What Technology Does

How much do we see technology as being the primary basis for economic progress, within capitalism or any other economic scheme? How connected is our instrumental understanding of technology — the understanding I want to problematize — as neutral and universally applicable tool to our understanding of the capitalist economy as neutral in its privileging of efficiency above all other values? The capitalist economy operates upon an ethics of efficiency: that which is not efficient will die. Do we assign an ethics to technology? That which is not useful will die, perhaps? The discourse in which education serves competitiveness in the global economy must at some level assert that education promotes higher efficiency. What is the class status of the technocrat, upon all the axes of class that I’ve been exploring?

We understand that the technologization of education was a response to Sputnik. Public policy created a historical space within which students are operated upon and improved by technology (and, in computers and composition, student writing is improved by technology) and improved that they might operate technologies more efficiently and even produce more efficient technologies, just as students are operated upon and improved by literacy education and improved in order that they might operate words more efficiently and even produce more efficient ways of communicating. Yet the watershed moments in composition have come when instructors have perceived students as subjects, and not as a collective needing to be improved. How many of those watershed moments has the discipline of computers and composition had?

Few, I think. This is because the discourse of technology takes problems of politics and culture and transfers them into the ‘neutral’ realm of technology, where the instrumental nature of technology will make it easier to divorce those problems from student subjectivities and then simply find the appropriate tool.