Ursala Franklin - The Real World of Technology

This is a series of Massey Lectures, available on-line through the Ideas archive or as a book.

The lectures are well-worth reading. Franklin is a deep and original thinker. For the purposes of this blog, her most significant idea is the way that technology turns society into a collection of compliant robots - a specific reference to the "Dragon Theory" idea.

How does this work?

Technology demands "work" to be parcelled out into steps or specialized components. Each piece of work needs to "fit" with all the others, so "good" work is basically work that tightly complies with specifications. Human qualities of judgment are ruled out. Any identification with the end product is removed. This in what Marx called "alienation". But Marx traced alienation to the fact that the worker no longer owned the means of production or the product of his labour. Perhaps the deeper reality was the switch to mass production, centralized because the power source was central (first water, then steam).

Ms Franklin provides an almost mathematical proof that technology itself leads to "assimilation". The industrial revolution lead to an emergent structure of society in which people need "jobs" to participate. This re-defines work, what it is to be human and even the physical structure of the city.