More Thoughts on Technology

Machine, Capital, Framework

Since my last post on alienation and social media, I’ve been thinking more about how I experience technology and a couple more paradigms from things I’ve read occurred to me. One of them is again from Marx, this time from another unpublished manuscript from around 1857, the Grundrisse. In these notebooks, Marx is beginning to fill out his theory of the capitalism that would ultimately go into his magnum opus Capital. What I remembered is a provocative description of how machines use workers rather than workers using machine. The machine, as it automates the labor process, gradually replaces the need for workers. What workers do remain are just there to make sure the machines keep running:

In no way does the machine appear as the individual worker’s means of labour. Its distinguishing characteristic is not in the least, as with the means of labour, to transmit the worker’s activity to the object; this activity, rather, is posited in such a way that it merely transmits the machine’s work, the machine’s action, on to the raw material—supervises it and guards against interruptions. Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc, (matières instrumentales), just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion. The worker’s activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself.

The worker becomes just “organ” in the entire system:

Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism.

For Marx, this machinery is capital—“In machinery, objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital.” And capitalism as a mode of production can be said to exist when this relationship of worker to machinery exists:

The full development of capital, therefore, takes place—or capital has posited the mode of production corresponding to it—only when the means of labour has not only taken the economic form of fixed capital, but has also been suspended in its immediate form, and when fixed capital appears as a machine within the production process, opposite labour; and the entire production process appears as not subsumed under the direct skillfulness of the worker, but rather as the technological application of science.

Do we relate to social media as a worker to a machine? I would argue, in some important ways, yes—we are also just “conscious organs” and “links in a system” in this context. The entire machine of social media runs on the content and attention the users supply to it. Aren’t we all sort of just feeding it coal? Now, one might object that there is still a degree of skill involved in social media that makes it not quite the same as being a worker on a line. But I wonder how much that is just an illusion of the individual. If you disappear from it, log off forever, it all keeps going, no one user or class of users is essential, they are just there to keep the thing moving. I recognize it might sound kind of silly to argue that posting all day is analogous to working in a factory. It’s obviously very different the same in pretty obvious, concrete ways, but maybe on a very formal level, our relationship to the machinery, is similar. I also suppose a Marxist would say this is all sort of obvious: capitalism is the dominant mode of production, so it follows therefore everything takes on a capital structure. But it seems notable to me how vast and integrated the machines have become and how little we realize that we’re all, in a sense, working a machine, and then often precisely when we think we’re not working.

I thought of another reading in this context: Martin Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology.” Note that Heidegger is very difficult to understand and I am probably getting a portion of this wrong, but basically he says the essence of technology, which all specific technological applications and inventions share, is something called the Gestell, translated as Frame or Enframing. So it is a kind of very abstract ordering, a putting of things in their places:

According to ordinary usage, the word Gestell [frame] means some kind of apparatus, e.g., a bookrack. Gestell is also the name for a skeleton. And the employment of the word Ge-stell [Enframing] that is now required of us seems equally eerie, not to speak of the arbitrariness with which words of a mature language are thus misused. Can anything be more strange? Surely not.

I think a good example of something that reveals this Gestell quality is something very common today: A spreadsheet, which is a kind of rack, a framework, an abstract ordering. What the Enframing of modern technology does is to make everything what Heidegger calls a Bestand, a standing-reserve. The standing-reserve is something like a stock of resources. Technology converts nature but also man into such a standing-reserve:

If man is challenged, ordered, to do this, then does not man himself belong even more originally than nature within the standing-reserve? The current talk about human resources, about the supply of patients for a clinic, gives evidence of this. The forester who, in the wood, measures the felled timber and to all appearances walks the same forest path in the same way as did his grandfather is today commanded by profit-making in the lumber industry, whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to the orderability of cellulose, which for its part is challenged forth by the need for paper, which is then delivered to newspapers and illustrated magazines. The latter, in their turn, set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set configuration of opinion becomes available on demand.

Heidegger talks about the limiting and denaturing “danger” that comes from Enframing:

It is precisely in Enframing, which threatens to sweep man away into ordering as the supposed single way of revealing, and so thrusts man into the danger of the surrender of his free essence..

Or as the translator’s introduction has it:

Man himself, through whom the ordering characteristic of Enframing takes place, may even be wholly sucked up into the standing-reserve and may come to exist not as the "openness-for-Being" ("Da-sein"), but as a merely self-conscious being knowing himself only as an instrument ready for use.

It seems like Heidegger would prefer us to engage in more primordial ways of relating to Being, like poetry, thought, and the arts, which he thinks are essentially different modes of revealing Being than Enframing. That all sounds good, but I’m not gonna get into it now. What’s interesting to me here is the idea that the technological, the Gestell, like Marx’s machinery, is something that acts through us, but is not really under our control; it is ordering us, which provides nice play on the sense of being bossed around and being put into some abstract order through numbering, specifying, boxing, etc. As technology, social media affects such an Enframing, it sucks us into the standing-reserve: we become mere accounts.

I think the Internet and social media are phenomenologically close to both Marx’s capital and Heidegger’s Enframing. Both seem to me helpful ways to understand what’s happening “on there.” As thoughts they sort of move in opposite directions: Automation and machinery is a specific, concrete process that can be abstracted from to understand other things, while Enframing is a very abstract notion that can be found in many different concrete practices. Maybe there’s a good way to synthesize the two.