<nettime> Computers as conservative technologies

[Felix Stalder <stalder@fis.utoronto.ca>]

We are used to associate with computers concepts like 'new' or
'revolution.' We tend to believe that we live in times of unprecedented
change, driven by technology; that old knowledge is obsolete, old thinking
is bad. But this obsessive concern with the now and the next ten minutes,
limits the attention to the surface while underneath it, the currents
might flow in a somewhat different direction. 

Joseph Weizenbaum, in a book on the social impact of computers written
nearly 25 years ago, described computers as a fundamentally conservative
technology. This still seems apt in many ways. After all, is there really
so much difference between Walmart and amazon.com? 

"Many of the problems of growth and complexity that pressed insistently
and irresistibly during the postwar decades could have served as
incentives for political innovation....Yet, the computer did arrive 'just
in time.' But in time for what? In time to save--and to save very nearly
intact, indeed, to entrench and stabilize--social and political structures
that otherwise might have been either radically renovated or allowed to
totter under the demands that were sure to be made on them. The computer,
then, was used to conserve America's social and political institutions. It
buttressed them and immunized them, at least temporarily, against enormous
pressure for change. Its influence has been substantially the same in
other societies that have allowed the computer to make substantial inroads
upon their institutions: Japan and Germany immediately come to mind."
(p.31) 

Weizenbaum, Joseph (1976). Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment
to Calculation. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company

Weizenbaum, a MIT computer scientist, is best known for his 1965
development of ELIZA, a computer program that could emulate a psychiatrist
in a basic conversation with a patient. 



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