Elements of Technology Criticism

This is my attempt to synthesize the last several years of the emerging field of technology criticism into a set of recurring general principles. These ideas belong to many different thinkers. The contribution here is primarily distilling them down to their essential point and collecting them in one spot. My next step is to provide a “see more” section for texts and a “problems and examples” section.
—Mike Pepi @mikepepi (last updated 8/15/2018)

Elements of Technology Criticism originated as a blog post. It was my modest attempt to roughly synthesize the last several years of the emerging field of technology criticism into a set of recurring general principles. Shortly after publication in 2018, the post went softly viral as a community of thinkers responded to it (online, naturally), reacting to the way it distilled ideas that had been circulating in the discourse of the still-nascent tech Left. I do not claim ownership over the list’s ideas or statements—which draw from a range of thinkers from Alexander Galloway to Kate Crawford to Jaron Lanier—but rather took care and pride in assembling a list that was sufficiently mutually exclusive and categorically exhaustive, while being inclusive of a range of different thinkers’ collective contributions. The goal was to retroactively build, from the existing literature, a set of principles unifying the many voices that had come to offer criticisms and alternatives to the platform-capitalist status quo. These essentials functioned as a platform itself, one that could be further developed by relevant literature in response to evolutions in the fields of art and tech.

The list was exciting for me, intellectually, but it was also political—by definition it would need to be refined in the company of peers. Too much of tech writing and so-called tech criticism has been written in a theory-heavy style, only accessible to academics, or has not been designed for everyday users of technology to understand. The points are chapters that might unfold in telling the story of the criticism of platform capitalism during its frenetic expansion in the 21st century. Even further, its vision would highlight the salient intersections of institutional critique with our new digital institutions.

When I opened up this list to a group of interested artists, scholars, and researchers as part of Running with Concepts: The Mediatic Edition earlier last fall, I knew the discussion would be generative on this exact front. Every distillation implies gaps—gaps in details, definitions, and dependencies. I have been eager to understand how complex and amorphous topics such as “technology” and “criticism” could possibly be handled by a collective workshop format. Below I reflect on the results of the workshop.

A time when most of the globe has been forced into reliance on networked and software-enabled services provides quite the backdrop for trying to refine the terms of technology criticism. One of the core tenets of the Elements was to make visible what has always been (purposefully) obscured. The first pandemic lockdowns of the information age have necessitated increased remote working and virtual gathering, laying bare the dominance of our tech platforms. Thus, sharp workshop participants immediately latched on to the importance of defining the terms. Each and every one of the principles relies on the simple but critical act of naming—and thus knowing—the material grounds through which platforms imbricate our lives. This act of categorization was more than half the battle. And given the long history associated with a slippery term such as “technology”, the group worked diligently to make sure the phrasing was as direct as possible.

One of the other problems with the list was whether it was, in fact, mutually exclusive and categorically exhaustive. I anticipated quite a bit of debate on this. And our group pushed the core ideas into their most essential characteristics: When we say “people” do we just mean “labour”? Is “crowdsourcing” really the correct term? Would not “the gig economy” be better?

Every simplification was rightly challenged. The most remarkable improvement was around the very basis of the list’s framing. The list was always directly interested in the flavour of platform capitalism that began to emerge in the 2010s: the period during which technology companies and venture capital were winning the battle of public opinion as they marched across the fabric of everyday life. Even as they captured, monetized, and atomized each moment of human interaction, they were given a free pass—treated as somehow outside or an alternative to capitalism. Owing to that, some clarification was in order. Our group pushed back on the tautological nature of the phrasing of principle #3: “Technology can never occupy a space outside of capitalism.” After some debate, we settled on an alternative that might be best phrased: “Technology platforms do not exist outside of capitalism.” Why force two enormous and inseparable concepts (technology and capitalism) to contrast one another when the point could be made more directly? That is, we ought to recognize that the generation of technology companies that operate distinct, multi-pronged systems known as platforms deserve the exact same scrutiny that the Left once reserved for industrial monopolies.

Then there was the intent. Most agreed with the gist of the idea for #12, that “information is the enemy of narrative.” But as several respondents highlighted, “Is the concept of narrative worth saving?”

In the end, whatever vigorous debate that ensued was unified by two meta-principles. Our group kept returning to two universal threads:

I don’t think these ideas could be entries themselves. Rather, as underlying challenges of the task at hand, they unite the entire project. Each problem that a point set out to describe seemed to come to a dead end when the group brainstormed solutions. For instance, in the first case, each power organ of platform capitalism—while we could locate its effects—provided no clear route to using the traditional forms of collective power against it. Second, software and its surrounding ideology seem almost designed to elude any attempts to stick it down. This means it’s awfully hard to do the work formerly known as “critique.”

The time we spent resulted in a rich and interactive digital whiteboard of sources. It will be the core of the syllabus that I always intended for these points to inspire. Like the target it sets out to critique, such a syllabus will always need to be modular, polyvocal, and agile. What can we borrow from the institutions of critique that we once knew, when they are now so eroded by platforms? This is, to me, a central question for our time.