> ravi: " What I have techno-utopia-phobia."
>
> [WS:] ...I think society (rather than
> capitalists) should have a choice which technologies to adopt and
> which to reject, although I recognize that exercising that choice may
> pose some practical difficulties. However, in a planned society where
all investments are public and individuals own only personal property,
> that condition can be closely approximated.
>
I wish I knew what Gar's book said... But, what I like about Ravi's utopianism, here, is that his works through a commitment to social change driven by social movements comprised of the people most negatively affected by the technologies you so blithely say capitalists choose for them. What I can't understand about Wojtek's politics is how someone who repeatedly suggests that the hoi polloi are politically irretrievable while simultaneously rejecting Carrol's argument that serious social change can be made by a committed core with loose knit followers and those carried by the wave can hold anything other than the most idealist utopianism when it comes to the prospects of and for the planned society you say could closely approximate the social choices which should exist.
>
> Having said that, however, I believe that generally speaking,
> technology tends to "bring good things to life" ;) - if applied in a
> socially and environmentally conscious manner. I think that negative
> effects of most technologies, including hype and techno-utopia, are
> the product of capitalism - that is profiteering and marketing -
> rather than the technology itself.
The historical and sociological blindness, here, is almost beyond understanding. By some bizarre conceptual means Woj appears to have completely forgotten everything Weberian sociology tells us about the organization situatedness of technological priorities and trajectories as well as everything Marxist technology studies have repeatedly shown us about the interpenetration of capital accumulation, political legitimation and technoscientific development - much less built environments, cultural praxis, normative expectations, etc. This stuff goes back farther than JD Bernal, but his work - for all its problems relative to his reading of the Soviet Union - makes a great place to start. If you don't want to go back to the 20s and 30s you could just go back to the 70s and Science for the People (in the US), Radical Science Journal (from the UK) or the critique of medical technologies initiated by feminists, particularly socialist feminists. A great deal more has happened since then...
It is categorically the case that whatever kind of planned society you are imagining will have to work with existing technologies, but the idea that there is nothing deeply anti-social and anti-ecological embedded within the technologies themselves - that their problems and contradictions reside only in the ways they are embedded in profiteering and marketing is ridiculous.
> In a
> planned society, the use of the automobile would be discouraged in
> situations where it is detrimental (e.g. urban environment) for
> example by very high licensing fee, as it is the case in Singapore,
> but promoted where it offers clear societal benefits (e.g. in rural
> areas.) Of course, profitability or lack thereof would not be an
> issue, because all investments would be public, and price mechanisms
> would be used exclusively to regulate consumption rather than to
> generate return to investments.
What is completely missing here is that "the automobile" is not a thing discrete from its myriad associated networkings... oh, jeez, I'm sounding like Latour... "The automobile" is part and parcel of the built environment across the world whether that environment be wilderness, parkland, rural, exurban, suburban or urban. The very design of the whole range of motor vehicles AND the many communities just listed has embedded in it not only received technologies and infrastructures but the very essence of profiteering and marketing - not to mention the workplaces, lifestyles and cultures (or thousands of other technological packages).
It is one thing to have a utopian goal as part of one's politics, it is another to treat the phenomena that are your nemeses as discrete and disembodied material things that are OK in and of themselves so that you can hold on to an idealist "planned society" utopia and to reject the idea that there is any kind of historical agency within the public sphere that might bring about the changes you desire.