Diálogos com Andrew Feenberg

[Music] the technology goyas is the finger no doctorado and education [Music] determinism is technology compare I am alsoing crazy yes foreign [Music] [Music] daily [Music] Netflix professors [Music] pleased to be with you uh even though we're actually very far apart [Music] talk to you about philosophy of technology and also I've written a new book on marcuso which will appear [Music] the um I have of course been involved with education as a professor in a philosophy professor and a communication Professor for many years but I was also involved in the very first experiments in online education

[Music] so you might want to ask me some questions about those early experiences back in the early 1980s [Music] yes I I have been very influenced by phenomenology since my student days I feel philosophies of experience of all kinds are great importance we cannot simply accept that the world as science presents it is the whole world there's a lot of other things going on at the level of our lived experience it's not there's nothing it's not that science is wrong I'm not anti-scientific it's just that there's more to experience than can be encompassed by the

methods of Natural Science we need philosophy and the experiential thinking to make sense of the world we actually live in social or aggressivista Marx has been interpreted in many different ways it's very difficult to be sure what he really intended among the interpretations that I think are most convincing are constructivist interpretations the of course there's a very broad over what would you say a very broad perspective which appears deterministic because I mean he does believe that the ability of human beings to transform nature and make it useful for themselves That's the basis of civilization and

different modes of transformation of nature give different civilizations but that doesn't really solve any problems in the present in our actual practical experience in the present we have to act out of intentions ideologies beliefs and none of these are determined by in some absolute Way by social forces in in practice Marxism I think should be a active philosophy not a it's not about way predicting the future it's about making the future um I think it does play a significant role but it's very confused now that role is very confused because the collapse of the Soviet

Union and what has happened in China really means that we don't know what socialism would be like we have no model and that makes it very difficult to know what Marxism really is telling us so we're better at complaining about capitalism than we are at inventing an alternative is foreign yes we talked in some emails and I want to talk to you that I am very honored to be here and talk directly with you I am very grateful for Claudia um that organized this moment for us I study your your ideas and I want to

to do some questions but I first I want to hear about your ideas about technology but I am very honored and very constraints [Music] to be here I am very happy very grateful for you well I'm glad to hear that yes Glenn very great to be here I I want some questions but first I want to hear you about your ideas thank you so much foreign okay um since I don't really know for sure what it is you want me to talk about I'll I'll keep it short and then you can ask more questions but

let me tell you something about um my ideas about technology thank you okay well let me say something then um my original engagement with the problem of Technology was with Heidegger and Marcus in other words with um approaches to technology that saw it as [Music] profoundly destructive at the same time it seemed obvious that you could have no modern society without technology so there's a kind of of paradox the the the important critical work on technology and seem to contradict the possibilities of modernity some people drew the conclusion that you should withdraw from the technological

Society altogether go back to the woods but I grew up in New York City and for me the idea of going back to the woods seems absurd so I then somewhat later after these early experiences with Heidegger and Marcus's work I began to actually engage with technology directly I had the opportunity to work with Technical Systems and then I discovered something that I had not understood before namely that technology is much more flexible than it appeared in the works of the philosophers I had studied so we could imagine a technological Society very different from the

one in which we live um I I'll briefly mention the two experiences that the most impact on me um I worked at one point in the 1970s in a Medical Research Institute so we we engaged in medical experimentation on human subjects for a disease from which there was no treatment and no cure well I did some research on how to do this on what would be a ethical and humane way to engage in experimental treatment it turned out that there was no truly scientific um formula you could you could engage in experimentation in very different

ways so of course so there were some constant elements that you had to um take care of for the experiment to be valid but the human dimension of the experiment could be very different so it could be um dehumanizing or it could be a social experience could be an educational activity all these are possibilities and science doesn't determine how to do it you have to make the decision then a few years later I was asked to participate in the development of a online educational system you have to understand the conditions in 1981 we started out

we had 300 broad modems we had 48k of [Music] of internet uh 48k of uh bytes in the computers memory you can't imagine what it was like the the keyboard only gave capital letters you need you needed special a special equipment to get both capital and small letters um no one had done much there were two or three courses that had been offered before we created our system of course of working on this online education system I realized that we were actually transforming the nature of the computer the computer was becoming a communication system the

human communication system not just at before it was a filing system it was a calculating system and now it was becoming a communication system and we were making this happen around this time the social constructivists were beginning to develop new ways of understanding Science and Technology uh uh I remember Bruno latuo was a neighbor and we talked about uh this new approach these um social constructivists and they seem to have a completely different way of viewing technology from Heidegger and Marcus who I had read as a student their approach made more sense of my own

experiences with technology I could not give up on the idea that somehow larger social issues were involved with technology the sort of issues that emerged from say Marcus's Marxist critique I began to think about how to put together the two sources of my experience with technology my understanding of Technology the Marcus on the one side and the constructivism on the other how could they be synthesized um the the it's it's rather difficult to explain than what I did in a few words so that is the origin of my work on technology [Music] I'm hoping that

you will have read enough that you have a good idea um basically the the approaches seconds in the constructivist world active actors change the design of Technology the design of technology is in other words socially constructed most of the constructivist work is quite specific to individual Technologies and actors are those who are directly involved with those Technologies I thought about transferring this approach to the level of civilization for example capitalist societies design Technologies in function of certain imperatives control of the workforce by management is essential that affects the kind of technologies that are innovated for

example the assembly line is a good case of control through technology capitalist the actors involved are capitalists and their agents workers are not actors in the construction of these Technologies under capitalism so this has consequences for the kind of technology that is produced the nature of work and the products you can think of this as a kind of generalized constructivism not about particular Technologies but about whole regions of Technology and then the alternative would of course be the designs that would result from for example worker control those designs might be incompatible with capitalist control of

the workforce so I started out with these ideas and then gradually the social World changed my original Notions were largely an attempt to make a kind of constructivist version of Marxism in the 1970s and 80s social movements around technology began to develop of a new kind there were movements around nuclear power around environmental problems like air pollution around Medical um issues specifically around the obstetrics AIDS see that so this is also an important uh issue in this new type of technological struggle that emerged in the 70s and 80s and that don't change my perspective so

I I began to see that technology had so completely covered over every aspect of social life in modern societies that it's not only workers who have a problem so it looked to me like Marx had found something very important where technology is present their people are assembled and suffer and can resist but in his day that was really only in factories and on ships now people are assembled by technology in many many ways not simply by their work in factories or boats but also in all sorts of experiences they are engaged in in the community

in medicine in uh education in every field so the idea that once people are brought together by technology they have problems and they can fight to improve their condition Marx's original notion now concerns the whole all spheres of society not just the factory well we may not get the revolution marks expected from this situation but he gives us a the elements of a political philosophy of Technology so I'll stop there and wait for you to provoke me with questions [Music] uh technology foreign yeah I think there I remember I made a chart actually the the

four uh types of theories of Technology comes from a book by Albert Borgman and then I put it into a chart and made it uh more easily understandable what the Alternatives were so the four types so the um instrumentalism and substantivism and determinism were three of the possible philosophies of technology and then I added a fourth critical theory and the critical theory in a way crosses the the boundary between these different approaches so I I mean very briefly the um instrumental theories are argue that we can do with technology what we wish it's up to

us but uh they only work at the level of the individual possibilities offered by existing technology what you can do is what are the different things that the technologies that exist will allow you to do and the the substantivist theories argue that the technology technology as such has consequences so it changes the nature of social reality independent what you do with it so critical theory I argued would be the critical theories of Technology would be theories that argued that the design of Technologies the um and the the systems within which the Technologies function are [Music]

can be altered by human beings but once you've created the system and the design it has the effects the value effects that substantivism attributes to it so the instrumentalist view of the National Rifle Association in America holds that people don't kill people guns don't kill people people kill people in other words the guns are innocent they are neutral it's the people who do the harm the critical view would hold that the technology itself creates a new situation in which uh gun violence is made possible so um you can't say that the technology is innocent since

it is it is part of a way of life in which gun violence plays a significant role so that's a very simple way of EX of understanding the difference but you could think of other examples for example [Music] um my experience of Sao Paulo and Beijing and Los Angeles is especially an experience of traffic jams so this is the result of a civilizational choice of the what is a city the design the city design is the responsible is responsible for this situation they're a city could be redesigned in such a way as to provide public

transportation bicycles many you can imagine a whole different way of organizing the city that would avoid the catastrophe that is now these large Cities traffic so the the the the critical issue is at not at the level of the technology specific technology like the car the critical issue is at the level of the system within which the car plays a role so you can see it's the critical theory draws from instrumentalism the notion that human beings can affect the technical world it is not as determinism might hold or substantivism a destiny but on the other

hand like substantivism it points out that the Technologies as in their the systems of Technologies embody values they frame a way of life so this is why a politics of Technology emerges from critical theory because it shows that we can change technology but at the level of the system not at the individual level of particular devices Technologies can be changed at the systemic level and that's a political task [Music] enormously foreign did you understand me can you repeat your question your voice is small is not live what word the most significant results in your research

refer your relationship with brunette an actual Network Theory well um I I learned some things from him but I also had some big disagreements um in the early phase of his work everything was really very specific to specific Technologies specific actors when we conversed about the problems of society in general he rejected he said that's just Marxism forget it I idea you an actor Network Theory human and no no human woman well a human in no human yeah his then then he came up with this idea that what he called the agency of things um

the symmetry of humans and non-humans yeah you know this Theory and by this he meant that human beings and things both act in the world there's no special difference between them they both act this idea comes from semiotics uh where it it makes sense in terms of how you analyze texts like novels take take an example um suppose that well say it's a movie and on the screen you see two people fighting and there's a gun and they're fighting to get the gun the gun is just as much an actor as the people the gun

makes things happen the people make things happen so does the gun so you can imagine transposing this idea to the world in general my problem with this is that earthquakes work by causal mechanisms people have intentions it's not the same to the difference between causality and intention is lost in latour's theory that makes a politics of Technology very difficult to imagine and he did invent one wonderful concept with this idea in in his theory things are always connected in to each other in Networks networks have [Music] um do not well a network is constituted by

what he calls a program you want to build a house you collect pieces of wood nails hammers saws and you you have a program for putting all these things together that forms a network which in this case takes the place is a house but the clouds in the sky have a program too which consists in dumping rain on your house and if your roof is not good the program of the clouds will destroy your house so you can call the clouds program the anti-program of your program it's the anti-program so I mean it's a my

example is silly but it but it is what La Tour intends by the agency of things and the symmetry of human and non-human let's forget about this symmetry argument and just use the concept of anti-program to talk about human beings so then you can see how useful the notion of network is for a politics of Technology different actors engage with the same network with different programs the factory pollutes the water in the town that corresponds to the program of the owners of the factory who need to evacuate its wastes the community creates its anti-program to

protect its water by going to court and asking the judge to stop the factory from polluting its water well this I could explain this in much greater detail but this is just an i an idea that I took from LaTour which I use in my own work unfortunately he did not use this idea in his later work he became concerned about environment the environment and he tried to develop a philosophy of the environment on the basis of his um notion of symmetry the results are to my mind very disappointing he seems to think that the

main cause of environmental problems is our bad attitude we have this modern notion that we are separate from nature that is uh irrelevant as relevant is the forces of the market in a capitalist Society but poor latur could never Embrace this Marxist idea [Music] thank you foreign [Music] tried to Think Through the implications of artificial intelligence um what it can do now is quite remarkable compared to what we we thought it was capable of in the past that's it um you can think of very different designs for these new systems um well the social world

has to adjust to these systems the teachers can no longer rely on on Papers written at home all the student papers will be written in class now there are certain professional activities that might be replaced a friend of mine in the movie in the street gave me an example when the people involved in setting up a movie Project get together we have an artist with them to quickly draw examples of what things would look like on the screen but perhaps you could replace them with chat AI so some professions may be affected but um in

the end the systems have very severe limits and will probably always have severe limits I'm thinking about the effect of Photography in the 19th century at first people thought painting will disappear because photography is so much better but two things to take into account painting changed to do something photography can't do it became impressionistic abstract and so on so it did not disappear and then also something else happened or it was always there but it wasn't noticed at first the photographer makes many images and chooses one the choice is an aesthetic Choice which the camera

cannot make only a person can make the aesthetic choice so I think something similar may happen with the attempt to use AI for Creative work so when you see a photograph you think of the person who made the photograph as the artist not the camera because you know that it's selected from thousands of images to maybe one more okay so um perforated with all computers yes technology foreign brazilera so far this is projects well the in terms of politics the key idea to keep in mind that philosophy of Technology offers is the non-deterministic view of

technological development the ideology of [Music] the neoliberal ideology would like you to believe that there's only one path to prosperity so anything else that you might consider important is a going is going to lead to poverty so we need philosophy of technology in the political domain primarily to make sure we don't believe that idea that deterministic idea that idea that deterministic idea eliminates technology from politics there is no politics of Technology if technology can only develop in one way [Music] the the other significant idea that I think is useful politically is the notion that different

actors can contribute to different designs of Technical Systems if you increase the number of actors not just businesses but also workers also communities also um social groups that have been excluded if you increase the number of actors you can obtain better a better technological result so those are ideas that philosophers of Technology mostly agree with that can be useful for talking about politics foreign palabras is speechless now you can see that I'm very happy to have made her speechless um I hope that you can continue to work on positive technology and make some contribution Brazil

is a special case huh because of the Amazon because of the tremendous wealth of the resources it really needs it really needs to have a better understanding of Technology [Music] and the politics of technology that makes sense is [Music] [Music] videos [Music] you wrote about so many things Marcus Marcos Heidi girl so many things as I understand but you can send the emails okay that will be fun [Music] tomorrow foreign [Music] thank you foreign bye bye ciao [Music] foreign [Music]