The Myth of Technological Neutrality

The status of crank is rarely remitted in the span of ten years, but that is what has happened to me. I spent two decades, from 1999 to 2019, in New York City, where I watched social media and smartphones change the early adopters. My reading of Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan convinced me that “the myth of technological neutrality” was just that. In conversations with friends, often somewhere downtown, I disputed the view that these technologies merely added technical capacities to our lives. They exerted a negative spiritual, cultural, and political effect. They were superseding better ways of being and acting, while empowering certain groups over others. I argued that the first question about any technology was what kind of people it made us into. I convinced basically no one.

Today, the Institute for Family Studies, of which I am executive director, is a leader in efforts to require age verification for social media platforms and pornography sites, as well as to weaken the hold of smartphones over the lives of kids. In August 2022, with our friends at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, we released a policy brief calling for legislative action on these matters. Two years later, we have witnessed more than a dozen state laws, including one that received a governor’s signature only nine months after publication. My colleagues and I would be happy to credit ourselves for this short interval from white paper to law. But I believe that it heralds something far more momentous: The days of deference to Big Tech are ending.

That these measures seek to address a youth mental health crisis certainly increases their urgency and their political attractiveness. But more is going on. Just five years ago, it seemed unimaginable that lawmakers should see their responsibilities as encompassing the shaping of technology for the public’s benefit. The sudden shift toward regulation is a surprise to everyone. And social media and smartphones are only one case. Technologies of many types are being drawn into social and political contestation. The myth of technological neutrality is collapsing.

In March 2024, YouGov released an opinion survey of more than one thousand adults that finds a sharp political divide over artificial intelligence. More Biden voters view AI positively than negatively; among Trump voters, the sentiment is flipped, with more than twice as many holding negative views than positive. AI, it appears, is a partisan issue. An April 2022 survey on more than a dozen technologies, also by YouGov, confirms the pattern. Notwithstanding some overlap, Biden voters by wide margins think that AI, virtual reality, self-driving cars, lab-grown meat, and gene editing are “good for society,” whereas Trump voters think they are “bad.”

Technology has moved to the center of fights on Capitol Hill and the platforms of the two major presidential candidates. Kamala Harris advocates the Green New Deal, which amounts to a near-total transformation of our industrial economy: from the small (gas stoves, showerheads, light bulbs) to the great (electric automobiles, solid state batteries, charging stations) to the very great (laboratory production of the world’s food, a top-down reform of our energy infrastructure). By a thousand nudges, mandates, and regulations, our old technological order, around which we have organized our lives, communities, and nations, is being managed out of existence and replaced.

Though Trump has taken a more piecemeal approach, his technological vision, too, is remarkably consistent. He defends the old technological order as intrinsic to the American way of life. He opposes the bureaucratically required obsolescence of technologies on several grounds, including functionality. He resists the compulsory transition to electric vehicles. He opposes the transformation of the energy sector to one based on renewables, which he judges unable to sustain a flourishing industrial power. Like a medieval prince, he sees it as his duty to protect the jobs—and therefore the livelihoods and communities—of those threatened by needless technological change. He has courted members of the United Auto Workers whose jobs are made vulnerable by the bureaucratically coerced transition to electric motors. These stances are technological expressions of Trump’s protectionist instincts. His preservation of the old technological order, however, is balanced by a call for a heroic effort to expand it, through mastery of space and the founding of an American-led industry building flying cars.

These proposals reveal technology as subject to party politics. Combustion engines are Republican technology; electric motors are Democratic. Republican technologies serve America and the hinterlands; Democratic technologies serve the planet, and the coastal and global elites. Republican technologies expand the power of Americans, individually and collectively; Democratic technologies enable bureaucrats (corporate and state) to manage our power consumption. Whatever one thinks of these visions, they are not ideologically neutral.

Polarization is not the reason for the demise of the technological neutrality myth. Technologies never were neutral. What is noteworthy is that this truth, evident to theorists for decades, is dawning on the populace. I have long awaited this day, and yet much about it will be bad. On the one hand, technology will be humanized by its subjection to politics, the art for ordering things to the common good. People will use what power they have to align technologies with the interests of their families, communities, and nation, and will not sit idly by as their way of life is destroyed for others’ benefit.

On the other hand, technology will be made human, all too human, in a darker sense. As Big Tech companies and state bureaucracies set aside the mask of impartiality, technological change will be imposed all the more divisively. In The Coming Wave (2023), Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of DeepMind and CEO of Microsoft AI, attacks the notion of technological neutrality and declares openly that “Technology is a form of power.” He calls on governments and international organizations to develop a regulatory structure of “containment”—that is, to grant corporations like Microsoft monopoly power over technologies like AI and keep them from “bad actors” like the gilets jaunes in France, followers of Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Brexiteers in the UK. Such groups are deemed too dangerous to have a say over the technologies of “the future.” Such a judgment, openly made, suggests that an era of strife and force is not far off.

Recall what touched off the riots of the gilets jaunes. Macron had levied a new gas tax and reduced the speed limit in order to make drivers susceptible to France’s network of photo radar speed traps—moves that, as Matthew Crawford has explained, were seen by the French working class as punishment for their dependence on (and preference for) gas-powered cars. Significantly, over long months of rioting, about 60 percent of France’s entire speed camera network was destroyed by the gilets jaunes. The government had moved against the old technological order reliant on fossil fuel by means of a technocratic adjustment that imposed costs on those outside the new technological order; the action was met by the aggrieved with a ferocious counterattack against the successor regime. The French government was forced to back down, though it remains undeterred in its larger aims. The fight on the streets was decided by police wielding batons and rubber bullets.

Conflicts are flaring up across the world, with an intensity appropriate to a struggle that implicates the way of life, even the survival, of whole populations and classes. Inspired by the long-haul trucker protests in Canada, farmers have blocked the streets of Brussels and other European cities with columns of tractors, and doused them with liquid manure, to oppose the bureaucratic obsolescence of common farming techniques and machines in pursuit of the EU’s net-zero agenda. In July 2022, the president of Sri Lanka fled the country on a military jet to escape a massive wave of rioting poor who were threatened with starvation due to a government ban on chemical fertilizers. Violent tractor protests provoked by forced technological change have become persistent in India as well. Make no mistake: The green transition requires a technological transformation that will have revolutionary social and political consequences.

The defense of one’s way of life is among the most powerful motivators of politics. This primal impulse strives against a total restructuring of our technological regime around the perceived needs of the earth, with the survivability of the human race supposedly hanging in the balance.

Will the myth of technological neutrality actually fail? Events show it under severe strain. But after a period of contest, or even suspension, it might be reasserted. It is remarkable that it came to occupy the ground of common sense to begin with, since the industrial revolution gave rise to politically explosive clashes between labor and capital, transformed societies as agrarian life was eclipsed by urban, wage-earning existence, and brought unimaginable lethal force to the conduct of war. Technology convulsed the West in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A social history of the myth of technological neutrality has not been written, as far as I am aware; but my hypothesis is that it emerged as a compromise between labor and capital, as unskilled proletarians swelled the ranks of labor and skilled artisans were reduced in number. The fight for a fair wage, rather than for control over the means of production (that is, over technology), became the order of the day. But that, again, is a guess. What we know is that over its brief lifespan, technological neutrality has endured much. The machine war of World War I, the atom bomb of World War II, the sexual-contraceptive revolution of the 1960s, could each have unmade it, but did not. I fear that this time will be no different. Under liberalism, to the victor goes neutrality. We must not fall for that false promise yet again.

Michael Toscano is executive director of the Institute for Family Studies.

Image by Unknown Artist, public domain. Image cropped.