Technopolitics (Jethani, 2024), encyclopedia entry

=== [PDF page 1] === Technopolitics SUNEEL JETHANI University of Technology Sydney, Australia Technopolitics is a perspective on the interaction between humans and various forms of power that foregrounds the role of technical objects, systems, and logics in mediating this relation. As technology is advanced through innovation in science and industry, it is comprehended through discourse and then reintegrated into culture. As this happens, technology creates and contributes to political subjectivities. Both historically and in a contemporary sense, technology is a project that continues humanity’s efforts to control, represent, and alter nature, culture, and society – for example, climate, energy, agriculture, transport, biology, medicine, genetics, knowledge, and communication. The notion of technopolitics challenges deterministic views of technology’s role in democracy, progress, and innovation, which assumes that technologies are wholly autonomous with purposes of their own and, as they are projected onto society, become ends in their own right. Technology and the political have long been entwined, particularly with material and embodied aspects of technology’s function in governing, empowering, and progressing society. Notwithstanding the positive contributions of technology, the concept of technopolitics lies at the center of a tension between the ways in which technology supports the utilitarian work of political institutions and the influence that politically and culturally influential actors have over how technology is developed, invested in, and introduced into society. Technologies carry with them powerful visions of the situated social contexts in which they are intended to be used. These visions are awash with equally powerful discourses guiding how resources and lives are reorganized to accommodate their presence (Orlikowski and Gash, 1994; Brock, 2018). Since the middle of the twentieth century, this relation has been framed by globalization (Kellner, 1999, 2021) and systematically problematized in several ways. For instance, there has been increasing concern about the potential threat posed by the increasing size, complexity, and interdependency of technical systems to their own regulation and governance (Winner, 1980; Feenberg, 2012). Accompanying this, as technology and technical literacies become integral to almost all aspects of everyday life, political problems have been increasingly framed by technological solutions (Morozov, 2014) and in terms of a conflation of freedom and control as indistinguishable forces within problem spaces (Chun, 2008; Stiegler, 2010). While a political perspective might explain outcomes happening around a new technology as a result of certain groups’ loss or gain of power, a technopolitical perspective takes the idea of politics further into the realm of contingent technical processes, helping to explain contradictory outcomes arising from different interpretations of a technology’s utility and appropriateness across a range of use contexts and social backdrops. In recent times, these have included nuclear power, biotechnology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, the Internet, social media, and artificial intelligence. And debates in these fields have extended public understandings of agency, power, and control as forces to be wielded by government and industry actors primarily but also offset by active public collaboration and participation on technoscientific decision-making (Irwin and Michael, 2003; Durant, 1999). Rapid technological development at an unprecedented scale has the potential to undermine democratic institutions, eroding public trust in governments and corporations. Therefore, the responsible stewardship of technology emerges as a significant challenge that not only has an impact on human (and animal) agency and sovereignty but also shapes ontological security (e.g., privacy, food, environment, healthcare and medical treatments, basic human rights), temporality (e.g., life expectancy, accelerationism, time deepening, work–life balance) and epistemology (e.g., education, knowledge sharing, access to information, truth, facticity, self-knowledge). The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Edited by George Ritzer, Chris Rojek, and J. Michael Ryan. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781405165518.wbeost059.pub2 === [PDF page 2] === TECHNOPOLITICS As the third millennium unfolds, technopolitical thinking intersects with the broader project of decentering the concerns of cosmopolitan-urban, financially secure, able-bodied, colonial, and other categorically archetypal user bases within the design and governance of sociotechnical systems, particularly along the global north–south axis (Treré and Barranquero Carretero, 2018) and across lines of gender and race (Phan, 2019; Benjamin, 2020; Strengers and Kennedy, 2021). As a concept with utility in humanities and social sciences and in critical interdisciplinary work, technopolitics informs the analysis of technology and society with an attention to how the material outcomes of technological development come to be “ironic and paradoxical” (Arnold, 2003: 232) and pull in opposite directions, leading to contrasting aftereffects relative to their expressions of value and function and conditions of possibility. SEE ALSO: Agency–Structure Relationship; Cybernetics; Information Society; Information Technology; Knowledge Politics; Net Neutrality; Political Economy of Science; Stratification: Technology and Ideology; Technological Determinism Kellner, D. (1999) Globalisation from below? Toward a radical democratic technopolitics. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 4 (2), 101–113. Kellner, D. (2021) Globalization, technopolitics and revolution, in D. Kellner, Technology and Democracy: Toward a Critical Theory of Digital Technologies, Technopolitics, and Technocapitalism, Springer, pp. 153–177. Morozov E. (2014) To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, PublicAffairs, New York. Orlikowski, W.J. and Gash, D.C. (1994) Technological frames: making sense of information technology in organizations. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 12 (2), 174–207. Phan, T. (2019) Amazon Echo and the aesthetics of whiteness. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, Stiegler, B. (2010) For a New Critique of Political Economy, Polity, Cambridge. Strengers, Y. and Kennedy, J. (2021) The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Treré, E. and Barranquero Carretero, A. (2018) Tracing the roots of technopolitics: towards a north–south dialogue, in Networks, Movements and Technopolitics in Latin America: Critical Analysis and Current Challenges (ed. F.S. Caballero and T. Gravante), Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 43–63. Winner, L. (1980) Do artifacts have politics? Daedalus, References Further Readings Arnold, M. (2003) On the phenomenology of technology: the “Janus-faces” of mobile phones. Information and Organization, 13 (4), 231–256. Benjamin, R. (2020) Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Polity, Cambridge. Brock, A. (2018) Critical technocultural discourse analysis. New Media & Society, 20 (3), 1012–1030. Chun, W.H.K. (2008) Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Durant, J. (1999) Participatory technology assessment and the democratic model of the public understanding of science. Science and Public Policy, 26 (5), 313–319. Feenberg, A. (2012) Questioning Technology, Routledge, London. Irwin, A., and Michael, M. (2003) Science, Social Theory and Public Knowledge, Open University Press, Maidenhead. Fejerskov, A.M. (2017) The new technopolitics of development and the global south as a laboratory of technological experimentation. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 42 (5), 947–968. Folkers, A. (2017) Existential provisions: the technopolitics of public infrastructure. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35 (5), 855–874. Hassan, R. (2015) Our post-modern vanity: the cult of efficiency and the regress to the boundary of the animal world. Philosophy & Technology, 28, 241–259. Lupton, D. (2023) The Internet of Animals: Human– Animal Relationships in the Digital Age, Wiley, Chichester.