Technophile

1966 Editor. Ingenor, Autumn 1966 p.30, College of engineering, University of Michigan Most of us simply ignore technology in its depth effects; the few who don't ignore it tend either to glow with technophilia. . . or to glower with technophobia. . . But both technophilia and technophobia are superstitious relapses in which, let me repeat, we impute to the dynamic a direction that it does not have. Our one hope of humanizing technology is by humanizing ourselves: gaining the courage and the humility to get a hold on ourselves, we might gain the wit and the will to get a hold on it. In this bootstrap effort, neither the technophile nor the technophobe is likely to be helpful, for what we need is not a simple assessment of how technology affects the world "out there" or the world "in here." We need, rather, an assessment of how it affects both, in interplay. And for that effort, both the technophile and the technophobe have disqualified themselves — the one by his dogmatic fixation on what he claims to be objective certainties, the other by his equally dogmatic fixation on what he claims to be subjective imperatives.

It is naive to think it likely that technology can be phased out in a smoothly managed, orderly way, especially since the technophiles will fight stubbornly at every step.