Section One

Proposition:

Technology is the tangible expression of desire motivating human imagination to modify reality.

Why do we have technology?

Surveying history, it seems that there are at least two, often closely connected, reasons why humans develop technology. One is to accomplish some fantasised wish such as recording sound and light. Another is to decrease the amount of time and/or effort required to achieve some desirable end, such as carrying coal from one town to another in order make life easier or to increase profit. Profit is seen as desirable in itself as it leads to the accumulation of wealth, and wealth can be used to realise fantasies or reduce the amount of time and/or effort required in carrying out the tasks of life. Whilst there are many other explanations for technological change (such as extending human mental and physical abilities or overcoming the arduous burdens of nature by making things more accurate, safer, cleaner, healthier, etc.) it is consistently the case that technology has a nominated purpose — the attempt to satisfy some human desire.

Technology removes obstacles to desires

Put another way, technology removes obstacles to the satisfaction of desire. At an early age we apparently develop a sense that the world resists or constrains our behaviour and we are often denied what we want. This central aspect of the human condition can be circumvented to some extent by adapting our behaviour or surroundings so as to meet with our desires. When we want to crack open a nutshell to eat a nut and the shell is too tough we can use a rock or stick to break it. If we want to draw up water from a well with less effort then we might devise a mechanism for doing so. If we want to make yarn quicker than a hand spinner we can invent a machine to do it. These kinds of technological intervention modify aspects of reality according to our needs, in spite of the various obstacles that appear to constrain our desires. In this reciprocity of desire and technology we are always trying to resist the entropic tendency of the Universe and get more for less, without any apparent limit to how much more we want.

What we still want

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) our considerable technical success, there are many human desires and aspirations that still resist realisation; the desire to live indefinitely, to travel through time, to have cost-free energy sources, to make contact with alien life-forms, to read other peoples minds, to create artificial beings, and so on. The fact that we have not yet devised the technical means of realising these goals does not stop us from imagining that we might in the future. Indeed, this list of phantasmagorical human dreams may be driving some of the most prestigious and highly funded scientific research programs in history — The Human Genome Project, High End Particle Acceleration, Cold Fusion, SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), Brain Imaging and Intelligent Robotics, all of which feed an imaginary, pre-Oedipal future in which desires are fulfilled.

Why do we transform the world and ourselves?

Changing the operation of reality is not always easy. The fact that the world generally resists us, but occasionally yields to our ingenuity, encourages the imagination of the designer, the inventor, the programmer, the artist, the songwriter, the scientist or the writer to continue their exploratory struggles. Despite the obvious difficulties inherent in any creative practice, in which a high ratio of unproductive effort combines with a great probability of failure, there is an assumption that success is possible. We subscribe to the notion that the ground may 'give' at any time and a solution to an intractable obstacle to desire might be overcome. Perhaps the real questions historians of technological change should ask is not 'why do technologies change?' but 'why do we invent?' Why do we continually imagine that we can satisfy desire through strategic action?

The imaginative imperative

The human imagination can see things that are not there, which is both a gift and a curse. It is a gift because it allows us to escape from harsh reality into congenial fantasy and a curse because it can create dissatisfaction with the present by projecting the possibility of something better than we have. The white elephant of our imagination can summon up ideal conditions, generating utopian possibilities we try to realise, but can also lead us to fantasise the most chilling horrors that might befall us. As the body of science fiction literature clearly demonstrates, we are trying to keep up with technological developments we have already been told to expect whilst, simultaneously, living with nightmare expectations of their future failure. Cheap air-travel, disease-resistant crops and interstellar communication are all now realities where once they were dreams. But they also become the stuff of disaster stories, activist resistance and Hollywood plots.

"If the software doesn't meet the spec the spec is wrong" Technological development only seems strategic with hindsight. Engineers, and more recently computer programmers, often solve problems by deliberately changing the underlying conception of a device. They call this kind of thing a kluge (from the German, klug: clever). Some complex technologies such as the personal computer are a bricollage of kluges; technologies that initially meant one thing are reinterpreted to mean another. On the Personal Computer, the typewriter keyboard does not become the impersonal intermediate stage between hand and print, but the interface for any number of operations that personalise the textual utterance. Similarly, television technology devised to satisfy the desire for telepresence becomes a localised output device in the screen. These new meanings are brought together by contingency to produce a device that satisfies a completely different set of human demands, while retaining an occult shadow of former imperatives. It should not be surprising, therefore, that within three decades, the humdrum calculating device becomes the dominant means of global interaction. The ductility of technological meanings echoes the malleability of the human imagination, and the persistence of desire subject to Universal Laws. (see note 1).

Myths of order from confusion

Given this confluence of past and present imperatives, one begins to suspect technological artefacts might function in a similar way to historical myths in that they serve as rationalising models for those cultures that produce them. The confusion and complexity of actual events is reduced as we consider only those pieces of information that are accountable. Present realities (artefacts or social conditions) are regarded, retrospectively, as the inevitable outcome of an imagined past. In which case, technology's culturally determining role is not only in the feats of data processing or earth-moving that it helps us achieve but also in the ideas it generates about itself, and us.

Speaking as the Machine demands

Some time ago somebody asked a group of scholars in an internet news group (note we say scholars) what John Travolta was reading in Pulp Fiction; these are some of the replies:

'From my hazy recollection, Vince was reading Modesty Blaise while sitting on the toilet and in another scene too...