Digifesto

Horkheimer’s comment on engineers:

It is true that the engineer, perhaps the symbol of this age, is not so exclusively bent on profitmaking as the industrialist or the merchant. Because his function is more directly connected with the requirements of the production job itself, his commands bear the mark of greater objectivity. His subordinates recognize that at least some of his orders are in the nature of things and therefore rational in a universal sense. But at bottom this rationality, too, pertains to domination, not reason. The engineer is not interested in understanding things for their own sake or the sake of insight, but in accordance to their being fitted into a scheme, no matter how alien to their own inner structure; this holds for living beings as well as for inanimate things. The engineer’s mind is that of industrialism in its streamlined form. His purposeful rule would make men an agglomeration of instruments without a purpose of their own.

This paragraph sums up much of what Horkheimer stands for. His criticism of engineers, the catalysts of industrialism, is not that they are incorrect. It is that their instrumental rationality is not humanely purposeful.

This humane purposefulness, for Horkheimer, is born out of individual contemplation. Though he recognizes that this has been a standpoint of the privileged (c.f. Arendt on the Greek polis), he sees industrialism as successful in bringing many people out of a place of necessity but at the cost of marginalizing and trivializing all individual contemplation. The result is an efficient machine with nobody in charge. This bodes ill because such a machine is vulnerable to being co-opted by an irrational despot or charlatan. Individuality, free of material necessity and also free of the machine that liberated it from that necessity, is the origin of moral judgement that prevents fascist rule.

This is very different from the picture of individuality Fred Turner presents in The Democratic Surround. In his account of how United States propaganda created a “national character” that was both individual enough to be anti-fascist and united enough to fight fascism, he emphasizes the role of art installations that encourage the view to stitch themselves synthetically into a large picture of the nation. One is unique within a larger, diverse…well, we might use the word society, borrowing from Arendt, who was also writing in the mid-century.

If this is all true, then this dates a transition in American culture from one of individuality to one of society. This coincides with the tendency of information organization traced assiduously by Beniger.

We can perhaps trace an epicycle of this process in the history of the Internet. In it’s “wild west” early days, when John Perry Barlow could write about the freedom of cyberspace, it was a place primarily occupied by the privileged few. Interestingly, many of these were engineers, and so were (I’ll assume for the sake of argument) but materially independent and not exclusively focused on profit-making. Hence the early Internet was not unlike the ancient polis, a place where free people could attempt words and deeds that would immortalize them.

As the Internet became more widely used and commercialized, it became more and more part of the profiteering machine of capitalism. So today we see it’s wildness curtailed by the demands of society (which includes an appeal to an ethics sensitive both to disparities in wealth and differences in the body, both part of the “private” realm in antiquity but an element of public concern in modern society.)