Well… How Did We Get Here?

Technological Determinism Articles

Technological Determinism – the questions we are still answering

These essays grow out of a single question that has occupied me for the better part of two decades, and that I spent the length of Well… How Did We Get Here? trying to answer properly: does technology shape us, or do we shape it — and if the honest answer is both, in what proportions, and who gets to decide?

Technological determinism is the formal name for one position in that debate. In its hard form, it argues that technology develops according to its own internal logic, that societies adapt to its requirements rather than the other way around, and that the shape of the digital world we now inhabit was — in some meaningful sense — always going to look roughly like this. In its softer forms, it acknowledges that human choices matter, but insists that the technologies we build quickly develop an agenda of their own, one that reshapes the people who use them in ways those people rarely notice and rarely chose.

The essays collected here approach that question from different angles: through philosophy (Heidegger’s concept of enframing, and what a 1954 essay on hydroelectric dams has to say about your phone), through cultural theory (Stuart Hall’s argument that media don’t just tell us what happened — they tell us what it means), through literary history (what Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure knew about surveillance four centuries before the algorithm), and through the books that shaped my own thinking on the subject, from Glyn Moody’s history of the Linux movement to Howard Rheingold’s prescient account of mobile technology and collective action.

They are companion reading to the book, but they stand on their own. If you have a view on whether technology shapes society, or whether society shapes technology — or whether that’s even the right question — one of these pieces will probably find a way to complicate it.

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