Freedom for Technology!
Beck, Ulrich
Modem life, precisely because it is fraught with so many problems, needs technological creativity as we need air to breathe. How else can we meet successfully such global challenges as the...
...If we move beyond questions of official responsibility to the small print of safety regulations, the prevailing principle is that in all key questions—from the safety of nuclear reactors to clean air, from protection of water and limits on noise to medical intervention in life—it is not the parliaments, not the governments, not the citizens, not even the courts that shape the argument, but technical specialists and doctors...
...Currently two approaches seem to represent the only alternatives: on the one hand, wholesale condemnation of any criticism of technology...
...But the analogy to art goes only so far...
...This may sound paradoxical, but freedom for technology and societal liberation from technology could coincide...
...Neurotechnologies and genetic engineering are reshaping the laws that govern the human mind and life...
...For this part of my proposal I usually receive lively applause from scientists in technological fields who long to be free to do primary research...
...Medical experts...
...How else can we meet successfully such global challenges as the destruction of the environment, poverty, the population explosion, and the need to create meaningful forms of work...
...As much as our civilization needs technology, it also needs imaginative, observant, and competent critics of technology—as a matter of survival...
...To put it another way: the radicalization of modem life—technology as l'art pour ran—could also provide the prerequisites for solving the problems technology poses in terms of direction, control, and democratic participation...
...When it comes to culturally crucial questions such as genetic engineering, and probably medical progress in the neurotechnologies as well, the power to define the terms of discussion thus lies in the hands of a few...
...on the other hand, obstruction of any new advance, couched in the demand that all probable impacts of a given technology be foreseen...
...Figuratively speaking, technology should take the leap from realistic to abstract painting...
...This model of self-definition and self-determination in technology can be made clearer through the analogy with art...
...Irresponsible talk of risk" interferes with economic recovery, costs jobs...
...How shortsighted this argument is must be obvious to those who will later have to pay the economic price for risks they have evaded—the large corporations and their management...
...Third, self-determined technological development of this sort could get rid of the concept of Sachzwang [compulsion inherent in things themselves] and replace it with the ethics and practice of identifying alternatives, thus opening up technology for citizenship...
...At the same time, they require billions in investment...
...By systematically nurturing technological pluralism we could assure that an unending series of different and distinctive paths of development, scenarios for the future, a cornucopia of possibilities would be worked out and presented as the basis for nontechnical moral and political decisions...
...First among these would be the vision of a technology that would sustain and promote the reshaping of industrial society according to ecological principles...
...We must get past these false alternatives, but how...
...In expressing their concerns about technology, people are simply articulating their instinct for self-preservation and their democratic impulses in a world where technology has long since become a political force of the first magnitude, permanently transforming all aspects of life...
...The nuclear energy industry could tell us a thing or two about that...
...My suggestion: not by going backward or coming to a dead stop, but by continuing onward in a new direction...
...Ask any of them, and the reply will be the one Ulysses gave the Cyclops: nobody...
...This notion implies an ethics of foresight, that is, delaying implementation, preserving the possibility of revising decisions, a technology that is "tolerant of mistakes" (Christine von Weizsicker) and open to participation...
...Decontamination Through Silence...
...Technological experts would have to liberate themselves from the tyranny of the state and the economy—not only as it affects their external position, but also as it affects their image, their conception of technology—in order to liberate society from the tyranny of a technology imposed from without...
...We need a Kandinsky, a Klee of engineers to reveal the purity of technology, its unique logic, its inherent principles, to argue them through, and to make them reveal themselves...
...As a result, all talk of "technical necessity" would come to be regarded as antediluvian...
...This is where the proposal for a second separation of powers becomes pertinent: just as the idea that the monarch was above the law had to fall by the wayside as we entered the modern era, so now, as we move toward a simultaneously selfdefined and codeterminable technology, the discursive monopoly of the technical intelligentsia should be opened up to democratic rule...
...To change this state of affairs, we must create space for technology and technological experts not only to design new technologies but also to alter technology's prevailing norms...
...Even Leonardo da Vinci designed fortifications and weapons to please his patron and make himself useful...
...If we liberate technology from the yoke of economic necessity, we will also have to reorganize its application...
...Here we find the source of that hostility toward technology that is actually only hostility toward runaway technology...
...Medicine has privileges," writes Jacques Testart, the French geneticist and "father" of the first test-tube baby, "unlike those of any other professional branch...
...Art is a-, or perhaps anti-, moral, which the creation and transformation of the world and of life through technology can never be...
...if it can be marketed, produce it...
...Whether cancer or AIDS, there are maybe ten to fifteen specialists who are calling the shots...
...Ethics alone doesn't help...
...Some of these groups have started up their own journals and newsletters...
...Politicians...
...The other side is that our uneasiness about technology keeps increasing, and not, as many scientists, doctors, and engineers would like to think, out of ignorance, but out of familiarity with the processes and potential applications of technology...
...Such a reshaping would include not only sparing use of resources, but a basic sensitivity toward materials—thus-egentle" technology that recognizes and responds seriously to the unique logic of materiality...
...To overcome this organized irresponsibility, we must relearn and reapply the quintessential liberal "art of separation" (Waizer), achieving a second separation of powers, this time between the creation and development of technologies FALL • 1995 • 505 Freedom for Technology that transform society on the one hand and their implementation on the other...
...Technological policy resembles the "nobody's rule" that Hannah Arendt tells us is the most tyrannical of all forms of power, because under it nobody can be held responsible...
...The latter calls for expensive, time-consuming research of the sort that ends up throwing out the baby with the FALL • 1995 • 503 Freedom for Technology bathwater...
...How can we resolve the paradox that criticism of technology increases along with our dependence on technology...
...As we know, corporations do not undertake their investments in order to make human beings happy or to avert future problems, but to open up promising markets...
...for potential catastrophes won't be eliminated, but people will make things much worse by worrying needlessly...
...True, technology often solves problems that no one really worries about, problems that would not even exist without technology...
...That brings me to my second point, which generally elicits a far less positive response from my technological colleagues: to reconcile technology to democracy, that is, insitutional space and occasions for public debate on different technologies must be created...
...Concerns about technology are no longer voiced by "out-of-work teachers" (as the sarcastic phrase went), but by nuclear technicians, biochemists, doctors, public health officials, neurophysicians, and geneticists...
...Those who would hush up or sweep aside the uneasiness of the general public are building research empires and markets on quicksand...
...In the context of a technology directed entirely by extraneous economic interests, inventiveness and discoveries automatically turn into uncontrollable upheavals and dangers...
...Up to now decision-making has occurred in the twilight zone where politics, science, and industry meet...
...We must force painting to give up its old habit of copying," Rimbaud wrote as early as 1871, "in order to make it au504 • DISSENT Freedom for Technology tonomous...
...it comes along too late, trailing behind, its point of view that of an alien world...
...Second, it should become possible for us to avoid being blind to consequences when conceiving and designing specific technological systems...
...Technological experts...
...Only if this occurs will we be in a position to say yes to technology (and the creative imagination of technical experts)—and under certain circumstances to say no to its implementation...
...For that to happen, applied scientists must question their bondage to industry, break free, develop fundamental alternatives, confront their own doubts, limitations, and failings, and also fight for public awareness of the issues involved...
...And what questions can be 506 • DISSENT Freedom for Technology asked under such circumstances...
...If the risk society becomes skeptical toward technology, such investments can be suicidal...
...But at the same time the application of technology should be organized as a separate process, subject to the rules of codetermination, of ethics, of revisability, of tolerance for mistakes, in short, technological citizenship...
...Technology has methodologically and culturally "internalized" these imperatives...
...I myself am skeptical toward the story told about technological progress, yet I am also sick and tired of always saying no to developments that neither I nor those professionally committed to a belief in salvation through technology can foresee or forecast...
...Only with the latitude provided by an "abstract" technology (abstracted from its military and industrial applications) could fundamentally different principles and ideas of development be invented, initiated, and implemented...
...We must establish an autonomous process in which ethicists, politicians, the public, laypeople, and, in this chorus, of course, technological experts play their parts...
...Only in this way will we create what has up to now seemed out of the question: a focus on context, an accompanying public dialogue, and the integration of issues of learning, activating consensus, and legitimation into the application of technology...
...Industry...
...How can we unfetter the technological imagination without at the same time allowing technology to run wild in a way that threatens our freedom and our very lives...
...For instance, while possible military applications never fail to be anticipated, the so-called side-effects on nature, health, identity, and anthropology are not...
...It is based solely on the extent to which private-sector efficiency and profitability criteria can be realized" (Dolata...
...At almost every turn we find ourselves confronting worlds of our own making—mistakes, uncertainties, and catastrophes for which neither God nor nature, however defined, can be held responsible...
...And they really do what they please...
...The application of technology requires ethical justification, the imposition of limits, and participation roles...
...As a result, in times of crisis, defenders of technology insist that it is not nuclear power plants, genetic engineering, or neurotechnology that pose a danger, but only loose talk about them...
...One might locate this new process in a "council of technology...
...Only with this ivory-tower model will it be possible to dream and test out the dream of a truly modem technology that discovers and develops its own uncertainties, insecurities, lack of safety, its own peaceful and creative potentialities...
...Capitalism lives off the permanence of technological innovations, such as mass production of consumer goods (like the automobile and the refrigerator) calculated to reduce labor costs and replace human workers by machines...
...To make technology autonomous, we must break it of its old habit of copying economic and military purposes...
...Like it or not, we must recognize that technology has become the prerequisite for the survival of the human race...
...To use Martin Heidegger's metaphor: specialists in technology should learn to play, to make music on and with the world as a violin bow plays on the violin...
...L'art pour l'art Technology's horizon of possibilities—not necessarily the thinking and intentions of the individual expert—has historically been determined by military and industrial imperatives...
...Still, the degree to which we are dependent on technology becomes apparent only when we criticize it...
...The time and place for saying yes or no or something in between would be provided by forms of technological citizenship combined in the upper house of technology, where ethical and political issues would have to be brought together before any decision could be made...
...As social survey research reveals, technological expertise and criticism of technology often go hand in hand, particularly among the young...
...Not everything that can be made should be made...
...if it strengthens the country militarily, make it...
...It has no more effect than a bicycle brake on an intercontinental aircraft...
...Corporations evaluate what the competition is doing and on the basis of market research make far-reaching and, in their view, imperative decisions on research and production priorities...
...In other words, decontamination through silence...
...That's one side of the issue...
...they even dictate legislation, since government turns to them as advisors...
...If we didn't trust technology, not one of us could step out onto the street...
...Instead, we could ask for and search for institutions, structures, and sources to make technological citizenship possible...
...As a matter of course we go by these principles: if it works, build it...
...In 1986, the year of Chernobyl, Niklas Luhmann wrote that the risk society must "learn to live with catastrophes, and in fact live normally and calmly...
...The new "problem children"—genetic engineering and neurotechnology—are likewise taking shape under this pressure to assert themselves in the marketplace...
...We must help it emerge from what Kant would call its self-imposed immaturity and uncontrollability...
...The solution I would propose is freedom for technology...
...But how can one do research with the guillotine of investments in the billions hanging over one...
...Inventions that disregard this law are not considered worthy of the name...
...Any criticism that wants to be taken seriously, that claims to make sense, must itself be grounded in technology, must use the language of technology...
...Reflexive Modernization An appropriate response in a high-tech society that reserves the right to decide its own technological future would be to promote the establishment of an "art" of reflexive and self-skeptical technology...
...Only in this way could the question be broached as to how we really want to live—with or without technology...
...An Upper House of Technology The dilemmas posed by uncontrolled technology stem, in fact, not from the autonomy of technological development but precisely from the lack of autonomy...
...Neurotechnology and human genetic engineering violate deep-seated cultural taboos...
...How can we install a steering mechanism and brakes in a scientific/technological civilization that tends to rush full speed ahead, unleashing explosive powers in the process...
...Their goal must be to establish a self-defined and self-aware academic discipline focused on technology, a critical discipline...
...How can we change technology's self-image and the conditions that govern its existence...
...Translated from the German by KRISHNA WINSTON q FALL • 1995 • 507...
...The central problem is that this sort of entrepreneurial creation of needs and channeling of innovation as a rule does not take place in response to but in the vanguard of social sensitivity and articulation of interests, and thus remains to a great extent uninfluenced by democratic discussion of guidelines for future technological development...
...The public...
...At present we give technological experts a free hand—legally and politically—to define what constitutes the "state of the art of technology...
...Who is doing this...
...Instead of reproducing objects, it must evoke a response by means of lines, colors, and . . . shapes...
...With what kind and goal of politically structured technology and how...
...The critics have a far more important role to play than prodding technologists into building in a margin of safety that will pay off later on the world market...
...Only if we undertake this intellectual experiment will we recognize that technology—the epitome of the modem—has been organized in a medieval way within the design of industrial society...
...Ultimately it is runaway technology in the context of rapid modernization—driven by world markets— that produces the absurd spectacle of yea- and nay-sayers responding to developments whose consequences no one knows and that seem to take their course in any case...
...But since this concept includes safety standards, in Germany (and in other industrialized countries) it turns out to be private organizations and commissions (for example, the Association of German Engineers, or the German Institute for Standards) along with a handful of consultants who decide what risks are "acceptable...
...For instance, bringing technology into conformity with sound ecological principles will become possible only if young scientists have a chance to revise the prevailing technological paradigm...
...If we equip it with quasiparliamentary, quasijudicial powers, and institutionalize it as a sort of "upper house of technology" (Konrad Adam), the desired effect will be achieved...
...In other words, technology as l'art pour l'art, technology into the ivory tower...
...Why shouldn't technological development itself be equipped with an"eye" that would enable it to foresee consequences and dangers...
...The first large project to come out of this supply-side development and implementation of technology was, and is, nuclear energy and the nuclear industry, which requires government financing and public legitimation...
Vol. 42 • September 1995 • No. 4
