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"What is This Thing called Technology? Technology, Politics and Progress" with E. Stefan Kehlenbach, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Rockefeller College ofPublic Affairs and Policy, SUNY Albany.

Should we care about technology as a political force? Is there something inherent in technology that makes it political, or is it merely instrumental within larger political machinations? In short, does technology have politics, and how does our new forms of digital technology driven by AI and data complicate the politics of technology? This question takes on new valences given our current technological moment. The early Frankfurt school was deeply interested in technical forms, and worried about how they can lead to destruction (Horkheimer, Adorno) or operate as mechanisms of social pacification (Adorno, Marcuse). However, the second generation of the Frankfurt School, embodied by the work of Habermas, left technology by the side to focus on moral and political issues. Later, Langdon Winner took up this question for a pre-digital age. Ultimately, understanding the political aspects of technology also requires us to have a clear view of what technology is, something lacking in previous work. The definition of technology must cover the material (and immaterial) things that we commonly reference as technology. It must meet the requirements of a colloquialism, but also not constantly be left behind as our usages change. In our contemporary context, our view of technology is focused on what might be called “digital outcomes,” things that are tied to digital existences, like the internet, algorithms, and other mechanisms that utilize these digital outcomes.

To help solve this puzzle, Professor Kehlenbach turns to Amy Allen’s The End of Progress, specifically her definition of “progress as fact,” or the idea that “progress is a judgment about the developmental or learning process that has led up to ‘us’.” He proposes a definition of technology as the outcome of progress as fact. Or to put it in the inverse, technology is what we use to identify the “fact” of progress. When it comes it identifying the progress in society, we look to technology. Technology is the specific marker that is used to delineate progress. This can be seen by appealing to what we might think of as major technological and progressive milestones. The printing press, the atomic bomb, the computer, these are all forms of technology used as a marker for progress. This definition opens up the form of technology to immanent critique, allowing us to recognize the embedded, Enlightenment ethos that accompanies our technological forms, in short, making it a subject of critical theory.