this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
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Trains are a technology. Walkable city planning is a technology.
Those aren't purely technological solutions though (except in the loosest sense of the word, where any non-hunter-gatherer behavior a human engages in is a technology), as they involve changing the way people live.
The electric car is a mostly drop-in replacement that fits in fine with the existing car centric suburban development model. The transit, cycling, and pedestrian oriented city involves changing how people think about their lives (many people in the US ask how it's even possible to get groceries without a car) and even changing some of the ways we structure our society (the expectation that the cost of housing will increase forever, or even the expectation that housing should be treated as a commodity to invest in at all, as well as many other things to do with the intersection of finance and landuse).
To give another example inventing new chemical processes to try to make plastic recycling work is a technological solution to the problem of petroleum use and plastic waste. Reducing or eliminating the use of single-use plastics where practicable is a non-technological solution, because it doesn't involve any new technologies.
In principle I'm not opposed to new technologies and "technological solutions". However you can see from the above examples that very often the non-technological solution works better. Technological solutions are also very often a poison pill (plastic recycling was made to save the plastic industry, not the planet).
In practice I think we need to use both types of solutions (for example, massively reduce our plastic use, but also use bio-plastics anywhere we can't). But people have a strong reaction to the idea of so-called technological solutions because of the chilling effect they have on policy changes. We saw this with the loop and hyperloop. Rather than rethinking the policies that lead to the dearth of High-Speed rail in the US and investing in a technology that already existed a bunch of states decided to wait for the latest whizz-bang gadget to come out. And it turns out this was exactly the plan. The hyperloop was never supposed to work, it was just supposed to discourage investment in rail projects.
I think that innovative forms of policy are technologies. If chemistry can have chemical engineers that implement chemical technologies, then political science should have civil engineers who implement political technologies.
My background is in chaos magick, where we refer to our magic spells as techs all the time. And this approach isn't novel. Psychologists consider things like meditation or applications of the placebo effect technologies. I mean, the brain is a thinking machine just like a computer, and we consider software technologies such as websites and applications to be technologies. Psychological technology is software for a brain, and political technology is software for a society.
I think gardening is a technology, even though it's just a different way of treating seeds that already exist. Sewing is a technology, the written word is a technology, money is a technology. And words and money exist only inside our heads.
We should be getting techbros excited about actually useful technologies instead of their AI crypto bullshit. I'm a techbro for magic spells and bicycles! There should be political hype over social technologies.
Sure, but that's not how most people read the term. Going back to my point about how I both dis/agree with this because of how vague it is.
We should be using the term correctly so that people learn to read it correctly. Otherwise we'll have a society of people who think technology is whatever Elon Musk is up to, and that's no good at all.
Begone, prescriptivist!
Hahaha jk, but I agree in part. For the other part, though, I think there is a partial duty to a communicator to realise how words will be interpreted, and use the word as they know it will be understood. Or else they should do some work to explain their meaning.
For instance, in the comic, the word "technological" could be removed altogether, and the meaning is only clearer for it.
I think we should be getting people excited about social technologies, and using the symbols of mainstream technology hype is a good idea. Symbols tell people how to feel. If we use techbro Steve Jobs presentation symbols to advertise walkable design to techbros, maybe people will get hype for walkability. I know I'm hype for walkability.
I may sneer at the commodification of livable designs, but I guess I see your point... We've gone way beyond the scope of this comic, using a single word as a launching point to talking about leveraging hype machines for good.
Would you care to give an example? I have a hard time picturing this kind of thing as sincere, because it's usually the tip of the spear in a cynical marketing campaign to divest people of their money.
Check out the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes. He gets me super hype for walkability, transit, and bikes. His newest video is about the weirdest trains in Japan. They make me want my country to have a train network as high tech and as massive and efficient. And also more cool trains. There's a Hello Kitty bullet train. It's pink!
Why would the comic be referring to technology that has been around for hundreds of years? To me it's clearly about the belief that we'll "technology" our way out of the overconsumption crisis of capitalism
If we think the comic is being vague, then maybe a better specific example would be nuclear power?