Beyond the Language of Technocultural Discourse

The next speaker at the iCS Symposium is Yidong Steven Wang, who begins with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s recent appearance in front of the U.S. Congress. This demonstrated the limited technical understanding of U.S. politicians, as well as Zuckerberg’s ability to evade the difficult questions.

Within the overall context of the current post-truth paradigm, the technocultural discourse in such hearings articulates technological agency, which in turn informs current regulatory principles. Technological agency here refers to what machines are seen to be able to do: we have a certain discursively derived understanding of such agency, and the current paradigm informing such understandings remains dominated by the discourse of cyberculture, an ideology of connectivity, and a sense of Internet exceptionalism.

This discourse is articulated by the tech entrepreneurs, the like-minded journalists who cover them and their companies, and the associated tech enthusiasts, but also by sometimes more critical voices in academia and the mainstream media. Zuckerberg’s ‘Internet for All’ project, also supported by major celebrities, is an embodiment of such ideology; it is also represented in some of the print and online publications that tech entrepreneurs now own.

More critical views have now also emerged, arguing that technology cannot be the redemption of humanity. This still places an awful emphasis on the power of technology, however. In a post-truth environment such views can persist unchecked, and we need a language for discussing technological infrastructure as politics, and for political-economic mechanisms of entrenchment. We need to develop a language for ‘bottom-up truth’.