Resistance Is Futile: The Myth of Tech Inevitability

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” — Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage This time around I’m passing along a slightly expanded and edited version of a short talk I had the pleasure of giving this morning at a virtual event hosted by the Future Narratives Lab based in the UK. My thanks to Daniel Stanley for the invitation to participate alongside far more accomplished panelists, Dr. Jeannette Estruth, professor of history at Bard College, and Dr. Kanta Dihal, Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge University. They and Daniel gave terrific presentations, and when the recording is available I’ll pass it along. The theme of the event was “the narratives behind Big Tech,” and in my contribution I revisited some earlier work on the rhetoric of technological determinism. The relationship between technology and narrative is long-standing. Indeed, some have argu

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” — Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage This time around I’m passing along a slightly expanded and edited version of a short talk I had the pleasure of giving this morning at a virtual event hosted by the Future Narratives Lab based in the UK. My thanks to Daniel Stanley for the invitation to participate alongside far more accomplished panelists, Dr. Jeannette Estruth, professor of history at Bard College, and Dr. Kanta Dihal, Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Center for the