A triangle model for understanding the dark side of technology [Walter Davis, ISSS 1998 Paper Session, July 22/98]

These notes are a rough transcription, prepared as each individual presenter and/or commentator spoke at the ISSS 1998 conference. Gaps and errors have likely occurred. For more accurate citations, please consult the original presenters. These notes have been contributed to the ISSS by David Ing, of the IBM Advanced Business Institute (sabi@systemicbusiness.org).

Walter Davis, Kent State University

Some question as to whether technology is helping human to flourish.

• However, agreement of destruction of social and personal environment
• Jack Ellul -- The Technological Society
• Defines technique: a self-perpetualating, totalizing force ...

1. Goals, beliefs
2. Context
3. Human attributes

• Three characteristics of the model are necessary and sufficient determinants of intentional systems.
• Global, consistent with general systems theory.
• Linked by constraint -- both an limitation and an enablement.
• They're connected and distinct

• World is stratified layers of causal determination ....
• Universe and all living systems are open systems, machines are closed systems
• Universe is being -- organismic

Patterns & Outcomes

• (Patterns of) Individual and group actions have consequences (outcomes)
• These are directly connected to goals, intended and unintended
• Goal-directed, but often fail.
• Both positive and negative outcome

• We are both necessarily individual and social
• ... and therefore selfish and altruistic
• ... maximize or minimize
• We are perceptual-affective systems
• As open systems, have on-board potential energy,
• ... which means we have agency

• In order to have agency, have to have power
• Utilization of resources
• Authoritative (non-material) and allocative (material) -- Giddens

• All relationships have power, never zero-sum

• Ideology are beliefs about human nature
• Beliefs are causes
• Can be conscious or unconscious
• Goals can be multiple and conflictual
• Much of behaviour is routinized, and unmotivated
• Epstein: guided by both rational self (tacit knowledge) and experiential self (may do opposite of rational)
• Ideology from Giddens (1979): Capacity of the dominant class to make their own sectional interests appear to others as universal ones ...
• Mythical, not false
• Western belief is mostly Hobbesian, which separates politics from morality.
• Assumed machine view of world.
• Resources are scarce, thus every man for himself
• Capable of reason, but selfish
• Therefore, we have stand in awe of a greater power, and be willing of being controlled
• There was no intermediary between anarchy and strict authoritarianism (and he went for the latter)
• Locke was similar
• Social hierarchies are therefore natural and necessary
• Technology means progress

• Live in a social and a physical world, connected but different
• Asymmetrical relationship: social world depends on the physical world (which existed first)
• Implication: dominate nature at your own peril

• Gibson's theory of affordances: physical world, duality between action and perception, the world affords things (is constrained) on us.
• Giddens duality of structure is similar, but for social world.
• Regularized practice using rules and resources recursively implicated in the reproduction of social systems.
• Systems stretch in time

• Hierarchy vs. heterarchies (abstract, which don't exist in pure forms)
• Hierarchies == authoritarianism
• Commands unidirectional
• Relationship immutable and linear
• Roles are singular and immutable
• Centralization of control
• Reduces degrees of freedom
• Stable, changes are minimal
• Heterarchy == participative democracy
• Free dominance, depends on actions within the system
• Reciprocity in flow of information
• Leadership decentralized
• Freeing of degrees of freedom
• Less stable, more susceptible to change.
• From Giddens, most important decisions are:
• Production and distribution of resources
• Control over the means and use of violence
• Military is a apparatus of the state
• Power (including information) is not always taken, it is given

• Most important decision are economic and political (overarching, most constraint)
• Capitalism:
• Goal of profit, domination, control
• Hierarchical
• Antithetical to democracy
• Undermines politics and culture
• An immoral and irrational system
• Corporate liberalism (u.S. 1900, prominent today)
• Programs, and policies and a bureaucracy to administer laws.
• Sold to the public by masking the manner in which the programs and institutions serve the corporation.
• Masses led to believe they have a vested interest in the system
• Weinstein (1968) American liberalism as a powerful ideological weapon
• Elite liberalism
• Most people not smart enough to make their own decisions, so we make them for them
• Consolidation of power: control of mass media, coerced schooling, formal networks of authoritative resources and allocative resources

• Given a goal, what do you want? What sort of behaviour patterns would you like to see?
• Domination and control ...
• Need to balance between hierarchy and heterarchy

• Since physics was there, the atomic bomb had to be created
• The other view is guns don't kill people, ...
• Another view is creating an artificial world better than the real world

Questions

Why juxtapose hierarchy and heterarchy?

• Not necessarily autopoesis = heterarchy.