Tech-Master Disaster: Part Two
A conversation with Siva Vaidhyanathan, Sally Haslanger, Susan Silbey, and Seth Mnookin. Listen today at 2 pm on WBUR or anytime on our website. Looks like last week’s newsletter may not have reached the faithful. You can read it here (it’s about part one of our series with Evgeny Morozov and other unmissables).
After talking to Evgeny Morozov about the myths deployed by titans of techno-industry, we’re now taking a closer look at MIT as well as its Media Lab, that temple of techno-capitalism, perhaps the ideal representation of what one of this week’s guests—Siva Vaidhyanathan of the University of Virginia—calls “techno-fundamentalism.”
“Techno-fundamentalism,” Vaidhyanathan tells us, is the “notion that there is only one way to approach human problems, and that is by inventing another thing.” It’s “searching for the quick and easy answer because it seems doable, and that usually means inventing another machine.”
This seems embedded in at least one corner of the American consciousness. Vaidhyanathan reminds us that there’s a parable about this exact American issue. The parable: Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
Here’s Vaidhyanathan, from this week’s show:
Mark Twain saw that America had a certain ideology, a certain civic religion of technology. So his character Hank Morgan—a Connecticut Yankee very much of the Whitney and Edison mold—ends up transported back to King Arthur’s Court. And he immediately goes about first surviving and then thriving based on his ability to invent things and predict things. He’s able to predict eclipses, and he’s able to invent all sorts of cool new tools, including weapons of war. And fairly soon he becomes something close to a dictator, and he’s assuming power, and his great enemies, his great rivals for power, are the storytellers, the humanists, the the religious people, the clerics, and the wizards.
And the final showdown battle is between the Connecticut Yankee—the empiricist the inventor, the technologist—and the storytellers, the mythologists, the wizards. Ultimately there’s tremendous loss of life at the end of the book. It’s a terrible ending. And the storytellers end up prevailing. They end up winning. And it’s really unclear what what our takeaway is supposed to be from that, but I think Twain wanted Americans to feel discomforted by the fact that we trust too much in our ability to master the universe through our inventions, and we might want to pay a little bit more attention to the stories we tell about ourselves and the ways that we interpret our world around us.
Sally Haslanger, MIT philosopher, joined us to describe the moral hazards of the disruptive, “move fast and break stuff” thinking of Silicon Valley that leads to the breaking of things one must not break. We also talked with Susan Silbey, an anthropologist who calls out the so-called “geniuses” at MIT who pursue work that validates their sense of their own mastery. Susan is the former chair of the faculty, and she spoke to a tense faculty meeting this week:
When we live in a culture whose anthem is “move fast and break things,” when disruptive entrepreneurship is the ostensible purpose of education, we cannot really be surprised that a level 3 registered sex offender is a courted financial donor to educational institutions and is celebrated for his imagination and creativity. Jeffrey Epstein, a known sexual predator who trafficked in young girls is invited to campuses. We should be horrified but not surprised.
You can read the whole text of her speech here.
On our show Susan notes the core problem of abandoning the public sphere, which she traces to the 1970s and the turn to neoliberalism. Seth Mnookin, the writer and journalist who also teaches at MIT, explored how the chase for grant money alters agendas and the very culture of an institution like MIT.
It’s clear that the connections between science and money are producing some miserable developments. What we’re hearing about in our “Tech-Master Disaster” series isn’t science as it ought to be. This is something else. There’s loads more still to come out about all of it— as well as more lies and ducking of the fundamental (and fundamentally frightening) fact that celebrated scientists and abusive financiers have joined forces. Here’s some evidence of that:
Watch: One Sings, the Other Doesn’t
A feminist epic, Agnès Varda’s One Sings, the Other Doesn’t follows two lives in twentieth-century France, two women finding their way and independence in a rigidly gendered—but changing, in-process—social order. Music, social critique, and friendship sustain one another in this intensely humane film. It’s one antidote to the anti-humanism we’ve been hearing about these past two weeks.
From Criterion:
Pomme lends Suzanne the money for an illegal abortion, but a sudden tragedy soon separates them. Ten years later, they reunite at a demonstration and pledge to keep in touch via postcard, as each of their lives is irrevocably changed by the women’s liberation movement. A buoyant hymn to sisterly solidarity rooted in the hard-won victories of a generation of women, One Sings, the Other Doesn’t is one of Agnès Varda’s warmest and most politically trenchant films, a feminist musical for the ages.
Read (or Watch): Jurassic Park
Next week: we’re finding still more scientific visions emanating from MIT (and Harvard). These include the emanations from one of the most significant scientific minds that flourished at MIT and Harvard. We’re referring here to the mind of Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park. (We’ll be speaking with Joanna Radin of Yale, who studies Crichton’s commentary on the problems with contemporary science).
Jurassic Park’s Ian Malcolm, the chaos theorist, makes some of the novel’s (and the film adaptation’s) most celebrated observations about scientific hubris. The following quote particularly speaks to the role of mastery and victory—as opposed to critical inquiry—in entrepreneurial science, the kind of science that could lead to a genetically engineered theme park, a revived mastodon, or the MIT Media Lab:
“Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don’t do it, someone else will. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That’s the game in science.”
Listen: Schoenberg’s String Quartet №2
If you visited the ground floor of the MIT Media Lab recently, you’d find an exhibit on “Schoenberg in Hollywood.” But what would the Media Lab see in Schoenberg? There are clues in the language on the Media Lab’s site for the exhibit (emphasis added in the following):
On display in the lobby of the Media Lab complex on the MIT campus, this exhibit was conceived to complement the Boston Lyric Opera’s premiere of Schoenberg in Hollywood, a new opera by Media Lab professor and celebrated composer Tod Machover and librettist Simon Robson.
Visitors are given a rare glimpse into the creative life of Arnold Schoenberg, one of the twentieth century’s greatest composers, and how this complex and brilliant man inspired Machover’s newest work. Videos and archival materials trace Schoenberg’s journey, from his musical roots in Vienna, to his life as an exiled composer in Hollywood following Hitler’s rise to power, to the creation of the multi-sensory opera that pays tribute to his musical genius.
Look at the language of superlatives, or of something close enough: the words “genius,” “greatest,” “brilliant man.” It’s language of a man’s achievement, of grand victory, of the highest intelligence and thinking that lies beyond scrutiny of commoners (“genius”). It’s not the language of infinitely accessible mystery, surprise, exploration, emotional communication. And this is talking about Arnold Schoenberg, the modernist theorist of music whose compositions evoke gorgeous complexity, a world in which there’s no straightforward victory:
Coming Soon: Lawrence Weschler on Oliver Sacks
We had a long, digressive, wonderful chat with Ren Weschler on his new book about his good friend Oliver Sacks. The book isn’t getting the attention it deserves (and that’s a story in itself).
This Week’s Ephemeral Library:
A reflection on “Bartleby” that’s also an un-appreciation of most of us for being “lazy and cocooned”? She Said is the feminist All the President’s Men. Nina remembers Cokie—the founding mothers of NPR were badass women, and don’t forget it! The activists of the moment are young people, like Greta Thunberg and other participants in the climate strike.
-The Open Source team
