When thinking about technology it is inevitable to consider the “paths not taken,” the forms and technical arts which never were adopted or were abandoned and forgotten. From the vantage point of our societies marked by drivers of ‘efficiency’ and ‘value’ it is also possible to consider technologies, and their success or demise, as being functional to the accumulation of value or ‘economic growth’.
This is not contrary to the common notion that ‘technology’ is the fundamental driver of society and economy. We have to write ‘Technology’ –with a capital “T”– because it has become a distinguished substantive, a thing in itself, almost a force of nature or an idol –depending on the ideology one might submit to. For every ‘progression’, especially recent history according to technocentric views, a particular ‘technology’ can be pointed to as a cause of social change. Books are written attempting to demonstrate how ‘technology’ by itself is the motor of human history and how it appears as a decisive factor of social change.
Some observations will help moderate that approach. For example, one should consider that not all technologies are successful and not all technologies become mass consumption products. In fact, only technologies which can be appropriated as capital are successful, and only technologies which can be incrementally introduced as part of cycles of marketing, research and development, and release management become capital.
To fully understand this statement, it is important to let go of the notion that technology is an object. The language of marketing and ‘industry magazines’ is not appropriate for our analysis. Instead of seeing technologies as ‘things’, as ‘objects’ of science and innovation, I prefer to see them as bundles of human activity: each and every technology is not only the product or the object of an activity but an activity itself and, more concretely, it is the activity of one or more human groups (organisations) which cooperate around it. Technologies must be seen as trajectories of action, with a beginning, a course and an end.
Under this framework, ‘adopting’ a technology (purchasing, implementing or using it) in reality implies interfacing with, linking up and cooperating with the activity of the human groups which display and develop that activity. And the adopters coordinate their actions either as consumers or producers or some combination of those roles.
So even if we can consider a particular technology as an object (e.g. as condensed value), or as some kind of autonomous entity, we are obliged to perceive the interaction of human groups in production, distribution and consumption and hence the mutual relations of dependency, control and cooperation so established. A technology is never an isolated object nor its own cause.
If a technology (a bundle of human activity) becomes part of a business process, of a process of production, distribution, marketing and sales, it necessarily does so within some form of -ownership’. This may be ownership of the process, of the know-how, of the materials, of the conditions of production and distribution or a combination of these. In these we can say that a technology becomes part of the process of production of value. In other words, a condition of its realisation is some form of ownership where the technology becomes an asset, or –in other terms—where the technology becomes ‘capital’.
The statements above are neither original nor special in any sense, as I am only rephrasing ideas which can be found in Classical economics with the added notion that behind any profitable operation there is always an element of rent, derived from property rights over resources. This last point may be traced back to authors like Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson and some of the developments of the Cambridge (UK) school of economics.
The reader does not need to adopt a ‘socialist’ or ‘post-capitalist’ stance to understand and follow the ideas explained here, which boil down to a trivial fact: only those technologies which can be managed as capital become successful. In other words, only technologies which can be appropriated as specific chunks of capital are developed, adopted and disseminated in a particular economic context, while other technologies fall away, disappear, are bought out or are abandoned and forgotten.
In the long term then, what we see in the history of technology, especially since the ascent of Industrial Capitalism, that the technological setup of the world, this hegemony of ‘technology’ which has penetrated all spheres of human activity, can be seen not only as a cause of our Modern conditions, but also as a *result* of technological choices which in turn derive from historical and social contexts and not primarily from technological advantages. Certainly, if we consider only the ‘winning’ technologies, those which are *selected* for the production of value, this or that technology may appear as an ultimate cause of social change, but we are advised to put this in the context of all other technologies (economic theory would speak here as the “combinations of factors”) which are discarded or at least marginalised because they cannot be converted into sources of rent.
In fact, while technology as ‘product’ may be naively seen as a cause of progress, we can also say that *this* technology complex, this technological world it itself a result of the constraints imposed on innovation and human activity by the imperative of appropriation. Note I do not refer here particularly or especially to ‘private property’ as my argument addresses *all* forms of appropriation and all social forms more or less compatible with the production of value.
Forms of appropriation may be capitalist or socialist, private or public, in various degrees and combinations, while the notion of appropriation and rent generation is more general than these particular forms, and so that the key driver guiding the selection and development of technology may be private or public, under various forms of political and legal environments. From this point of view, all forms of appropriation which arose with and as a consequence of Industrial Capitalism can be seen as a generic class of “types of production” which subordinate and select human activities and organisation to the production of value.
A Type of Production here means a specific technological complex of “production factors”. (Note: a Type of Production can also be seen as a combination of technical, spatial and social division of labour.)
In turn, this should lead us away from the usual take of ‘technology’ as some sort of magical object heroically created from pure human imagination, towards a view of ‘technology’ as a *selected* chosen human activity from a vast array of possible human activities and forms of organisation.
In reality, then, *this* ‘technology as asset or capital is what it is because it can be *accumulated as technology* under some form of control (public or private) which then operates as a source of rent for the parties in control. Current technology is therefore synonymous with accumulation and cannot exist without accumulation.
Now, because ‘technology’ is ultimately activity (the activity of human groups –as noted above) we must say that technology, as it appears in the current setup (“Gestell”), is accumulated or condensed activity, an activity which has been *selected* and *appropriated* precisely because it can be transformed into a source of rent.
This accumulation, then, under the condition of public or private ownership (appropriation) defines the limits of human activity. Inside of the process of accumulation and rent generation human activity is granted, valid, acceptable; outside of it, human activity becomes sporadic, marginal and eventually invalid and impossible. In some cases, it disappears from history.
From a wider viewpoint, it becomes clear that successful human activity (for example a successful technological product) defines the limits of other human activities: human activity in the whole ends up ‘imprisoned’ it its own cycles, notwithstanding potential upheavals which may occur as human groups mature and expand, and as political forms come and go in a succession and replacement of the contingent, cyclical forms of society. A constant–despite these changes–is the tendency of human activity to become trapped in its own movement and its own products.
Layer after layer of inherited social and economic constraints, and their concomitant ideologies, obfuscate reality, so that the motives of action and the results of invention appear as ‘economic value’ and as instruments which are realised and can be realised only in the market and through market exchanges (private or public!). Submerged in the now universal production of value, all actors, including the “anti-systemic” currents, operate unwittingly on the same grounds where measures of value efficiency and management effectiveness prevail.
What is human organisational action-activity, appears as an ‘object’; what is an action-activity in the division of labour, appears as a ‘product’. Not as the mythical “substance of value” or “surplus-value” of XIX and XX Century theories, but as specific, material, immediate networks of human action which I call “types of production” to distinguish them from now almost forgotten Marxian theories of “Modes of Production” (Note: while the proverbial Modes of Production were sequential and appeared in progression, Types of Production do not have any particular sequence and do not rely on an idea of ‘progress’.)
In the whole then, ‘technology’ can be shown to be as a product of human action and simultaneously as the limit and constraint of that action. And change arises not from the idol of ‘technology’ but from the imbalance between those human activities which lie inside of the networks of accumulation (of ‘growth’) and the human activities which lie outside of them.
References:
Alfred Sohn Rethel,, “Intellectual and Manual Labour: Critique of Epistemology,” 1978
Joan Robinson, “The Economics of Imperfect Competition,” 1969
Piero Sraffa, “Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities,” 1975
Karl Marx, “Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses,” Das Kapital I, VI. Kapitel, 1969