Political Technology, Technological Politics

Platypus Boston organizes reading groups, public fora, research and journalism focused on the problems and tasks inherited from the "Old" (1920s–30s), "New" (1960s–70s) and post-political (1980s–90s) Left for the possibilities of emancipatory politics today.

The panelists will respond to the following prompt:

“Max Horkheimer: I couldn’t care less about sending spacecraft to the moon.
Theodor Adorno: There is nothing sacred about technology.
Horkheimer: Marx already has the idea that in a false society, technology develops wrongly.” (Towards a New Manifesto, 1956)

The revolutionizing of industrial technique and explosion of productive capacity in the 19th century prompted a range of political responses: the Luddites’ destruction of machinery in the name of skilled labor, Robert Owen’s utopian experiments in reformed communal labor, and Charles Fourier’s technocratic phalansteries. It was Karl Marx’s dialectical conception of a laboring proletariat, however, that would determine the fate of utopian politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the wake of the failure of Marxism to inspire world revolution, and facing another period of technological innovation, utopian thought searched for a new basis to understand technology. Leftists across the board recognized new potentials, from autonomous Marxists to cyberfeminists, transhumanists to Occupy’s Facebook organizers. At the same time, as diverse a group as Foucault, the Frankfurt School, Libertarians after the Patriot Act, and climate activists registered with apprehension technological penetration into social life. And the enduring question of labor automation remains unanswered.

How should a 21st century Left think about emerging technologies, and what is new or old about that conception? What politics do disparate understandings of technology motivate, and vice-versa, what ideas are sufficient to motivate political action? How do the questions of immigration and imperialism relate to broader technological trends? And how do the political responses to those phenomena measure up to an appropriate understanding of technology?