Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 1 (2015), 98-120
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17351/ests2015.009
Technological Determinism and Permissionless Innovation as
Technocratic Governing Mentalities: Psychocultural Barriers to the
Democratization of Technology
TAYLOR DOTSON
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
1
Abstract
Despite no shortage of thoughtful analysis concerning how to more democratically develop and
assess new technologies, practical progress toward democratized innovation has been paltry.
This state of affairs suggests that the barriers to such democratic ends merit more attention.
Building upon calls to more seriously examine citizens’ understandings of technology as
autonomous or deterministic, this paper characterizes the assumptions, beliefs, and patterns of
thought undergirding technological determinism and permissionless innovation as technocratic
governing mentalities. That is, they contribute to the biasing of political discourses, practices, and
organizations toward non-decision making and adaptation with regards to technological change.
Indeed, permissionless innovation is quickly becoming the motto of those aiming to legitimate a
“hands-off” approach to the sociotechnical “disruptions” sought by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
Moreover, this paper explores how STS, as both an academic and political endeavor, might better
respond to the challenges these modes of thinking present. Drawing upon relevant work within
social psychology and communications, several fruitful avenues for engaged research regarding
undermining technocratic governing mentalities become apparent. Not only is there a pressing
need for accessible and parsimonious counternarratives to technological determinism and
permissionless innovation but also rhetorical strategies for making the democratization of
technological appear continuous with aspects of status quo systems. Finally, given that
technocratic governing mentalities are likely to have practical and material roots, inquiry should
be directed toward understanding how different sociotechnical arrangements impact citizens’
perception of the desirability and feasibility of democratizing technology.
Keywords
technological determinism; permissionless innovation; governing mentalities; psychocultural
barriers; technological governance; democracy
1
Taylor Dotson, Email: tdotson@nmt.edu
Copyright © 2015 (Taylor Dotson). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives
(by-nc-nd). Available at estsjournal.org.
Taylor Dotson
Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 1 (2015)
Introduction
The democratization of technological innovation has long been a goal of many science and
technology studies (STS) scholars. Potential participatory models, theoretical reflections on
deliberative processes, and post-hoc evaluations of democratic experiments abound in the
literature (e.g., Daim et al. 2011; Guston et al. 2014). Despite a panoply of work on possible
democratic end-states, the barriers standing in the way of democratizing technology have yet to
receive much attention (cf. Kleinman 2000; Hamlett 2003). This imbalance has limited STS’s
potential as a political movement. Indeed, technological development, at least in the United
States, hardly seems any more democratically steered today than during STS’s infancy.
Consumers, retailers, and policy-makers all appear to breathlessly await the next “disruptive”
gadget to emerge spontaneously from Silicon Valley. What contributes to the non-democratic
status quo’s obduracy or resistance to change? How might allied activists and scholars intervene
to incrementally lessen the barriers to more democratic technological decisions?
Although a broad range of social, cultural, material, and political variables contributes to
nondemocratic technological decision-making, in this paper I will focus on what could be termed
the cognitive or psychocultural barriers to democratizing technology and suggest potential avenues
for normative research and strategic intervention. In particular, I am concerned with the hurdles
presented by technological determinism, the idea that technology autonomously drives history,
and permissionless innovation, the belief that technology best benefits humanity if innovation
remains nearly unregulated.
Building upon calls to not merely dismiss ideas like technological determinism for their
conceptual crudity but take them seriously as real forces helping to construct social reality (Hecht
and Allen 2001, 5; Wyatt 2008), I characterize technological determinism and permissionless
innovation as normative phenomena. Their foundational beliefs, ideas, and assumptions constitute
governing mentalities that shape discourse, thinking and action regarding technological innovation
to the advantage of a narrow range of elite actors. Because they help mobilize bias (within the
political organization of technological societies so as to encourage adaptation to technological
change) and non-decision-making (regarding the potential consequences of emerging
technologies rather than conscious democratic steering) they can be termed technocratic governing
mentalities.
If my assessment is (at least partially) correct, it suggests that meeting the challenges
presented by technological determinism and permissionless innovation will entail drawing from
and advancing research lines within social psychology and communications regarding belief
formation and challenging system-justifying ideologies. Scholars should not assume, however,
that these mentalities persist simply because members of technological societies are not better
informed about STS case studies; to do so would risk projecting a “deficit model” onto citizens,
repeating the mistake typically made by scientists during moments of pubic scientific controversy
(see Wynne 2006). Beliefs like technological determinism endure in part because common
interpretations of the sociomaterial experiences of everyday life tend to confirm them (Williams
2002; Wyatt 2008). Hence, careful study is necessary regarding how different material affordances
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and constraints scaffold the experiences, psychic states, and patterns of thought that construct
citizens’ technocratic beliefs.
My exploration of these issues productively synthesizes four different conversations
within STS. Although the antidemocratic slant of technological determinism is well recognized
(Feenberg 1991, 5-14; Bijker 1995, 281; Wyatt 2008), attention in the literature has only recently
refocused on more fully characterizing the political implications first analyzed by Winner (1977;
also see Hamilton 2014) as well as the social processes that can lead to the belief that certain
technologies are obligatory or unavoidable (Chandler 2012; Dafoe 2015). I extend this perspective
to the discourse of “permissionless innovation.” Although Silicon Valley techno-libertarianism
has already received substantial scholarly attention (see Barbook and Cameron 1996; Turner 2006;
Sadowski and Selinger 2014), its most recent instantiation, permissionless innovation, has yet to
be characterized as an emerging barrier to the democratic control of technology and a potential
target for intervention (see Theirer 2014; Theierer and Hagemann 2014). I describe how
permissionless innovation is not only strongly colored by the logics of laissez-faire economics but
also involves a well-developed, albeit naïve, view of risk. Furthermore, I draw upon the literature
on governing mentalities and political subject formation in order to flesh out my characterization
of technological determinism and permissionless innovation as cognitive or psychocultural
barriers to more democratic technological politics (see Campbell 2000; Campbell 2005; Agrawal
2005). I contend that, similar to the apparent passivity of many citizens in the face of toxic
consumer products (Woodhouse and Howard 2008) or economic inequality (Fraser 2015),
acquiescence to technocracy is reflected and reinforced by entrenched ideas, assumptions, and
belief systems. Finally, through my exploration of possible responses to technocratic governing
mentalities like technological determinism and permissionless innovation, I aim to advance more
normative STS research.
Technological Determinism and the Technological Imperative
The specter of technological determinism is ever-present in the history of STS. It recurs not
merely as an object of study but also as a pejorative term that some academics use to characterize
those perceived to be overstating the influence of technological change on social evolution (Kline
2001, 15497; Dafoe 2015). In this section, I argue that a narrow focus on excising it from academic
thinking concerning technology (or using it pejoratively) has distracted scholars from inquiring
more deeply into how it works in the minds of citizens as a barrier to democratic technological
politics. Mounting an appropriate response to technological determinism (as well as
permissionless innovation) will require refocusing attention on such patterns of thought as
normative phenomena.
Much of the research within STS over last decades has been aimed at unseating what
Bruce Bimber (1994) termed the “nomological” form of technological determinism, the quasinaturalistic theory that technology drives social adaption and change in predictable, law-like
ways. Scholars in the field have sought to illustrate how such theories are empirically false
through detailed histories of technological innovation. Whether nomological technological
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determinists exist, at least outside of popular media, is uncertain. The historian Robert
Heilbroner, for instance, has been sometimes suspected of offering a technological deterministic
viewpoint (see Bimber 1994). Nevertheless, he maintained that the heuristic “machines make
history” should be used only when also “bearing in mind the socioeconomic meaning we attach
to the last word [of the phrase]” (1994, 77).
Indeed, STS predecessors like Jacques Ellul (1964) and Langdon Winner (1977)
approached technological determinism as a “normative” phenomenon (Bimber 1994). Despite
their frequent and pejorative mislabeling as nomological determinists, such scholars argued that
technology proceeded autonomously largely because of sociocultural factors—namely, the
elimination of human values apart from narrow interpretations of technical efficiency, economic
profitability, or other more technocratic notions of progress, from technological decision making.
Technology comes to drive history, in their view, because societies neglect to subject new
technoscience to sufficient political scrutiny, instead delegating the responsibility for sorting out
desirable technologies from undesirable to the innovators, technocrats, businesses and/or
markets. As Rosalind Williams (2002, 125) notes in her reflections on the dynamics of
sociotechnical change, “We are faced not so much with technological determinism as with market
determinism reified in a technological product” (also see Dafoe 2015). Although ostensibly
deterministic scholars like Ellul might be reasonably accused of incorporating too few
sociocultural factors into their accounts, strict technological determinists they are not.
If the actual existence of nomological technological determinism within technology
studies is questionable, then constructivist STS research over the last decades begins to appear to
have been mistargeted (politically speaking). Yet the claim that social constructivism finally laid
to rest the supposed determinism of more critical and/or theoretically oriented scholars
undergirds one of the main origin stories for contemporary technology studies (see Cutliffe and
Mitcham 2001, 2-3). That is not to deny, of course, technological determinism’s continued
omnipresence within public imaginaries and discourses, particularly of those citizens who are
eager to consume new technologies. Nevertheless, the emphasis placed on slaying the dragon of
nomological technological determinism among technology scholars has arguably distracted
researchers from practically and politically addressing technological determinism as a normative
phenomenon (see Winner 2001). Indeed, Wyatt (2008, 175-6) concludes that “it is no longer
sufficient to dismiss it for its conceptual crudeness, nor is it enough to dismiss it as false
consciousness…[for] it remains as part of a broader public discourse which seeks to render
technology opaque and beyond political intervention and control.”
Wyatt’s claim is well known and probably agreed upon by most STS scholars, and yet it
is in need of more specificity. How exactly does technological determinism help render
technology beyond political control? My view, simply put, is that it helps to legitimate and
reproduce anti-democratic sociotechnical policy regimes via its influence on citizens’ patterns of
2
Wyatt (2008, 167) also distinguishes “normative” from “justificatory” technological determinism. The latter
is mobilized by social actors and the former is the broader decoupling of technology from political
accountability. I view justificatory technological determinism as aimed at the foreclosing of politics. Hence,
it contributes to technological determinism as a normative phenomenon.
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thought. That is, technological determinism is a type of governing mentality, “a tacit and often illconsidered pattern of assumptions that fundamentally shapes political relationships, interactions,
and dialogue” (Woodhouse and Howard 2008, 46; also see Campbell 2000; Campbell 2005).
Governing mentalities are frequent constituents of the broader political process of the mobilization
of bias: the systematic and consistent operation of predominant values, practices, procedures, and
rules that result in some people and groups automatically benefitting but not others (Barchrach
and Baratz 1962; Lukes 2005). The mobilization of bias can be viewed, in one sense, as the
organizing of non-decision making. That is, the effect of a particular set of biased values, rules,
practices, and procedures is the manufactured unthinkability or perceived infeasibility of the
choices that would hurt the interests of advantaged groups.
The specific governing ideas associated with technological determinism center on the
belief in technological imperatives and the desirability of technocracy. Technological imperatives
are rooted in the belief that “can” implies “ought.” Given an underlying presumption that
technology writ large evolves according to an internal, asocial logic and that technology is taken
to be the “cause of well-being” (see Smith 1994), the task for humanity under the rubric of
technological determinism is merely to provide the necessary operating conditions for the next
stage of technological evolution to flourish. This, as Winner (1977) points out, entails that citizens
must, in turn, make the appropriate cultural and psychological adaptations to the sociotechnical
systems implied by those changes. Not adapting is to risk failing to “modernize” and, hence,
progress. Insofar as such beliefs are internalized—or one might say naturalized within the minds
citizens and in broader culture—the more active and conscious steering of technological
development becomes increasingly unthinkable. Hence, they serve as psychocultural barriers to
democratizing technology.
Examples of technological deterministic governing mentalities altering sociotechnical
trajectories are legion. Hamilton (2014), for instance, has illustrated how the rhetorical language
of “agribusiness” was deployed in the United States in the mid-twentieth century to rationalize
governmental efforts to enforce the highly centralized industrialization of farming. As he shows,
the term agribusiness “signified, and too often justified, the seeming inevitability of a consumerdriven, technologically determined, corporate capitalist logic of food production and
distribution” (561-2). The widespread marshalling of the technologically deterministic discourse
of agribusiness, especially by powerful actors, and its eventual popular acceptance resulted in the
mobilization of bias toward non-thinking and non-decision-making concerning the potential
consequences or downsides of industrialized agriculture.
Despite the presumption of technological autonomy within the governing mentality of
technological determinism, what might appear at first to be technological imperatives are
actually sociopolitical accomplishments—as social constructivist studies have amply
demonstrated. Nevertheless, widespread belief in technological imperatives, as Winner noted
3
Technological imperatives are logically dubious (see Niiniluoto 1990). For them to hold true, all possible
innovations, or at least all economically feasible technical possibilities, would have to be realized. Given the
history of promising but failed technologies, this is clearly not the case.
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(1977, 258), legitimates and enables technocracy. That is, the internalization of the ideas and
beliefs underlying technological determinism leads citizens and decision makers to see the
proper scope of government as consisting in simply obeying and adapting its citizenry to the
perceived logic of technological evolution. Insofar as such a regime characterizes sociotechnical
governance, technologies really do come to determine or govern societies, only further cementing
the perceived naturalness of technological determinism. The governing mentality of
technological determinism and technocratic governance regimes form a vicious circle.
The framing of agribusiness as the next technologically determined stage of agricultural
development, for instance, was one factor in the eventual shift in farm policy toward supporting
corporate subsidies and the more uncritical embrace of new biotechnological innovations, which
remains mostly intact to this day. Those who today advocate for more locally rooted and less
chemically intensive forms of farming are battling the historical mobilization of bias toward the
beneficiaries of corporate-led industrial agriculture that was partly borne out of the rhetoric of
agribusiness. The sociopolitical restructurings entailed by this process, of course, are largely
absent in public imaginations and public school history books; they are displaced by a
triumphant, linear, and technocentric telling of the “green revolution,” which in turn helps
legitimate future instances of agricultural technocracy.
Understanding technological determinism matters to advocates of functional democracy
because it stands in the way of democratic decision making regarding the trajectory of
technological development. As a normative phenomenon, technological determinism maintains
and reproduces particular sociotechnical regimes. It naturalizes technological changes and
shields those responsible for stewarding those changes from criticism. As Sadowski and Selinger
note, “by focusing on technology as the dominant force in society—a force that progresses in
inevitable ways—technocrats can justify their actions as merely being the outcome of rational,
mechanical processes” (2014, 166). In justifying the actions of some as merely the outcome of
rational processes, as opposed to reflecting the interests and value disagreements characteristic of
politics, the discourse of technological determinism frames such actions as rightfully outside the
purview of democratic control.
4
Innovating without Permission, Innovating without Representation
Although technological deterministic thinking remains prevalent—consider all the overhyped
talk of dramatic social transformation surrounding the putatively inevitable arrival of an
“internet of things”—another perhaps even more sophisticated technocracy-legitimating
discourse has emerged recently. The rhetoric of permissionless innovation, like technological
determinism, accomplishes a mobilization of bias toward adaptation to technological change for
the benefit for entrepreneurs, innovators, and tech firms. However, permissionless innovation
differs from determinism, substituting an innovation imperative for the previous technological
This definition of technocracy differs from its characterization as the belief that an optimal answer to social
problems can be arrived at through the rational application of technical means (see Sadowski and Selinger
2014).
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imperative and somewhat recognizing the indeterminacy of technological consequences. Far
from being a marginal concept having caché only among a small cadre of techno-libertarians, one
witnesses it already shaping policy proposals concerning Internet technologies.
The term “permissionless innovation” appears to have been coined by Google’s “Chief
Internet Evangelist” Vinton Cerf (2012a; 2012b), who attributed the economic growth-enhancing
potentials of Internet technologies to the apparent lack of substantial regulatory oversight to
which they are subject. Writers at the Mercatus Center, a free market think tank associated with
George Mason University, have taken it up. Senior Research Fellow Adam Thierer (2014, vii)
sums up permissionless innovation as “the notion that experimentation with new technologies
and business models should generally be permitted by default. Unless a compelling case can be
made that a new invention will bring serious harm to society, innovation should be allowed to
continue unabated and problems, if they develop at all, can be addressed later.” Echoing Cerf,
Thierer argues that such a light regulatory hand ought to be applied lest Western societies risk
undermining their long-term economic growth and increasing standard of living vis-à-vis
consumption. The mentality of permissionless innovation, moreover, puts almost unerring faith
in the ability of those potentially affected by innovations to eventually, and ostensibly without
unreasonable harm, adapt to them.
Permissionless innovation’s importance lies in its normative dimension, as a discourse
justifying the detachment of technological innovation from political oversight and control. It
differs from technological determinism in that it is guided not so much by a valuation of
efficiency (see Smith and Marx 1994) but by the fetishization of human technical creativeness and
an unwavering faith in “disruptive” technologies to bring about progress. As Thierer (2014, 3)
extols, “permissionless innovation is about the creativity of the human mind to run wild in its
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Similar to technological determinism, permissionless innovation holds little water as nomological theory.
One wonders whether or not an environment of permissionless innovation has ever actually existed. Even
the ostensibly permissionless Internet is the byproduct of government subsidized research and
infrastructure as well as beholden to innumerable regulations and standards (see Mueller 2010; Yglesias
2012). It also overlooks the multitude of social barriers to more desirable innovations that may only be
lessened through governmental action. For instance, absent public intervention, the sociotechnical
momentum of “brown chemistry” will likely continue to stymie the development of more environmentally
desirable greener alternatives (Woodhouse 2006). Its depiction of innovators as having their hands tied by
restrictive regulations obscures the fact that regulatory oversight has largely been weakened in the last few
decades by advocates of neoliberalization. Finally, the proposed reasonableness of adaptation as a strategy,
of course, is rooted in a questionable understanding of technological change. Thierer and Hagemann (2014,
51), for instance, imagine a rosy future for those potentially put out of work by the mass deployment of
driverless vehicles, which is rooted in a mythical history of automation: “After all, industries in which
individuals have previously been displaced as a result of automation are examples of less-skilled jobs being
replaced by more technically skilled and economically advantageous positions.” Automation, at least in the
United States, has been associated with job polarization or a hollowing out of the middle of the job market
with respect to wages and skill-level (Acemoglu and Autor 2011; Autor 2011). Only some of those
automated out of a job become engineers and programmers; many sweep floors or remain chronically
unemployed.
5
Permissionless innovation appears to be an outgrowth of what Barbrook and Cameron (1996) called the
“Californian Ideology,” the mixture of techno-triumphalism and economic libertarianism found in
magazines like Wired and the writings of tech-gurus like Kevin Kelly.
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inherent curiosity and inventiveness.” Such unencumbered inventiveness is viewed as necessary
to enable new technologies to “usher in amazing, life-enriching changes” (7).
Permissionless innovation can be described as a governing mentality that threatens to
mobilize bias for the benefit of a select population of consumers, innovators, and large tech-firms.
Because it is undergirded by an assumption that the benefits of innovation are (near) universally
distributed and that the harms are relatively insignificant, this bias is hidden from view.
Permissionless innovation is also rooted in a fairly optimistic view of technological change and
risk. Consider Thierer’s (2014, 2) assertion that “more often than not, humans adapt to new
technologies and find creative ways to assimilate even the most disruptive innovations into their
lives.” Those put out of work or into menial jobs through automation and new “sharing
economy” apps like Uber or Airbnb, workers in developing nations who sift through toxic ewaste, and others harmed from such “progress,” however, are unlikely to describe themselves as
creatively adapting; they might even say that they are struggling to make a living. The “we”
benefiting from the “life-enriching changes” alluded to by advocates of permissionless
innovation seem to be not everyone but rather a more select group: affluent consumers and
owners of tech-firms.
Innovators, for their part, are assigned the right to innovate with abandon, except in
cases where a “compelling” argument for harm can be made. At the same time, the discourse of
permissionless innovation presents technologists as hamstrung by unnecessarily precautious
rules and regulations and, hence, in need of liberation if they are to invent wondrous new
technologies. New innovations, so citizens are told, are poised to “disrupt” apparently stale
markets, such as transportation and hospitality, and even governmental services like education.
However, in contrast to Thierer’s (2014) depiction, regulations exist in these areas not simply for
reasons of risk-aversion but because they represent the interests of those potentially harmed. For
example, critics note that the disruption of hotel taxes by informal room renting services like
Airbnb undermines the funding for the code inspections needed to insure that tourists are not
exposed to health risks (Gallun and Marotti 2015). “Ridesharing” apps like Uber and Lyft attempt
to disrupt not only corrupt private taxis services but also cooperatively run taxi services like
Alexandria Union Cab , both of which afford workers more stable livelihoods and surer access to
benefits than either of the two apps (Rogers 2015; Liss 2015). Regulations serving to benefit these
populations, however, are often barriers to tech firms’ profit maximization. The rhetoric of
permissionless innovation shifts attention away from the democratic decision-making rights of
stakeholders who are potentially affected negatively by technological innovation and toward the
liberties of innovators, corporations, and affluent customers.
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The disruptive innovation literature, of course, is fairly broad (see Yu and Hang 2010). My focus is not on it
as a market strategy for firms per se but rather the public discourse of disruption as a justification for
eliminating precautionary regulations.
Alexandria Union Cab is a cooperatively owned taxi service of around 225 drivers. Employee owners not
only earn a better living by enjoying lower “stand dues” but also have a say in running the organization (see
Liss 2015).
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Similar to technological determinism, the governing mentality of permissionless
innovation risks mobilizing bias in policy toward non-intervention and adaptation. Any
implementation of conscious democratic steering would, of course, entail some degree of
precautionary regulation and, hence, that someone’s “permission” be sought prior to the
deployment of new innovations. Hence, through the disavowal of “permission,” permissionless
innovation is likely to serve as a technocracy legitimating discourse. However, it justifies
technocracy differently than technological determinism. Although it ultimately relies on a
teleological and optimistic reading of technological change, the presentation of technology as
unfolding according to an easily recognizable, internal, and mechanistic logic is eschewed. The
core idea behind disruption, in contrast to technological determinism, is indeterminacy. In contrast to the
typical mobilization of indeterminacy within STS, which highlights risk and the need to proceed
prudently (see Woodhouse 1992; Woodhouse 2013), the foregrounding of indeterminacy within
permissionless innovation discourse places the emphasis on the possibility—the contingency—of
new technological wonders. Yet it is presumed that, even though new innovations’ broader
effects are uncertain, their consequences will inevitably be more positive than negative.
Privileging the potential for benefit over the risk of harm threatens to derail more
precautionary and democratic approaches. Indeed, permissionless innovation frames the shift in
the burden of proof from those potentially harmed to innovators entailed by the precautionary
principle as a “trial without error” approach to emerging technologies (Thierer 2014, 17; Thierer
and Hagemann 2014). That is, permissionless innovation discourse depicts advocates of
precaution as demanding that no new technology be deployed at any scale unless it is absolutely
proven that no risk of harm exists. The risk-aversion of precautionary approaches is painted as a
kind of pathological technophobia, threatening to stifle the development and deployment of
supposedly universally beneficial and growth enhancing innovations.
The depiction of precaution within permissionless innovation is rooted in a weak
understanding of the literature on technological risk. While invoking Aaron Wildavsky’s (2000)
criticism of strictly precautionary approaches as sometimes coming close to demanding “trials
without error,” those championing permissionless innovation forget that Wildavsky argued not
for the absence of intervention but rather incrementalist trial and error learning: ensuring that the
potential errors from new technologies are as small and few enough in number as possible so that
citizens would have the capacity to learn from them and, at the same time, making reasonable
efforts to avoid foreseeable harms (also see Morone and Woodhouse 1986). Moreover, such a
depiction denies the considerable debate regarding when to apply the precautionary principle
and ignores that some see it not as requiring “no innovation until absolutely certainty of safety is
achieved” but merely that decision makers “not use ‘lack of full scientific certainty’ as a reason
for not taking measures to prevent…harm” (Fischer, Jones and von Schomberg 2006, 2; also see
Taleb et al. 2014). While there is extensive debate about the meaning and application of the
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Permissionless innovation legitimates and justifies what Winner (1977) called “reverse adaptation”: the
tendency for societies to adjust their practices and expectations to match what new technologies have to
offer rather than demand that technologies be designed to suit their values.
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precautionary principle, advocates of permissionless innovation take an extreme, if not
strawperson, version of the precautionary principle as their target.
This line of thinking, even if rooted in an unfair understanding of precaution and the
literature on risky technologies, could nevertheless be effective in framing those wishing to lessen
technological risks as narrow-minded technophobes imposing a “stasis mentality” (Thierer 2014,
13) on the rest of humanity. Those who accept and internalize permissionless innovation
discourse are likely to believe that the only opportunity for experimenting with and genuinely
learning how to realize the best from technologies lies in giving innovators a free hand.
Precautions pursued in fear of the worst-case scenario will be perceived as inevitably stifling
possibilities for realizing the best-case scenarios. Hence, precautionary measures become framed
as a threat to progress writ large. Realizing the benefits of new technological wonders is viewed
as assured only through protecting the liberties of innovators at the cost of forms of risk
mitigation typically assured through democratic process.
Permissionless innovation threatens to mobilize bias within technological regulation to
the advantage of a small number of socioeconomic elites: Silicon Valley innovators, tech-firms,
and affluent consumers. A technological regime organized around its principles would amount
to “innovation without representation” for ordinary citizens. Even though numerous groups
apart from consumers, innovators, and corporate shareholders might shoulder the burden of the
externalities produced through disruptive innovation, permissionless innovation denies such
groups their main avenue to shape technological decision making: political action and regulation.
Permissionless innovation assumes a false binary between technological stasis and adaptation to
the changes wrought through minimally regulated disruptive innovation. As a result,
permissionless innovation discourse makes the more proactive and democratic steering of
technological development seem stodgy and technophobic, painting precautionary efforts as
barriers standing between the present and future technological wonders. Hence, similar to
technological determinism, it makes greater democratic control of technology appear to be a
fool’s errand. Insofar as its underlying assumptions, ideas, and beliefs are widespread and
entrenched, citizens and policy makers will be disposed toward non-decision-making regarding
technological risks and adaptation to technological change. Hence, permissionless innovation is
well positioned to become a psychocultural barrier to the democratic control of technology
The beliefs and assumptions characterizing permissionless innovation are not yet as
widespread and entrenched as those of technological determinism. Indeed, the term is primarily
mobilized by a small but influential group producing texts for techno-libertarian blogs and for
think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Mercatus Center. Yet there are signs that it is becoming
more prominent in the thinking of important decision makers and in public discourse. For
example, Tom Wheeler (2015), chairman of the United States Federal Communications
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Given the recognition that technologies can be as influential in shaping people’s lives as political
legislation, a commitment to democracy, a system in which the polity participates in deciding the structures
that shape their lives, requires extending democratic representation to technological innovation (see
Goldman 1992; Sclove 1995; Winner 2012)
See The Technology Liberation Front: http://techliberation.com/.
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Commission, recently invoked the phrase when proposing new net neutrality regulations: “My
proposal assures…the rights of innovators to introduce new products without asking anyone’s
permission.” Others, moreover, have embraced the term in arguing for disruption-enhancing
(de)regulation regarding medical technology and aerial drones (Carr 2014; De Rugy 2014).
Therefore, there is good reason to be concerned that permissionless innovation could end up as
influential for shaping policy regimes and public inaction as technological determinism. Given
that very real possibility, how might permissionless innovation be opposed and how could STS
aid the opposition?
What Is to Be Done? Intervening into Citizens’ Thinking on Technology
As Williams (2002) has noted, “even if the theory of technological determinism can be refuted,
the experience of technological inevitability is convincing” (p. 118). If my above characterization
of technological determinism and permissionless innovation as psychocultural barriers is
appropriate, STS should further explore how technocratic governing mentalities are sustained. It
is not enough to simply recognize the seeming unshakeability of the experience of technological
inevitability. STS scholars and activists must find ways to understand and intervene in those
experiences. Doing so entails drawing upon and extending several research lines regarding belief
formation, misinformation, and system-justifying ideologies. Technology studies scholars,
moreover, could work with psychologists to explore how different techno-material experiences
help construct people’s beliefs about the nature of sociotechnical reality, especially those that
scaffold techno-libertarianism.
Technological change might seem inevitable and certain technologies perceived as
“obligatory” or unavoidable for a range of reasons (see Chandler 2012). As anyone who has
introduced STS to undergraduates will know, technology often seems autonomous to people
because they too easily or strategically forget the social factors shaping innovation. Such
forgetting may be driven by the taking of an overly abstract perspective; grasping the complex
sociotechnical interactions and micropolitics shaping technological change is more cognitively
challenging than embracing simple linear models of technological advancement. Individuals,
moreover, might perceive technologies to be obligatory in response to the feeling that they are
competing with others (also see Dafoe 2015). Material dependencies created by the obduracy of
large sociotechnical systems can lead people to feel unable to do without or alter status quo
technologies, a feeling no doubt exacerbated by ideas about progress, moral beliefs, and the
normalization of what was previously considered fairly radical. Given the vastness and
momentum of large sociotechnical systems and the continual pressure many members of
technological societies face to adapt to a continually changing technological landscape, it is no
wonder that individuals might come to feel powerless and embrace a belief in technological
determinism. The foundations for the beliefs undergirding permissionless innovation are no
doubt found in the various progress myths championing modern technology as unambiguously
beneficial and linear versions of history imparted on citizens by mass media and during their
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years in school. If permission was rarely sought for previous technologies and everything has
worked out for the best why would permission be necessary for future innovations?
Certain factors are probably more salient than others in explaining the perceived
obligatoriness or inevitability of specific technologies. For instance, a felt sense of competition
might explain the degree to which students (and their parents) believe that they need Adderall
and other drugs meant to treat attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. Pill popping, in turn,
becomes normalized and/or justified by the dominance of neoliberal moralities that uphold
individual career success as summum bonum and individuals as responsible for that success
(Esposito and Perez 2014). Embracing cognitive-enhancing pharmaceutical technologies seems
obligatory in an educational culture emphasizing cut-throat levels of grade competition wherein
citizens’ psychological sense of self is also rooted in the moral responsibilization of individuals.
Insofar as these cultural and technical systems have gained substantial momentum, individual
members of technological societies are likely to feel powerless to do anything but adapt to them.
In contrast, the “need” for an automobile has as much to do with the practical and
material barriers to alternative forms of transportation created by contemporary urban form to
other modes of transportation (Kirkman 2009) as “car culture” based progress myths. That is, to
the extent that people have internalized suburban ideals of the good life, beliefs in motorized
transportation as inherent to “modern” living, as well as racial and class based fears in
association with urbanity, the possibility of intentionally steering toward societies without
automobiles becomes nearly unimaginable. If anything, in this context, the view that innovators
should be given a free hand to develop driverless cars and ridesharing systems that disrupt
public transportation and cab services becomes increasingly attractive. Such technologies offer a
psychically alluring promise of sustaining the autocentric good life.
Upon close examination of many of these factors, one quickly recognizes that advocates
for more democratic and consciously steered technological societies are likely to find themselves
in a Catch-22. Addressing some factors, such as dependency and competition, requires making
structural and material changes that are only likely be effectively pursued if and when citizens
and policy makers believe that technology is or ought to be under human control. Yet the
experience of dependency and competition pressures, as well as the complexity and difficulty of
steering sociotechnical systems, can undermine the belief that control of technology is possible.
For instance, substantially lessening the obligatoriness of the automobile within the American
urban landscape in the foreseeable future would require a much more deliberate and coordinated
steering of building codes, highway and road design, and transportation planning than exists at
present. However, various social, cultural, and political barriers stifle even fairly insignificant
deviations from established urban form (see Hommels 2005; Dotson Forthcoming). Proposals to
alter status quo urban form butt up against entrenched visions of how buildings ought to mesh
with public space, already established professional practices, and opposition by social groups
with incongruent interests. Such obstacles can render proposals for even fairly insubstantial
changes all but infeasible. People can hardly be expected to hope for the democratic steering of
technology more broadly when obduracy or obligatoriness characterizes even fairly non-radical
attempts to alter status quo technologies. The challenge for STS scholars, therefore, is to inquire
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into how beliefs in technological determinism can be effectively challenged prior to, or perhaps
alongside, large-scale structural changes. Might there be an experiential threshold for believing in
the feasibility of technological governance? Discovering such a threshold is likely to be the most
fruitful short-term avenue of inquiry regarding altering the beliefs of lay technological
determinists. Indeed, psychologists have found that established misinformation, such as the
belief that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, is rarely eliminated by simply providing believers
with more accurate information (Lewandowsky et al. 2012). This literature suggests that framing
interventions as a correction of misinformation, or providing an alternative story that is too
complex, can actually further entrench ill-founded beliefs—a so-called “boomerang effect” (Byrne
and Hart 2009). Similar dynamics would stymie “fact-based” attempts to sway ardent
technological determinists. Hence, it seems improbable that the better public communication of
STS findings alone would unseat technological determinism, though it might be better than
nothing. The literature suggests that the most effective approaches are characterized by repeating
coherent and parsimonious messages (see Lewandowsky et al. 2012, 122). How might citizens be
more often subjected to the kinds of experiences that set the stage for challenging their beliefs in
technological determinism? Researchers could look to social groups, such as the Amish, who do
not regard technological change as an unstoppable juggernaut but instead as under human
control (see Wetmore 2007). Ensuring that citizens gain experience with institutional or
community-scale implementations of technology assessment might make large-scale
technological governance seem more feasible. Indeed, doing so would be analogous to the
decentralization of forest governance to Indian villages that led residents to increasingly
incorporate the valuation of environmental protection into their identities as political subjects
(Agrawal 2005). Finding ways to implement small-scale and decentralized forms of technology
assessment could help citizens begin to see technological governance as part of their identity as
political subjects. At the same time, even small-scale applications of technology assessment might
face the same Catch-22 as the broader democratization of technology. Buy-in into the process will
remain challenging when technological determinism remains widely accepted. Therefore, it
seems that some research attention needs to be focused on how evoke a sense of feasibility as an
exercise to help prime technology assessment participants to see the process as worthwhile.
One possibility for closing the experiential gap concerning the perceived feasibility of
technological governance would be to utilize stories that draw readers into “experience-taking.”
Indeed, psychological studies have found that having participants read a story about someone’s
experience voting can promote actual voting behavior; similarly, having them read a first-person
narrative depicting the everyday life of a protagonist who only reveals themselves to be part of a
minority group (African-American or homosexual) late in the story encouraged more positive
and less stereotypical perceptions of that group and the character’s behavior (Kaufman and Libby
2012). Could well-designed narratives draw citizens into experience-taking for characters
involved in the social and political steering of technology? Experiments with such narratives
12
There may be realizable synergies between such efforts and the speculative design movement (see Dunne
and Raby 2013). The latter advocate the creation of media experiences and physical objects that spur users to
more frequently re-imagine the status quo and dream of (sometimes impossible) futures.
12
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would probably begin by developing historical, fictional, and/or quasi-autobiographical
accounts of technological change that are not merely free of unnecessary academic jargon but
readable and engaging for citizens without several years of university reading under their belts.
One starting point would be to depict technological innovation in a manner completely opposite
to dominant contemporary accounts: Rather than center around the lone maverick or eccentric
genius, they would highlight social negotiation, the challenges of sociotechnical obduracy, and
the workings of power.
The above strategies would likely be most effective in combating technological
determinism. What about challenging or undermining the teleological beliefs and free market
ideologies that form the foundation of permissionless innovation? Ideology has long been
recognized to be a powerful force in shaping people’s willingness to accept or question different
sets of facts. When presented with information dissonant with their political worldviews, people
tend to engage in highly skeptical “motivated reasoning” in order to remove the dissonance
through the rejection of the information rather than their worldview (see Nisbet, Cooper and
Garrett 2015). Belief in the unwavering goodness of laissez-faire free-market economies, for
instance, is highly predictive of skepticism about the reality of anthropogenic climate change
(Lewandowsky, Oberauer and Gignac 2013). Challenges to audiences’ worldview and identity,
moreover, render attempts to correct misinformation ineffective (Lewandowsky et al. 2012).
Indeed, studies where climate skeptics were provided with challenging information or
participated in deliberative forums found them to be generally unmoved afterwards, if not even
more entrenched in their skepticism (Hobson and Niemeyer 2013). Therefore, insofar as actors’
beliefs in the desirability of permissionless innovation or the autonomy of technology are deeply
integrated with their identities and worldviews, simply communicating STS research
problematizing the relationship between innovation and social progress or participating in
technology-assessment-style deliberation may be unlikely to unseat technocratic governing
mentalities among the more entrenched.
Hence, the challenge for advocates of technological democracy is to undermine
technocratic beliefs without appearing to excessively threaten important aspects of the intended
audience’s worldview and identity. Those opposed to the sociopolitical changes needed to
mitigate or avert the predicted harms of advancing climate change or other “no-growth”
proposals, for instance, do so partly in response to the fact that such changes are rarely presented
as aligning with their valuation of individualism and/or free enterprise (Campbell and Kay
2014). Some have suggested utilizing “broker” frames in order to steer around such hurdles
(Hoffman 2011). Depicting meeting the challenges faced by global climate change as compatible,
if not reliant, on individual entrepreneurialism is but one example. Others have found that
describing environmental harm in terms of purity, a moral frame typically more salient to
conservatives, rather than in terms of harm and care, tends to be helpful in reducing the gap
between liberals and conservatives regarding environmental issues (Feinberg and Willer 2013).
Some, of course, might demur regarding such strategies. Are they not manipulative? I
think that objecting to these strategies on such grounds is misguided for a number of reasons.
First, it seems to presume that a non-manipulative framing of controversial issues exists. For
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instance, it implies that individual entrepreneurialism is naturally at odds with admitting the
existence of global climate change. Otherwise, it would not be manipulative to frame facing up to
the challenges of climate change in such terms; one would simply be better informing them.
However, most STS scholars will probably agree that there is no neutral or natural framing of
reality, only competing partisan perspectives. Second, it signals a failure to adequately grasp
one’s political opposition. As George Lakoff (2002; 2008) well articulates, non-progressive
political actors are already mobilizing what might be termed “manipulative” framings and
metaphors in order to sway the minds of American citizens—and frequently successfully at that.
The tendency of many progressives to want to keep their hands “clean” and only “give people
the facts” simply renders them less politically effective than their opponents. Finally, as a
democratic partisan, I maintain that taking advantage of such “manipulative approaches” is
justifiable if it can aid the democratization of technological innovation.
How might climate change framing strategies be extended to promote the acceptance of
technological steering? Potentially effective “broker” frames would leverage liberty or rightsoriented rhetoric rather than only talk about equality or harm and would be careful not to frame
interventions too exclusively in terms of one vision of the good life. That is, movements to
democratize technology would, at least in its early stages, lessen their emphasis on anticonsumerism and think strategically about which audiences will be swayed by social justiceoriented language. The more active steering of innovation could be framed as enhancing the
ability of citizens to more reliably receive the technologies that best suit their needs: Cars that
handle better and are easier to repair or smartphones that enhance family life rather than detract
from it. The democratization of technology can just as easily be depicted as an expansion of
individual liberty as a battle for sociopolitical equality. Of course, many advocates of more
democratic and socially-just technology might balk at sometimes framing their efforts in terms of
so-called “first world problems.” However, an insistence on an ideologically pure framing is
likely to act as a barrier to buy-in for those still steeped in status-quo worldviews.
Extra hurdles result from that fact that, like climate skepticism, technological
determinism and permissionless innovation are “system-justifying ideologies.” That is, they help
to “justify and rationalize the way things are, so that existing social, economic, and political
arrangements [are] perceived as fair and legitimate” (Jost and Hunyady 2005, 260). The strength
of such ideologies is visible in the apparent willingness of poor Americans to elect conservative
politicians promising to dismantle the very social programs they depend on. Despite the harms
produced, even to believers, part of the attraction of system-justifying ideologies stems from the
psychic benefits they provide—namely, a sense of order and lessened anxiety within what is
perceived to be an unstable and dangerous world. Hence, discursive interventions attempting to
motivate people to recognize the uncertainties and complexities of sociotechnical reality and
technological change could be rejected simply because they can evoke an uncomfortable sense of
disorder.
Given this, STS scholars ought to devise communicative strategies that aim to not merely
pull the rug out from under citizens in regard to their beliefs about technocratic progress, but
strive to provide equally stable-feeling counter-narratives. Mobilizing stories depicting
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technology as increasingly coming under public control of technology throughout history, even if
not totally empirically correct, could help normalize the idea of democratizing technology among
some citizens. Another possible strategy would be to attempt to evoke a greater tolerance for
uncertainty regarding technological change in members of technological societies through
alternative framings. Advocates for the democratization of innovation could learn from
experimental successes with climate change beliefs. For instance, framing pro-environmental
changes as a patriotic facing of the environmental unknown and therefore a kind of change
sanctioned by the status quo system has been found to limit the effects of system justification (see
Feygin, Jost, and Goldsmith 2010). Efforts against technological determinism and permissionless
innovation could better lessen the psychological barrier posed by system justification by framing
the application of democracy to technology as a continuous extension of similar existing cultural
systems, even if they signal a radical break with the political status quo in other ways.
A longer-term strategy would involve inquiring into the experiential or material roots of
techno-libertarian ideologies like permissionless innovation. That is, how do different
sociotechnical arrangements help support the belief that technologies are unequivocally
liberating and, hence, not in need of democratic steering? Fred Turner’s (2013) recent work on the
“democratic surround” provides a potential launching point for such work. The democratic
surround is a multi-image, multi-sound-source media environment developed in the midtwentieth century that allowed viewers to move through it at their own individual pace. The aim
of such approaches was to mold citizens’ thinking but avoid cultivating the mass-scale
personality cults and authoritarian personalities seen as infecting an increasingly fascist Europe.
A democratic surround affords viewers the freedom to move and seemingly self-curate their own
media experience, albeit within the range allotted to them by managers. For instance, in The Road
to Victory installation, viewers chose their own path through a collage of images depicting
America’s economic, technological, military, and moral achievements leading up to victory in
World War II. As Turner argues, such media approaches aimed to foment a new mass
psychology premised on a high valuation of the experience of individualized decision making
even while they subtly subjected viewers to propaganda. Designers hoped that arranging the
carefully selected message in a way that viewers had to choose how to navigate it would prevent
the development of the “mass man” personalities they associated with traditional propaganda.
Rather than evoking an “unreasoning fealty to a single source of illumination” (28), it was
believed that multi-source democratic surrounds would engender a greater sense of
individualism.
Despite the presence of the adjective “democratic,” the democratic surround remains a
form of soft social control exercised by elites—Turner only utilizes it because he hopes such
media technologies could someday be put to more substantively democratic purposes. By
providing ostensibly liberating opportunities for individual choice within a larger media
framework devoid of collective and substantially democratic decision making, participants are
likely to be drawn into believing they are in possession of a degree of informational freedom and
agency they do not actually have. By ensuring that choice remained highly salient in the
experience of the democratic surround, participants’ actual lack of informational control is
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obscured. Viewers are led to feel individually empowered even while they take in messages
designed for them by elites. A relatively inconsequential, engineered experience of liberty stands
in for the actual practice of democracy.
The democratic surround, however, is not the only technology whose design amplifies
the experience of freedom and obscures constraints. Many everyday technological experiences
lend themselves to the view that technologies are simply liberty-enhancers rather than as also
barriers to realizing alternative conceptions of the good life (Dotson 2012, 331). As Briggle and
Mitcham (2009) have put it, “the experience [of contemporary sociotechnical networks] is one of
freedom and autonomy. The reality is one of interdependence” (380). Indeed, elements of the
democratic surround appear omnipresent in affluent technological societies. Shopping in a
department store, driving one’s car on the Interstate, and surfing the Web all tend to evoke an
experience of freedom via individual choice but nevertheless within constraints largely set up by
distant managers. Consumers have little direct say in what kinds of products end up on store
shelves, car-driving is freedom-enhancing only within the narrow constraints erected by
automobility and car-culture itself, and the character of the Internet is strongly shaped by the
protocols and codes built into it by technical experts (Galloway 2006; Lessig 2006).
Insofar as major sociotechnical systems are primarily experienced by users as freedomenhancing, despite their democratic deficits, I contend that users will be less inclined to question
the libertarian mythos undergirding discourses like permissionless innovation. In much the same
way that the experience of increased individual security achieved through purchasing bottled
water or organic consumer products can dampen citizens’ motivation to pursue democratic
political action to clean up waterways or more strongly regulate the chemical industry (Szasz
2007), the feeling of technologically enabled liberty offered by “democratic surround” style
technologies seems likely to inhibit citizens’ belief in the need for democratic technological
steering. That is, if certain highly salient aspects of people’s experiences interacting with major
technological systems lead them to view them as primarily freedom enhancing, they are unlikely
to see governmental intervention into innovation as anything but a constraint on liberty. Hence,
such experiences provide a material basis for a belief in permissionless innovation and, from a
democratic standpoint, should be reformed or limited.
The claim that many prevailing technologies help to scaffold technocratic governing
mentalities like permissionless innovation appears to have at least a kernel of truth to it, given the
preponderance of libertarian thinking among technophiles. Nevertheless, research investigating
the relationship between technological experiences and the formation of ideologies standing in
the way of more democratic technological governance remains undone. Which technologies most
evoke or help sustain techno-libertarian beliefs? How could technological experiences be
redesigned to steer users toward a more substantive sense and practice of democracy?
Through this brief review, a number potentially fruitful strategies and avenues for future
inquiry have become apparent. Belief in technological determinism is not necessarily built upon
citizens’ ignorance of the sociopolitics of technological innovation, but more importantly on
social processes (e.g., competition) and sociomaterial factors (e.g., obduracy and technological
momentum). Intervening with alternative framings could help, if they are focused on establishing
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alternative views rather than critiquing technological determinism. However, given that common
interpretations of everyday life can seem to confirm the beliefs that undergird technocratic
governing mentalities, research could be dedicated to exploring possible “experiential
thresholds” for people’s beliefs in the feasibility of democratic controlled technology.
Communication research techniques could be used to investigate whether narrative “experience
taking” can provide a sufficient threshold. The fact that technocratic governing mentalities like
permissionless innovation serve as system-justifying ideologies suggests that inquiring into how
to build stable-feeling counter-narratives, or helping people cultivate a tolerance for uncertainty
and ambiguity as it relates to technology, will be very important. Finally, I have suggested that
future research ought to explore the extent to which sociotechnical systems that resemble
Turner’s (2013) “democratic surround” provide an experiential basis for permissionless
innovation as well as how systems that steer users toward the practice of and belief in
substantive forms of democracy might be designed.
Conclusion
My purpose in this paper has been to explore technological determinism and permissionless
innovation as normative phenomena, in addition to proposing how STS might go about more
effectively opposing them. According to my characterization, these ideas affect technological
societies insofar as they act as governing mentalities, shifting political discourses and helping to
mobilize an anti-democratic, non-intervention bias within the organization of governance
surrounding technological innovation. The social psychological literature suggests that scholars
and activists are unlikely to unseat technocratic governing mentalities by simply deconstructing
their underlying ideas and showing them to be simplistic or outright false. Insights from social
psychological research on the making and unmaking of beliefs suggest a number of potentially
fruitful avenues for lessening the barriers posed by technological determinism and
permissionless innovation. Moreover, I have outlined how STS scholars might add to the
psychological literature through the exploration of how techno-materiality scaffolds different
sociotechnical ideologies.
There are, of course, drivers of technological determinism and permissionless innovation
besides the psychocultural processes that I have focused on. Dafoe (2015), for instance, has
proposed military-economic competition as a micro-process helping to drive the macro-process
of technological determinism. Some readers might be tempted to dismiss my account of the
psychocultural aspects of technocratic governing mentalities in favor of economic explanations.
Yet I contend that it would be shortsighted to do so, because even the ostensibly determining
force of so-called “free markets” in part stems from the quiescence of people in the face of
economic injustice (Fraser 2015). That is, market forces can determine only insofar as actors are
disposed to allow them to do so, and much the same is true for technological innovation.
Psychological or cognitive barriers align with and reinforce cultural, economic, material, and
political ones, all of which merit more investigation.
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Gabrielle Hecht and Michael Allen (2001, 5) have noted that although “technology may
not drive history…the fact that influential people believe that it does has real consequences.”
Hecht and Allen were mainly articulating an historical observation, and my intention has been to
extend their recognition to an exploration of potential research programs focused on targeting
and partially lessening the power of such beliefs in the present. That is, I have built upon the
suggestion that STS scholars take social construction “even more seriously” (Woodhouse 2005) by
more effectively leveraging social scientific inquiry into insights into how to reconstruct the
status quo. Indeed, part of my broader aim is to help nudge STS scholarship toward research
more easily leveraged into practical political benefits. Could STS research into how historical
social groups have enrolled others or done the boundary work to exclude political enemies
provide insights for activists and academics currently battling climate change denialists or
advocates of natural gas fracking, for example?
Engaging in such inquiry styles would entail very different modes of scholarship than
undertaken by most STS researchers: scholars would not merely perform careful and considered
inquiry into the social shaping and social consequences of science and technology but would also
actively attempt to ensure that the best heuristics coming out of such inquiries become
commonsensical, at least among sizeable, vocal, and motivated populations. Disagreement about
which heuristics should be mobilized is to be expected and would be largely desirable.
Nevertheless, I imagine most readers would agree that a technological society where the
assumptions and thought patterns underlying ideas like technological determinism and
permissionless innovation were rare among citizens, if not unimaginable, would be a more
desirable place to inhabit. STS scholars should aspire to no less than helping to realize just such a
society.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank his anonymous reviewers as well as ESTS's editors for their
incisive critiques of and suggestions for previous drafts of this article.
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