Interviewing Borgmann, Part 1

Intro & Reception of TCCL

Jonathan Lipps: Technology and the character of contemporary life. It's a very long title, and hard to say! So I say "TCCL". I thought it was an extremely profound book, and I'm curious as a newcomer to the field in the last 30+ years since you wrote it, what has its reception been, and what kind of debate has it generated?

Albert Borgmann: Well, there is actually a book titled Technology and the Good Life? which is a reflection of the early reception. It's an anthology of comments. That was done by three young people who got excited about it, and since then it's been… you know, people who write about philosophy of technology consider TCCL a book they should know. Of course you get pigeonholed after a while. The pigeonhole replaces detailed engagement with the book. I think the most rewarding and perhaps important impact was with people like you. Who's Jonathan, you know? How did he come across that book? It's widely scattered. For a while there was, as one of the contributors of the anthology said, sort of a Borgmann "school". It's still being read. It pops up in various places, among people who are not philosophers. So that's very rewarding of course to find out. But in the large sense it didn't make any difference to the culture. I can't think of a book that has. Perhaps Michael Harrington, How the other half lives, something like this. That supposedly inspired the war on poverty.

JL: So you're saying books generally don't impact culture very much?

AB: No they don't. There's sort of the melancholy example of John Rawls's Theory of Justice. This is one of two really important books of American philosphy in the 20th century. It took the academy by storm. The bibliography is probably 200 pages by now! In the last book that he supervised (although he was too ill to edit it himself) the editor says that John Rawls realizes that the country has been moving in the opposite direction from what he recommended. So if this fantastic book, so important and magisterial, didn't make a dent in the culture, then all we can expect is that we sort of sow some seeds, you know, and it germinates here and germinates there. We should be grateful if that much happens.

JL: That sounds like a mature perspective!

JL: This is bringing up another question: who did you originally write it for? Who was the first audience you had in mind?

AB: Fellow philosophers. As you can tell having read it, it uses philosophical terminology, and I never wrote a book in that style again. I'm always surprised that people like you actually work their way through it. The books that i've written since are much more accessible.

JL: Well it took me a long time. And I have philosophical training.

AB: And what is your training?

JL: I got a bachelors and a masters in philosophy. So I was familiar with the terminology, but even so there was enough meat there that even being familiar with the terminology it took a long time to digest. It's a short book but it probably took me a year or a year and a half to read through. I could only read in bits at a time.

AB: But it's still I think the most widely read and most influential book of the ones that I've written. So that's always surprised me. Even at the time when I wrote it, when I still tried to impress my colleagues (which I no longer do).

Affirmations and Retractions?

JL: So, again kind of looking at the expanse of time from then to now, you've obviously had a lot of time to reflect on the ideas that you put forth then. I imagine that some things you would say, yes, I continue to affirm this, maybe I affirm it even more. But what would you say has stood the test of time? Are there any things you would instead revise or rephrase?

AB: I unfortunately got it right the first time! You must know Hilary Putnam? Hilary Putnam glories in his changes. "What is Hilary thinking now?" people ask themselves. But if you got it right the first time, you can't say "I changed my mind."

JL: There are no more books you can write!

AB: I've tried to expand and elaborate it, and that's essentially what I've done. In some ways it's dated, the philosophy of science that I use. But I think I wouldn't take anything back. One thing that might have been good is to use the term "commodification". I talk about it, and I may have used "commodifying", but "commodification" makes a good link to things that worry people. And so it's a good entry, but that's a very minor thing.

JL: It was on point enough for me to read it nigh on 30 years later and find enough in my experience to say, "this is something I'm going to pay attention to". So I don't disagree! But wanted to give you the opportunity to elaborate.

AB: Well, I didn't foresee… I talk about computer technology which was just sort of beginning.

JL: Yeah, you talked about "the coming microelectronic revolution"

AB: Yeah, right. I think something that needs philosophical examination or articulation is the uncanny influence that ICT has on the culture. That something would have that pervasive and in many ways insidious force, I didn't foresee. One thing I was sort of too optimistic about, and I would take back, is global warming. As you may remember, I extend the Device Paradigm to "spaceship Earth" and I say, people take care of their cars, they'll take care of spaceship Earth! But they're not. They may yet. And clearly, if they do, I think the major impetus will still be the Device Paradigm. So it's not the people who want to go back to reality, who say let's solve the problem by doing less and less and less by way of conquering and modifying and shaping.

JL: Yeah, now it's more like, let's figure out how to do more of that to save ourselves!

AB: There are people like that, and I think that's the most hopeful development that I see. The problem is that all these hopeful developments in farmer's markets, the craft industry, little shops like this that buck up against Starbucks, furniture makers, the bicycle people…

JL: The whole artisan movement.

AB: Yeah. It's not getting critical mass culturally and politically speaking. And so it is boxing under its weight. I'm sort of waiting for that! Why don't these people see that they're doing the same thing at bottom and then assert their cultural, economic, and political power? But to get back to global warming and the Device Paradigm, it's the people who have sort of bought in to the Device Paradigm who will continue to dominate the discussion. An interesting illustration of what happens is what happened to the term "sustainability". That was sort of the purview of the environmentalists. And the Brundtland Report (she was the Prime Minister, I think, of Norway)… It's another report on dangers and drawbacks of technology, and that we have to have sustainability. And the environmentalists got really angry because they felt that the term was co-opted, subverted. So that's an illustration. As you know, technology never says "no, we're not going to do that". Rather technology always says "ok, what's the problem? We'll solve it". So the tendency unfortunately is that technology will co-opt the forces of reform and renewal. That's a good thing. We'll be better off if the Device Paradigm serves or aids in reducing or stopping (eventually) global warming than not.

JL: But it doesn't mean that we won't do the same thing with some other planet that doesn't have the same problems. What I'm hearing is that it's always in response to a problem that can be defined rather than proactively thinking about forestalling a problem in the first place.

AB: Well, who knows what's going to happen. There are three scenarios. The worst is we'll just continue like this. And leave your and my distant offspring a terrible, terrible planet. That's the worst. The second best and second worst is that people will continue the way they live except they will use little electric cars instead of SUVs, but they'll still be riding around, isolated…

JL: We'll increase efficiency so we'll have the same lifestyle with less cost.

AB: Exactly. That's the second worst and the second best. If that happens, even a person I greatly admire like Barack Obama, that's sort of the way he sees it. Fine. Great. It's a lot better than the worst. But the best would be that people would say, we have to do two things. One, save the planet, and also lead a better life.

JL: To have a sort of spiritual, cultural revolution.

AB: Right. And my hope is that that will happen. And of course it doesn't have to be one or the other.

JL: So ultimately, going back to our entree into this rabbit trail, you were saying you were maybe a little bit too optimistic that we were going to be following that best option, and now you're wondering if maybe that's not as realistic?

AB: Well, I advocate for it, I hope for it, and devoutly wish it's going to happen that way. But as you remember there's one thing I called the "unwarranted optimism of the pessimists". Things might have to get so bad that people have to be good. Technological structures might have to collapse. And I don't think that's going to happen. So we can't predict, with a sort of satisfaction, that "people will come to us".

JL: We can't be self-righteous that everything will come crashing down and that people will see, because as you put it the Paradigm is pretty resilient, pretty strong. It seems to have the resources within itself to cope with these kind of inner stability problems.

The Explosion of the Internet

JL: OK, let's move on. Something that I think a lot about: the most obvious (to me) since the time you wrote is the explosion of the Internet, online culture. More and more our entire lives are being orchestrated using the Internet as a medium for that. So how would you extend the arguments you made in your book to apply to the Internet? Or more generally I'm interested to hear you comment on this successor to the microelectronic revolution that you talk a little bit about.

AB: Well, I think it's the intensification of the Device Paradigm. So the machinery has become totally impenetrable. The Volkswagen disaster is an example.

JL: I haven't heard about that. What happened?

AB: VW put software into their diesel cars that senses when it's being tested, and then kicks in the pollution control. But as soon as the sensor tells it you're on the road again, it's turned off! And they spew 40 times the amount of nitrous oxide. It took people 6 years to nail it, because there are proprietary barriers, and just the sophistication of the software and the way it's concealed in a chip. The opacity of the world is just tremendous. The kind of disburdenment is also tremendous. The Internet of Things is an important step because you're using ICT, but here's Jonathan, here's the ICT, and you know you're using it. But in the Internet of Things, you know, the Internet of Things would have known that you guys liked coffee, so my house, being smart, would have known that. And my house would have somehow found out that you're going to be here at 3, so it would have made coffee, and so all the little interchanges we had about how to grind it, and all that, would be gone! And for all I know it would have put the dogs in the kennel. The disburdenment is becoming so radical as to be ludicrous! You can only marvel at the force of the Device Paradigm. It just continues and continues. It looks around for the last things that can be commodified!

JL: I know! I have this question later but talking about Internet of Things… I live in a town where people are working in the Internet of Things and every day a new startup is created. It seems like an effort to proactively turn everything into a device pre-emptively. We don't even have this burden yet, we don't even know that it's burdensome, but let's go out there and pre-emptively relieve that burden before people even realize it's a burden!

AB: Right. That was Steve Jobs's genius. He had a sense of that.

JL: Before people knew what they wanted to be freed from, yeah.

The Acceleration of the Device Paradigm

JL: So yeah, thanks for that response. One other thing that struck me as you were talking about the opacity going to infinity. Also the configurability of the surfaces can be achieved nearly instantaneously. With the devices that you considered in your book, things like TVs and what not, they at least take some effort to manufacture the next generation of. But with the Internet, with a site like Facebook, it will push a new version of itself hundreds of times a day. So it's almost like this evolution that you pointed out of things becoming less burdensome, more "pure surface", less "inner workings"… It's a continual thing now because the cost to change it, with everything being software, is so low. So it feels like we've reached some point where, since we've sold the entire workings of our lives to software, it's very easy for the Device Paradigm to go as fast as it wants. Do you see that kind of thing happening?

AB: Absolutely. One thing I also see is that there is a need to articulate it in a new way… essentially the Device Paradigm 2.0. This sort of gradual, step-by-step, invisible change. The whole way that the Internet informs the way that we see the world. It's crucial that somebody articulates this and then you'd have to hope that would become part of the common discourse. Apple has come out with the iPhone 6 or whatever. The reports are invariably supportive, and if they're critical, they're not critical of the idea of an iPhone.

JL: It's just the things that aren't working quite perfectly yet.

AB: Yes. In a lot of other reporting, the economy say, the military, policies and so on, there is sort of the addition that says, "critics, however say…". That never comes!

JL: No one is a critic of technology.

AB: The critics are the columnists who sort of ruefully report on how they suffer and lose things, or aren't feeling well. It gets this sort of sporadic and anecdotal attention, but it does not have a firm place in the culture.

JL: It's a kind of rearguard action.

AB: Yes. There's a need there, and philosophers, of course, are missing in action. The philosophy of technology now is sort of veering towards analytic philosophy so it's always this intramural discussion. Little things.

JL: Yes, that was my experience of going to the Society of Philosophy of Technology conference.

Continued in Part 2…