Working Alongside Technology

                We couldn’t exist as we do today without machines. Obvious as this may seem, that doesn’t take away from its significance, especially when you consider work. We’ve gotten to where we are thanks to machines, and now more than ever it seems that we’re working alongside machines for our benefit, rather than using them as tools. As Aronowitz says, “virtually all of our problems,” “…are subject to technical solutions.” (133) He’s essentially right with his assertion, but as Jeffrey Sconce and Ex Machina author Brian K. Vaughan also indicate we might not have so many problems if it weren’t for our dependence on technology.

            To begin with, Mitchell Hundred, hero of the Ex Machina comic book series, would not be in power over the city of New York if it were not for his power over the technological. It was his ability to control machines with his mind that allowed him to save one of the two towers on Sept 11 2001 and thus put himself into a position of popularity. He then leveraged that popularity in an election to win the seat of mayor. Better intentioned than the description may make it seem, technology earned his entry into office. Once there however, his key problems are all heavily technology based. For instance, the plough crisis crippling New Yorkers would not have been possible without a dependence on those ploughs. The only reason that the crazed student is able to shut the city down by disabling a couple of ploughs is indicative of society’s complete dependency on technology. Furthermore, Mitchell himself is dependent on his control over technology to do his job. Despite the fact that he is constantly reminded to keep his “Great Machine” abilities under wrap, he’s forever using them, or is simply affected by them. For instance, when a man makes an attempt on his life, he’s forced to jam the gun. Also, when he meets with a fellow politician who attempts to record their conversation, he’s able to hear the recorder. The relationship he has with technology in his work is unavoidable.

            Jeffrey Sconce, in his acknowledgments of the power of technology in “Tulip Theory,” seems to be the most bitter about it. Like Brian K. Vaughan shows with Mitchell Hundred’s daily escapades in office, Sconce is also of the opinion that work and technology are increasingly intertwined. This is especially true, for him, in the field of academia. With the introduction of “new media” and new media studies in universities, technology has played an increasingly important role in university departments. Academia is being increasingly ‘vaporised.’ That is, technology is a vaporous affair, where things come into existence to incite excitement and much writing and discussion only to disappear without leaving a lasting or meaningful mark. Now, academia too is becoming a vapour field. Sconce writes about how new media theory is growing at a faster rate than new media itself, and how writing theory in a quickly changing field can prove rather vaporous itself. Theories become outdated before they can be published and disproven before they can be proven. For Sconce, the world of academia has become an increasingly technological one, where snappy titles and money making play more important roles in university departments than knowledge and learning. Sconce associates technology with fickleness and fluidity, and in many ways it’s both. What is important to be taken out of it is, whether people like it or not, technology and work are becoming increasingly woven together.

            Despite the different descriptions that Aronowitz gives on the relationship of technology to modern culture, he seems to believe more than anything that “modern culture views technology as a regime of powerful tools by which human purposes may be served.” (135)We have become a “technoculture,” (136) where those discourses of technology and culture have become inseparable. It’s no coincidence that “teledildonics” (136) is probably getting closer and closer to creating actual sexbots – and limiting the distance required in the teledildonics that Aronowitz describes. We are closer and closer to literally and directly having sex with machine prostitutes; the world’s oldest profession is coming back in a very new way. Cybernetics is evolving, and the relationship between humans and technology is evolving. It’s becoming more immediate, more involving, and less and less avoidable. As Vaughan and Sconce have already affirmed, we are inextricably linked to technology, for better and worse.

           We depend on technology; it no longer depends on us. We have created it, and it has emerged in our world as something powerful, and essentially uncontrollable. We drive it, we research with it, we watch it for entertainment, we ride it to work and we make love to it before we go to sleep. It’s an increasingly technological world, and especially in considering our work, we need it more than it needs us.