lasch: man vs. machine

OK, so I don’t necessarily think that technology is neutral. It’s created and coded by people with certain perspectives, it’s rolled out according to who has the resources to obtain it, and so it’s not equally accessible to everyone. HOWEVER, it’s also not inherently evil. I revisited Kumar in my last post because Christopher Lasch’s argument in “The Degradation of the Practical Arts” strikes me as quite parallel. Here, again, we should be wary of technology because it disempowers certain people, or here, humanity in general. Lasch traces the current tech boom to Taylorism and the optimizing out of skilled workers. As I mention below, I have no love for the preservation of jobs for no reason other than to keep people busy. This isn’t to say that I’m an elite, managerial type who can’t wait to dominate an underclass of unskilled workers; I think there’s a middle ground here.

Lasch, in the interest of preserving humanity in manufactured goods and production, fails to note several of the important benefits of production that were around at least in 1987, when he wrote his article. When he cites Piore and Sabel’s critique in The Second Industrial Divide, he points out the limitations of their “yeoman democracy” model that will permit participatory democracy as a result of flexible production and technology. But he fails to critique the other element he cites about Piore and Sabel’s work: the inherent goodness of flexible specialization. This mode of production reminds me of the economic concept of the “long tail,” but it also brings to mind the abundance of commodities that we enjoy as a result of mass production. Does Lasch only wear handsewn shirts and decorate his house with carpenter-crafted furniture? I highly doubt it. Mass production has made many more things available to the average consumer. No whether this is a good thing or not remains to be seen, but Lasch is missing this essential critique in his discussion of Piore and Sabel.

He notes the importance of keeping humanity in technology, or at least the dangers and hubris of removing it. He characterizes engineers as upper-class straw men: for them, “[i]t is not simply the defense of their class privileges that makes them resist demands for worker participation, but the belief that human intervention can only distort and subjectify the beautiful objectivity of the machine” (p. 294). First of all, I know no one who would describe a machine as “beautifully” objective, although many may say it is necessarily so. Lasch strikes me as a man who has never encountered the bias of human service workers, or at least, as someone who hasn’t read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Human judgment is faulty, subject to racism, bias and vulnerable to rash decisions and rhetoric. Why wouldn’t we want automation to fix some of those problems that perpetuate privilege in our society? Machines won’t love you like humans will, but they won’t hate you, either.