This is a short extract from the paper “Re-envisioning Civil Society and Social Movements in the Mediterranean in an Era of Techno-Fundamentalism,” published in the European Institute of the Mediterranean (Barcelona). The article is open access.
Techno-fundamentalism is the belief that technology is “not only the means and will to triumph over adversity through gadgets and schemes, but the sense that invention is the best of all possible methods of confronting problems” (Vaidhyanathan, 2006). At its essence, techno-fundamentalism sidesteps politics in favor of taking on social problems and translating them into technical solutions. When technological thinking becomes central to political thought, it draws high risks to civil society and social movements that now become “arranged around platforms and abstractions” while weakening the link between politically-aware citizens and “locally rooted action” (Bartlett, 2018).
It can be argued that the digital technological realm is generally pursued by civil society and social movements for the securing of freedom for society, through organizing, coordinating, garnering public attention, and evading censorship; while governments often pursue the digital technological realm for securing society from freedom – through control, surveillance, censorship, upholding neoliberal modernity or diversion from civic questions… Techno-fundamentalism produces and thrives in a foggy and spectral environment where real world realities and online abstracts bleed into each other, the latter forming a digital swarm that lacks “internal coherence,” as it is fleeting, unstable, and volatile, and can come across less as a voice than noise (Han, 2017). Thus, when the digital order subverts or skews the terrestrial order, it undermines the abilities of civil society and social movements to give name, shape, and form, to the world they are seeking to make a better place.
This paper explores what drives techno-fundamentalism, arguing that having become a default mode of thinking, more so in the era of the pandemic and likely to hold sway long after, it empties political language of its meaning, disfigures human-technology relationships, expedites the progress fallacy and the mistaken belief that technology is a neutral affair. As a fundamentalism, it has been blind to notice the growing global backlash against technology – an obliviousness that can be observed repeatedly at tech conferences prior to the pandemic. At best, it is considered a sub-point worthy of discussion, such as “the right to disconnect”, as long as it acquiesces to the big progress machine. The literature is awash with the toxins of digital activism, from narcissism to security surveillance. However, this paper will focus on the practical realities of how civil society and social movements are constructively affected by digital technologies, and eventually stumble upon the law of diminishing returns that adversely works against their activism as in the case of scaling and polarization.
The hype of innovation stimulates the onward march of digital technology which has been underpinned by the age-old logical fallacy of argumentum ad novitatem (appeal to novelty), also known as the progress fallacy that says the new or recent is better than what came before it. The new is good without giving substantial analysis of the social and ethical implications of the new technology. The argument is further reinforced by tech protagonists, and everyday society, with a variation of this cliched line: ‘Technology is neutral, it is neither good nor bad, it is how you use it.’ Technology is anything but neutral. The popular line I frequently hear is that a knife can be used to cut vegetables or stab a human being, but this weary trope overlooks the subliminal reality that the mere sight of a knife, let alone holding it, has already altered the moral climate in a room. The knife’s very presence is already biased, the thought of a knife is heavily loaded with potential consequences. Similarly, social media is not neutral in a world of algorithms that push politically charged content and echo chambers that purge pluralistic voices from the discussion. Martin Heidegger would argue the neutrality thesis in technology poses ‘the highest danger’ as it puts us at risk of seeing the world through technological thinking, misleads us to believe that technology is an instrument rather than a worldview, and technology being a human activity rather than a grave matter developing beyond human control (Heidegger, 1977)
The rest of the article can be read here.