectual and spiritual disposition: that of being able to easily apprehend and judge the questions of facts while preserving this knowledge from any animistic or anthropomorphic "delicacy", from any quasi-personal interpretation of the phenomena observed. and their interrelationships. "  [10]

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