Culture: The Arbiter of Technology
One might think that with the exponential hype machine around Artificial Intelligence and the bubbling of quantum computing that massive technological change in society is underway. That it is coming fast and furious and has left most of us standing there like a deer in the headlights. The reality is much different.
Technological change in society is faster than hundreds of years ago, but the ultimate decision maker on any technology, how it gets accepted or rejected or changed, has always been culture. And in the end, technology gets better as a result. Why? What does this mean for the future of humanity?
In democracies, when culture as society (sociocultural systems) decides it wants something to change, like it did with AT&T and the New Deal in the last Gilded Age, it reaches a point where society outweighs the value of the lobbyists dollars. This is what is happening with regard to social media. It is a battle that not even the deep pockets of Meta can win.
It is hard to say how this will all play out with regard to Artificial Intelligence, but the AI giants like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Amazon, will eventually have to face their greatest arbiter. Culture. They’re currently sounding alarm bells of the dangers. Their goal is to secure moats around themselves to own as much market share as possible. This is a risky gamble. If culture and society ultimately does see AI as representing a true threat to humanity, it will move against not just the AI giants, but AI as a technology, ultimately putting the very restraint on AI that the tech companies are trying to avoid. Quite the gamble.
Culture and Technology Rejection
Digital technologies such as microchips and software have enabled what some call revolutionary technologies such as blockchain, Web3 and crypto. Yet these technologies are largely used on the fringes of society. They’re wallowing in digital misery. Yet they are great technologies. What happened?
Broader society doesn’t understand them. Culture hasn’t really found a use for them, a fit. And crypto’s venture into society has largely been associated with criminal activity. Of all the anticipation and launch of thousands of cryptocurrencies, only Bitcoin has a semblance of integrity. NFTs were going to change the world of art, music and literature. It was a short lived cultural phenomena. Even though there are some very useful ways to apply NFTs in the marketplace.
Culture sometimes just decides that a technology really isn’t something important enough to add value in both economic (capitalism) terms and societal terms. In pure capitalist terms, this is the market rejecting a technology. But that’s only part of the story of technological rejection.
Societies also play a role. More of a role than many who invent a revolutionary technology like to admit, or perhaps, realise. The metaverse is another example.
Facebook changed its parent company name to Meta. In part to distract from a huge public relations crisis and in part to propose to the world that it was going to create a techtopia called the metaverse. That was in 2021. It is now 2024 and Meta has spent billions on an idea that society found, well, just not that interesting. There’s a lot of little metaverses that are still just mostly about gaming. Meta took on culture and so far, is batting zero.
Most Silicon Valley tech giants, not all, think in terms of users. Singular. Not humans, but users. This is their first failure at misunderstanding culture. When they do go broader, they again don’t think in sociocultural terms (the way humanity actually works), they think in terms of cohorts, persona groups, demographics and that most annoying marketing idea of generational definitions.
Most tech companies dislike going beyond quantitative data. They tend to think that human behaviours and culture can be codified in algorithms. Unfortunately, humans aren’t really easy to quantify in such ways. It is this disconnect between the realities of human sociocultural systems and many technology companies that leads to their failure and why culture ultimately decides the fate on any technology.
There’s a reason that Apple has become so successful. They understand where the data stops and the humans begin. Apple understands culture. They’ve long employed anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists. The human sciences, where other tech companies rejected the human sciences as unimportant. Markets don’d decide anything, humans do and at scale, culture.
Culture Has Always Made Technology Better
We have, as larger sociocultural systems, always ended up making technology safer, more useful and more beneficial to society. Cars are safer than ever before, so are aeroplanes, trains, ships, railway cars.
The EUs privacy, data and AI regulations have proven that technology companies do not need our personal data as a means of profitability. No tech giant has been able to make a rebuttal to that argument.
Pharmaceuticals, healthcare, surgeries, are all better than they ever were because culture was the ultimate arbiter of the technologies used in these sectors. Innovation didn’t stop, it increased faster than ever before. More money has been made, not less. It just takes time.
Culture is now trying to make social media better using the systems it has evolved to take action; Rule of Law and democracy. It was the same with drugs, food and transportation technologies. No technology, no company, has ever won out against the ultimate arbiter; culture.
It is why there will, eventually, be an end to fossil fuel technologies. Culture has started to fight back. It may take a while, but the fossil fuel industry has already begun it’s decline into the history books. Just as sail and steam did. The oil & gas industry may be big, but it is not big enough to take on the whole of human society when it uses culture.
Humans created culture as our primary means of survival because biological evolution moved too slow for us to live. So we created language, writing, religion, political and economic systems, aesthetics and technologies to make it all work.
Every technological invention comes from the human imagination. As does culture. This is why culture will remain the ultimate arbiter of technologies, societies and all the amazing things we have achieved as a species and will achieve and why technology will always get better. It will be bumpy at times. We have and will, make mistakes. But we’re here today because we find ways to make it work.
