Response to Feenberg Questioning Technology

Response to Andrew Feenberg's Questioning Technology

Feenberg is routinely cited along with Haraway, Ihde, Latour, and Mitcham in contemporary philosophy of technology studies (for example, Scharff and Dusek's 2003 anthology). His critique of essentialist, and extension of social constructivist perspectives, focusing on opportunities for “deep democratization” in the context of his two-layer instrumentalization theory lends itself well to the study of complex technical systems such as software development. The constructivist approach reveals the “technological unconscious” of artifacts whose underdetermined history is concealed by the neat closure of the deterministic illusion that the essence of technology is efficiency and capitalist rationality. I believe his theories are particularly useful for reflecting upon the struggle between entrenched capitalist interests and techno-bureaucracies of the commercial, proprietary software and hardware world, and the revolutionary “free, open source” (FOS) movement highlighted by technologies such as GNU/Linux. To the casual user software does not present moral questions based on the subordination of groups or technocratizing business practices, but rather issues of intellectual property and privacy. Feenberg writes: “what if the various technical solutions to a problem have different effects on the distribution of power and wealth? Then the choice between them is political and the political implications of that choice will be embodied in some sense in the technology” (80). With software the embodiments of political implications is very rich while at the same time concealed by familiarity and the sense of necessity when engaging in them by users already constrained by their overall computing environments. For instance, having to agree with a EULA (End User License Agreement) or other “click-through” agreement in order to use commodity applications and websites that are now part of everyday life. Here Latour's idea that technical devices embody norms that serve to enforce obligations literally enforce them - arriving at Feenberg's notion of 'technological hegemony', “domination so deeply rooted in social life that it seems natural to those it dominates” (86).

A rich body of literature has already grown around the FOS movement, produced by technologists, outlining the contours of this hegemony by authors such as Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Pekka Himanen, and large-scale empirical studies of the FOS phenomenon have been published in Feller, et al., Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software. A common criticism of these viewpoints is the lack of philosophical rigor and a general sense that “the open source community generally lacks a thoroughgoing commitment to democratization” (Jesiek, 2003). In “Democratizing Software: Open Source, the Hacker Ethic, and Beyond,” Brent K. Jesiek therefore threads Feenberg's theories into the existing FOS rhetoric. The FOS option involves design and production as much as it does the use and delivery of finished products, so Feenberg's emphasis on the formation of technical codes and the interplay of primary and secondary instrumentalizations in the concretization of technological features as useful. For instance, Jesiek points out that, while FOS technologies have crept into the corporate workplace through use of GNU/Linux, Apache webserver, MySQL database in the infrastructure - which are often tactical maneuvers done of technology workers, few such organizations literally promote the FOS goals in their business practices themselves. Jesiek thus questions whether open source philosophy may actually reproduce dominance: “many corporations have been quite willing to utilize open source software applications while simultaneously avoiding open source principles when developing and distributing their own products.” He gives the further example of Chinese adoption of Linux, where it is possible that the ability to modify the source code will yield versions of programs that enforce totalitarian policies.

My first encounter with Feenberg was reading Transforming Technology while doing research for a presentation called “The Free, Open Source Option as Ethic.” There I found, in his description of Soviet Rationalizations, nearly a mirror image of the stereotypical FOS development community such as Sorceforge.net. Some of the lingering questions Jesiek has can be addressed by examining the material conditions of software production that make up these communities as hubs of communication, issue tracking, bug reporting, source code control, documentation, and project management tools. Clearly, the FOS movement both epitomizes the democratization of technology, and makes a good contemporary example to join Feenberg's continual reiteration of the Minitel and Internet stories. It is also ripe for analysis.

References:

Feenberg, Andrew. (2002). Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press.

Feller, Joseph, et al., editors (2005). Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Jesiek, Brent K. (2003). “Democratizing software: Open source, the hacker ethic, and beyond.” First Monday, volume 8, number 10 (October 2003). Retrieved 10/5/2008 from http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_10/jesiek/index.html.

Scharff, Robert C. and Dusek, Val, editors. (2003). Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition, An Anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.