Understanding the Modern World: II

what's a technology?

Organizational Technology in Action

In this series I'm arguing for the idea that we can usefully look at the ways we organize ourselves as technologies, so it behooves me to ask: "What's a technology?" I'm re-reading Aristotle's Metaphysics in Reeve’s translation right now, and am reminded of how much of my early philosophical education was influenced by his way of approaching problems, which is very focused on careful definitions, so here I am.

Stone tools are a technology. So is steel. So is steam.

When James Watt created the first "atmospheric engine" he introduced a whole new way of solving the problem of moving matter around using steam, although there had been much earlier approaches that were never developed beyond simple prototypes, which is a theme I’ll come back to. Watt's engine and the technology behind it was subsequently developed into all kinds of specific instances, which were put to work in everything from moving water out of mines to moving locomotives along tracks to making the parts of various machines in a diversity of factories spin and crank.

A technology is an external solution to a problem. This differentiates a technology from a skill, which is an internal solution to a problem. "Internal" and "external" refer to being internal to or external to a human being. There are (probably) martial artists who can pound nails in with their fists. That's a skill. Me, I use a hammer. That's a technology.

A technology is not is a behaviour or a discipline, both of which are internal. People sometimes decry "technological fixes" as if they were a bad thing, which is generally a sign they are on some kind of moral crusade, and they want to prevent the use of the technology because they wrongly believe that without it people will be motivated to make the internal (moral) changes they want to see.

The arguments tend to go like this:

Them: Premarital sex is bad.

Us: Why do you think that?

Them: It can lead to unwanted pregnancies and disease.

Us: Here are condoms and birth control pills, which prevent unwanted pregnancies and condoms prevent many sexually transmitted diseases.

Them: Those are technological fixes! They're bad!

Us: Why do you think that?

Them: Because they'll encourage people to have premarital sex!

Us: What's wrong with that?

Them: It can lead to unwanted pregnancies and disease.

It's not really about pregnancy or disease: it's about forcing shifting the burden from the external--a technology--to the internal: a behaviour.

As well as being ineffective--in the absence of a technological fix problems tend to persist because that's why they are problems in the first place--this style of argument is cowardly and dishonest: it tries to make a purely moralistic position into a practical one by focusing on the negative consequences of a behaviour, but the whole point of the technological fix is to alleviate those consequences, so what's the problem?

People often think of technology as necessarily being a "device", but I'm using it in a somewhat broader sense as any problem-solving system that is not internal to a person, and a mode of organization is obviously not internal to a person.

A mode of organization requires an understanding among different people as to how to interact with each other to solve the problem their leaders (which may be themselves) have. It is this mutual understanding, this often-implicit agreement on how to coordinate their behaviour, that is the technology. It is obviously external to any one individual, because it exists between individuals.

For example, consider genre in film or improv. Genre constitutes a technology for coordinating the actions of many people. I've done a fair bit of genre improv, and it's an extremely powerful technology. By practicing the tropes of the genre, original stories can be constructed on the fly with remarkable ease, even among people who have nothing in common.

One of my improv mentors once competed at a festival where there was a contest to put on the best forty-five minute long-form by two improvisors who had never met each other before. They were just called up on stage, introduced themselves, given a prompt, and told to go ahead. He was partnered with a Czech guy. Their prompt from the audience was "avocado". They were in the southern US. He opened the scene speaking in Southern accent with the line, "I'm so worried that we won't get enough rain this summer for our avocado plantation!" And the rest was gone with the wind...

One genre I've played is "The Twilight Zone", which also comes up a lot in script-writing courses and workshops, because the stories had an extremely tight, easily-replicated structure: an almost hyper-normal introduction followed by a slightly unsettling incident that serves as the seed of a problem that grows and grows until there is some kind of twist that resolves it, generally in a morally satisfying way.

This is a blueprint for a good story of a particular type, and using it solves the problem of coordinating improvisors to produce something that entertains the audience.

Screenplays are themselves technological fixes to the problem of getting film crews to work in a coordinated manner. A screenplay is nothing more than a technical document that tells professionals in a dozen or so disciplines what to do without tripping over each other. The only thing it's really not very good at is telling a story.

Genre is a kind of hidden technology in film: I have on occasion tried to make a "good" science fiction short that respects the boundaries of the possible, but was never successful because everyone on set knew what a sci-fi film should look like, and it wasn't what the script described or what I was trying to do. This meant that my scripts were consistently misinterpreted to fit genre expectations, and--because I am a finite being--I couldn't stay on top of all the professional choices everyone from props to makeup to actors made. That's the whole point of organizational technologies: to allow one person to organize the action of others despite the fantastically tight limits on our attention and reach.

Another area where organizational modes as technologies is evident is the software development process: named technologies like Agile, Kanban, and even the dreaded Waterfall are all ways of organizing at team to create complex systems without the individual members stepping on each other's tails too often.

Or consider: is the assembly line a technology? Few people would dispute this. But assembly lines don't actually depend on the gadget that moves widgets past workers. The first assembly lines were organized by Wedgewood to make crockery, and they were literally just lines of people, passing each work-piece along the bench after they'd done their bit. That's a technology.

As such, I don't think the way I'm using "technology" here is outside the realm of the reasonable.

Using any technology typically requires skill, but the fact that "having the ability to use a hammer" is a skill doesn't make the claim "hammers are a technology" in any way confusing or difficult to understand. The same will be true of organizational technologies: improvisors who are introduced to the strange form known as the harold aren't all that good at it at first, any more than first-time pilots are especially competent. It takes skill to learn how to use a technology to do the job it was invented to solve.

Finally, looking at organizational modes as technologies allows me to bring my knowledge of the history of technology to bear on the problem of organizational structure, and one of the things we're taught as scientists is that when you have problem you don't know how to solve, you should turn it into a problem you do know how to solve, and see what you learn. I don't know how to solve the problem of "Why is the Modern world organized the way it is and what can we do about it?" but I do know how to understand the causes of and constraints on technological change.

By considering organizational modes as technologies I can usefully employ that understanding to answer questions about the Modern condition, which I will continue on with next week, when I'll introduce the three dominant organizational modes we can identify over the course of human history.

There may also be a post mid-week on the aggressive disinformation campaign the BC government is running to convince people that the pandemic is over, which it is unfortunately not.