I recently read Randy Connolly‘s The Persistence and Rise of the Technological Community Ideal, in which he traces the history of the distinctly American vision of a utopic society populated by technologically connected citizens living in far flung geographic spaces. He draws his conclusions from a variety of technologies, from canals and telegraphs to online communities. It’s worth reading just for the awesome quotes, some of which are downright evangelical.

I’m willing to bet that there is also fertile ground to do historical research with American records in the opposite vein – technophobic and perhaps fire and brimstone like proclamations – by which some of the very same technologies Connolly writes of are also described as the downfall of society, the erosion of humanity and the sign of the beginning of the end. (On a side note, not even the most fearful of the internet would have probably predicted the awful yet strangely awesome rise of Teh Interwebs and all its shocking artifacts…) This is a narrative where technology alienates people from each other and from any sense of community, strips them of their ability to analyze, create and emote, breeds an amoral vacuum.

I’ve read so much theory about the net from a variety of angles and it seems that even today, it is difficult for people to move beyond the technolust-technophobic binary. Coupled with the American fantasy that we can have “better living through science” is the inverse fantasy in which slaves/robots turn against their masters. There exists a pseudo Luddite mentality that almost recognizes the economic forces shaping technology, yet this is displaced in a kneejerk distrust of technology rather than any direct criticisms of modernity and its metanarratives. Or in the case of cyberpunk, these links are made more explicit, but resolutions to conflicts born of these links are evasive. Perhaps we have a tendency to project our hopes and anxieties about modernity onto technology and to ascribe a greater influence to technology because it’s easier to do this than to critique and/or resist modern systems like democracy and capitalism. Perhaps we will always yearn for a utopic deus ex machina to solve all of our problems.

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