SF and Technology as Mystification

Russ, Joanna. "SF and Technology as Mystification." Science-Fiction Studies #16 = 5 (Nov. 1978): 250-60. Cited in Samuelson "On Hard Science Fiction: A Bibliography." Collected in Russ's To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. Quotations from on-line SFS article.[1]

Important essay by a major author and analyst of SF.

After a discussion of addiction to something nonpharmaceutical, as in sucrose, and a scathing brief commentary on the original STAR WARS — to which Russ will return, along with other works — (and some kind works on Star Trek), Russ gets to technology.

==============

My own definition is on the modest side. I mean by "technology" a rational, systematic, taught, learned, and replicable way of materially controlling the material world, or parts of it.

In this modest definition, every known human society has a technology; there's the digging-stick technology, the animals-domestication technology, basket-weaving, pottery, and so on.

Most people who talk about technology don't talk this way.

First of all, they mean something modern; the xerox copier or the railroad are technology; the hand loom or the potter's wheel are not. Modernity appears to be located during or after the Industrial Revolution.

Second, they mean something ubiquitous. Technology is all around us. One statement I can find about "technology" says "technology is in our time almost indistinguishable from the urban environment of West countries.8 In my definition of the word, such a statement would be absurd, since it would imply that the urban or village environment of non-Western countries is non-technological, i.e. something that arose spontaneously from nature. The use of "technology" here is clearly not mine.

Third, technology is not only everywhere; it's autonomous. It acts. It threatens our promises. It influences. It transforms.

Fourth, technology is often spoken of as uncontrollable. "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind." It controls us and is dangerous; it can threaten change or destruction.

What is this entity that began during the Industrial Revolution and continued thereafter, that is uncontrollable, autonomous, all around us, and both threatening and promising?

Hiding greyly behind that sexy rock star, technology, is a much more sinister and powerful figure. It is the entire social system that surrounds us; hence the sense of being at the mercy of an all-encompassing, autonomous process which we cannot control. If you add the monster's location in time (during and after the Industrial Revolution) I think you can see what is being discussed when most people say "technology." They are politically mystifying a much bigger monster: Capitalism in its advanced, industrial phase.

So a central point: "'technology' is substituted for political realities in academic discussion" as a mystification going along with a kind of addiction. Therefore

If talk about technology as an addiction, how do we cure it? I would go back to the physiological analogy. What the hypoglycemic craves is refined sugar; what the hypoglycemic must avoid at all costs is refined sugar.

The technology-obsessed must give up talking about technology when it is economics and politics which are at issue. But the addict cannot simply be left bereft; a sugar addict so treated would starve in short order. Instead, just as the offending addictive is taken out of the victim's diet, something else is put in — in this case protein, which is digested slowly and therefore slowly metabolized. In the case of technology, I suggest that politics and economics take the place of the kicked technology-habit until the victims' intellectual taste buds recover and they find themselves capable of thinking in more practical terms, especially about money and power.[2] 

RDE, Initial Compiler, 21May19