I gave a snapshot summary of the Tech/Myth project back in July. Here’s an update; it outlines the current assumptions and activities of the project, and provides some background to the current effort of analyzing tech in terms of character.
Assumptions and current work
I currently frame the project as follows:
Logical (rational, reasoned, empirical, scientific) policy analysis, specifically of the impact of Big Tech on society, is necessary but not sufficient
It should be complemented by attention to the “irrational” (emotion, beliefs, aesthetics, narrative, etc.) which plays a vital role in how we understand and respond to the world, but is undervalued by the WEIRD managerial class.
I propose to do this by applying mythology to technology, e.g. analyzing it in terms of archetypes and symbolic stories.
Archetypes are useful because they’re ingrained mental patterns shape how we understand and respond to social phenomena .
I have failed to find contemporary myths that explain technology in narrative terms. I will therefore apply traditional myths to the current situation – with some trepidation, since there are many reasons why they might not be applicable.
The near-term project goal is to delve into the transcript and coverage of a recent U.S. House antitrust hearing to tease out how politicians and the press are talking about Big (Digital) Tech. Framed as a research question: Who is digital technology as a character?
In the medium term, we may analyze how members of the public perceive digital tech as a character.
A few remarks
Archetypes are in the eye of the beholder. It’s impossible to prove that a particular technology (or company, or individual) IS a specific archetype, or instantiates a particular mythic narrative, not least because archetypes and stories are both subjective and fluid. On the other hand, every observation of any phenomenon is partial: there is no complete truth, especially given limits on time and cognition. This is certainly true for myths ¬(every retelling reflects the teller), but is also true for supposedly objective scientific claims.
A tangential problem that I’m leaving to one side is explaining my failure to find contemporary myths: are we pre- or post-mythological, are we too secular, haven’t I looked properly and/or in the right places, etc.
The antitrust analysis so far suggests that there’s little metaphor and less myth. The deepest historical reference, used by only one Member, is to railroad antitrust. This is what led me to focus on character.
Tech as a character
The research question “Who is digital technology as a character?” means What kind of person do people experience digital technology to be? What are the imputed mental and moral qualities, rather than mere characteristics, of digital tech? One approach explores the applicability of stock characters like those in traditional myth and legend. A more quantitative method is to use psychological assessments like the Big 5 or MBTI to aggregate the attitudes of some population. Between these two lies linguistic analysis of large corpora such as social media posts or news articles.
For the purpose of the antitrust hearing analysis, “people” are the members of Congress; when looking at coverage of the hearings, “people” are reporters and perhaps other influencers. In the medium term we may broaden the population to (say) students or people active on social media.
In the antitrust hearing case, “digital technology” is the four GAFA companies. In a broader study, it could (alternatively or additionally) be application categories like social media, online shopping, and search.
I think character analysis is applicable to technology because humans anthropomorphize instinctively and often unconsciously. We do it explicitly when we stereotype countries, companies, cultures, etc. It’s likely that we do it for digital tech, too. (I’m not discounting statistical, empirical, “objective” characteristics, of course; they’re also important, just not sufficient.)
Character analysis is useful because it’s dangerous not to know who you’re dealing with, e.g. when Pentheus doesn’t realize that the Stranger in Euripides's Bacchae is Dionysus; or when Othello doesn’t understand Iago’s character; or when one doesn’t realize that one of your coworkers is an Iago. In this case, we’re trying to find who this technology is that so dominates our lives.
The mythical dimension comes into play when one abstracts away enough from a specific person (or company, or technology) to evoke numinous images. Here’s the image I have in mind:
The legendary and mythical figures are fainter because of their conceptual distance, but their larger conceptual scale means they might be the same “size” (i.e. just as real) as more material images like celebrities or other individuals.
Character versus Tools
In my reading of articles about technology, it’s hardly ever presented as a character. Rather, it’s portrayed as a tool or instrument (“political weapon”; “access to reliable information”; “social media is a democratizing force”), a place (“Internet as the primary battlefield”), or natural phenomenon (“our information ecosystem”). (These examples are from Geoff Shullenberger’s “The New Net Delusion” in The New Atlantis.)
This lines up with Heidegger’s description in “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954): “The current conception of technology, according to which it is a means [to an end] and a human activity, can therefore be called the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology.” Heidegger contends that “the correct instrumental definition of technology still does not show us technology's essence.” Unlike Heidegger, I’m not trying to find technology’s essence, but merely to understand one of the ways in which it affects us. I’m still hopeful that we’ll get to narrative and perhaps even myth eventually, but for now I’m limiting scope to one of the key elements of narrative: character.
Character differs in some useful ways from tools. First, someone’s character can change dramatically in ways that a specific tool doesn’t. For example, Gilgamesh left Uruk as predatory tyrant, and returned as a good king. An actor’s Hamlet changes from one night to the next, depending on their mood, and the audience’s.
Second, character in the eye of the beholder: no two biographies of the same person describe the same person. Hamlet changes from one production to another, and from one era to another.
Last but not least, I suspect character is also more open to relatedness than instrumentality. Martin Buber’s distinction between the I-It and I-You ways of addressing existence could be relevant here. The policy analysis that I’ve seen treats technology as an It, that is, the world as we experience it. I’m groping towards an analysis that approaches technology as a You, that is, something that the subject-I has a living relationship with.
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