Design / Redesign

In our work, especially as consultants, we rarely speak to discourage the "march of progress" of technology. After all, new tech breeds cool work, as designers and developers/builders (in any domain) struggle to make sense of an emerging cool thing or toolset, hoping to be first out of the gate with the Next Big Thing. Since NBT's are often unpredictable within the context of innovation diffusion and adoption, almost anything "new" or potentially radical seems better than incremental enhancement or platform building. But while innovations eventually develop into larger markets of adoption, in the early stages few, if any, follow a regular path to diffusion.

(Remember the OSI 7-layer network, before TCP/IP took all? Fiber to the home, promised in the 1996 Telecommunications Act? The folly of gov mandating HDTV standards? Webvan?)

In our rush to design and build, how well do we acknowledge the social impacts of systems in our domain of design influence? What methods have we introduced that afford us or our clients visibility into the human values of information products or large-scale systems? Or for that matter, commercial websites? Some of us do work for the government from time to time - like the taxes we pay for things we do not support, are we able to see the larger picture of our unwitting contributions? Is everything we do (especially as consultants) "reasonable?"

This introduction sets off my intent in promoting mass reading of the 1992 masterpiece Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, which is more relevant than ever, 14 years later. Perhaps there is undue excitement of the late discovery of such a work, but John Ralston Saul's more recent books: The Collapse of Globalism: And the Reinvention of the World and On Equilibrium: Six Qualities of the New Humanism follow along similar philosophical lines. Copying a bit of review summarizes quickly:

Reason, he argues, has run amok; instead of the enlightened utopia envisaged by Voltaire, the modern West is a soulless machine run by technocratic elites that promise efficiency but create disasters. The author targets the insane waste of our "permanent war economy," the perils of nuclear power, the co-optation of democracy by vested interests, the news media's focus on false events and manufactured celebrities, the "personality politics" of presidential campaigns. He critiques the Harvard Business School's management teachings, profiles such figures as Thomas Jefferson, Robert McNamara and Charles de Gaulle, flunks our colleges for failure to reward creativity and imagination.

It makes you almost nostalgic for the innocence of 1992 - how much more so America, at least, has followed Saul's predictions. The reward in this book is the breathtaking scope of this theme throughout history, from the Inquisition to Ignatius Loyola to Napoleon, McNamara's MBA approach to Vietnam, to secret, backroom decision-making in our single-party "representative" democracy. Sauls' theme is that "reason" - itself- is ideology, and to the extent to which we are unaware of its embedded and systematic rule in our institutions and lives, we are not at choice to liberate ourselves from its tyranny. And, to that extent, we have no freedom of choice in the decisions that matter most to society and culture.

There are significant presaging authors that made convincing arguments consistent with these values, although built upon very different cases and examples, that Saul does not cite. Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society (1954), and Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality.

Ellul referred to as “technique” these values of efficiency and unexamined progress, which he said (in Truman's day) held the potential to overcome all social conventions, including political and national institutions. Ellul held the problem was beyond morality, that technique (essentially the unquestioned values of modern technological society) deeply pervaded human activity. “Technical activity automatically eliminates every nontechnical activity, or transforms it into technical activity.”

Moral questions are uninviting to behold, and overwhelming, in the context of such a valuation. What to do? How to decide? How to know what personal values are being violated when social behaviors and systems are so deeply interwoven"? How to respond when those values and one's own self-promises are so vividly detached from the larger scope of social solidarity and deeply-embedded technological systems and political structure? For now, I will continue reading ... and writing.