We had a camper when I was a kid, a pebbly-white, pop-up trailer that my grandparents gave us when we lived in Colorado. It was small but mighty, equipped with every necessity: two pull-out beds, a few cabinets, a sink that never worked, and a clever piece of furniture that, depending on its position and your mood, could be either a table or a couch. The floor plan was loosely based on Harry Potter’s first bedroom: cozy if you’re kind, cramped if you’re realistic. Everything could be tucked away neatly as if the whole thing were a puzzle box. To a seven-year-old, it was perfect.
I loved that camper. I can picture my dad inching it along winding roads in mountain counties where guardrails were wishful thinking. We travelled very, very slowly, even and especially downhill. I can remember waking up in the bigger bed next to my two younger brothers on cool fall mornings, half buried in a mess of three sleeping bags. My parents always slept in the smaller bed across the floor, far enough away that we kids were in our own world, close enough that our waking woke them up. We took that camper a lot of places together. It was always safe. I can still almost smell it.
We moved from Colorado to Maryland when I was eight. My parents bought a little brick ranch house with a good yard, and my dad parked the camper behind the fence. Then we all got older and busier. Mom went back to work. Every once in a while, my brothers and I would crank up the camper, pull out the beds, turn the couch into a table, and have our school friends over. On those nights, the camper was the scene of the best jokes I’ve ever heard and the meanest things I’ve ever said. But most of the time it only sat behind our fence packed away, collecting leaves.
One day, my dad sold it. I wasn’t surprised. To be honest, I wasn’t even all that sad. We’d come to have little use for a camper. We’d stopped going camping.
In my last essay, I claimed that technology in modern culture is best understood as a religion: something that asks for our whole-hearted worship. In the next couple of essays, I’d like to discuss the direction in which technology moves, and, by consequence, the direction in which our technology moves us. But before I get there, I think I need to start by addressing a stubborn myth of the technoreligion that suggests that our tools don’t move us at all.
Technology, claims the myth, has no telos. Tools are neutral. They come without attachments and might be used for anything. Campers are not necessarily for camping.
It takes only a moment’s thought to see that this is not true, and yet it’s remarkably common to hear arguments in this vein, as if each tool that humans create is pure, budding potential to be pointed in any direction, a bit of matter that popped into existence with no pre-purposed end. Guns don’t kill people, insists the myth; people kill people. A knife can be used as a weapon to murder a person or as a surgical instrument to save them. An iPhone can be used to play Candy Crush or to read War and Peace. AI can be used to cure cancer or take over the world.
Much of the confusion comes at the splitting point between our moral wills and our means. In other words, a knife isn’t put on trial for murder—a person is. But as every bloody revolution eventually finds out, morality can’t be ripped apart from its means of accomplishment. Take, again, a knife: It’s an object with no will of its own, and it could be used to perform any number of different actions, from killing someone to whittling wood to cutting steak. But each knife has an intended purpose. There are differences between pocket knives and steak knives and scalpels—not just differences of form but of intent—and you’d better hope that your surgeon can tell between them. Again: You can’t pull morality apart from means. Every technology we create is unavoidably for something. It can’t be understood apart from its purpose.
Interestingly, as something of a side note, you can see a kind of parallel principle at work in biology. We can only understand the features and behaviors of organisms when we understand their usefulness—what you might call their purposes. As Steven Pinker writes in How the Mind Works, biological analysis “begins with a goal to be attained and a world of causes and effects in which to attain it, and goes on to specify what kinds of designs are better suited to attain it then others.” A little later, he explains how this sort of “reverse-engineering” has helped researchers to understand morning sickness in pregnant women:
“[The biologist Margie] Profet predicted that pregnancy sickness should confer some benefit that offsets the cost of lowered nutrition and productivity. Ordinarily, nausea is a protection against eating toxins… Profet synthesized hundreds of studies, done independently of each other and of her hypothesis, that support it.”
Morning sickness, it turns out, protects babies. We came to know this not by working from the ground up, but by working from the point back down. Purpose dictates form. Our tools can be understood in a similar way. The shape of a carrot peeler, to take a tangible example, is determined by the fact that it’s used for peeling carrots. In Aristotelian language, there is always a formal and final cause.
Of course, many biologists (and certainly Steven Pinker) would balk at relating evolutionary reverse-engineering to the idea of an Aristotelian final cause or a telos. Evolution, they’re quite sure, only approximates the appearance of design. But you get the idea. When you know that ears are for hearing, their absurd appearance—all the silly little swirls and flaps of skin—suddenly makes sense, and of course you can hardly help using them to hear. When you know that carrot peelers are for peeling carrots, their strangely shaped blades aren’t mysterious but ingenious, and if you happen to have one in a kitchen drawer, you’re much more likely to go ahead and use it to peel carrots rather than to awkwardly try and dice them. This is why tools can’t be ripped out of context: Each tool is meant for something and must be used for it. All technology has a purpose. Our technology can’t separated from our intention, so it can never be neutral.
There are still at least three more areas of nuance, though, and here’s where the rest of the confusion lies. First, a tool can have many possible uses (like, for instance, an iPhone), which make the tool seem as if it’s only pure potential. Pretty much all modern technology is this way. Second, the various uses of a tool can themselves be deemed good in one context and bad in another—it might be fine to play Candy Crush while waiting for the bus, but you probably shouldn’t play it on a date with your wife. And third, a tool can clearly be used intentionally for something outside of its original purpose—like, for instance, when you use an iPhone to read War and Peace.
So, sure: Debating the morality of any technology is hopelessly complex. But the crucial point that underlies all nuance is that a tool can never escape its original purpose, and neither can the people who use the tool. You might only ever shoot your gun at the range, but even there you’ll aim it at targets designed to look like animals or men. You might try to use your iPhone to read classic literature, but eventually you’ll check your notifications. Buttons beg to be pressed. Any user of a tool is pulled to its purpose like metal to a magnet.
Purpose, after all, is what brings tools into being. In a way, it’s also what upholds them. When a tool’s purpose is abandoned, the tool will be abandoned soon after. That’s why my dad sold our camper.
All of this is to say that, while there are certainly arguments for nuance, there really is no valid argument for total technoneutrality. And this begs the question: If the myth is untrue, why is it asserted so often? One reason might be that it serves as propaganda for the technoreligion. If technology is neutral, then it’s no threat, and it can be left to unfold however it likes—and, of course, it likes to keep unfolding forever. Paul Kingsnorth makes this argument in Against the Machine. Reviewing how enmeshed spiritual leaders seem to be with technology—even in sacred places of worship—he writes that:
“It appears that many spiritual leaders and thinkers are as swept up in the Machine’s propaganda system as anyone else. They have bought into what we might call the Myth of Neutral Technology, a subset of the Myth of Progress.”
Maybe. All successful religions, after all, build into their foundational narratives the seeds of their own expansion—the Great Commission being maybe the greatest example. But I think the popularity of technoneutrality probably isn’t due to something so intentional as propaganda. The simplest answer is that we like our tools, whether they’re good for us or not. We don’t want to blame them; we want to keep them, and we want to keep using them. We believe the myth of technoneutrality because we’re loathe to give technology up, and we cling to it because, beneath the false myth, we intuitively sense technology’s two, much more alluring, promises: that it makes man more powerful and life more convenient.
Power and convenience: These are our modern addictions and two of our most ancient desires. They are two sides of the same coin at the glowing center of the technoreligion, although it tends to call them by other names.
They are what technology moves toward.
