He’s right and wrong, at the same time.
Ian Bogost starts with today’s badly-working sensor-driven toilet as an icon for technology’s displacement of more servile, and less autonomous gizmos, and he spins a condemnation of our society from that starting point.
Ian Bogost, Why Nothing Works Anymore
So many ordinary objects and experiences have become technologized—made dependent on computers, sensors, and other apparatuses meant to improve them—that they have also ceased to work in their usual manner. It’s common to think of such defects as matters of bad design. That’s true, in part. But technology is also more precarious than it once was. Unstable, and unpredictable. At least from the perspective of human users. From the vantage point of technology, if it can be said to have a vantage point, it’s evolving separately from human use.
This is just the point of departure. Bogost weaves in the postnormal disconnect for working people’s disenfranchisement as a second element of the disassociation of people by technology. Bogost goes on:
“Precarity” has become a popular way to refer to economic and labor conditions that force people—and particularly low-income service workers—into uncertainty. Temporary labor and flexwork offer examples. That includes hourly service work in which schedules are adjusted ad-hoc and just-in-time, so that workers don’t know when or how often they might be working. For low-wage food service and retail workers, for instance, that uncertainty makes budgeting and time-management difficult. Arranging for transit and childcare is difficult, and even more costly, for people who don’t know when—or if—they’ll be working.
Such conditions are not new. As union-supported blue-collar labor declined in the 20th century, the service economy took over its mantle absent its benefits. But the information economy further accelerated precarity. For one part, it consolidated existing businesses and made efficiency its primary concern. For another, economic downturns like the 2008 global recession facilitated austerity measures both deliberate and accidental. Immaterial labor also rose—everything from the unpaid, unseen work of women in and out of the workplace, to creative work done on-spec or for exposure, to the invisible work everyone does to construct the data infrastructure that technology companies like Google and Facebook sell to advertisers.
But as it has expanded, economic precarity has birthed other forms of instability and unpredictability—among them the dubious utility of ordinary objects and equipment.
He tries to make the connection between the oddball oversensitivity of automatic toilets – that flush unnessarily, wasting water – and the end goal of corporations that deploy these toilets, which is to have fewer employees cleaning the bathrooms. But, he really is arguing that these highly technological gizmos – the self-flushing toilet, Amazon’s online store experience, the vagaries of what shows are available today on Disney, search results on Google – the uncertain nature of how they work becomes internalized:
But why would new technology reduce rather than increase the feeling of precarity? The more technology multiplies, the more it amplifies instability. Things already don’t quite do what they claim. The fixes just make things worse. And so, ordinary devices aren’t likely to feel more workable and functional as technology marches forward. If anything, they are likely to become even less so.
Technology is not an agent, acting like a colony of ants or a class of capitalists.
This is the center of Bogost’s fearful insight: the more technology multiplies, the more it amplifies instability. But his scifi leanings – where he ends up wondering if technology is acting for its own end, evolving independently of us – slides off the rails:
Things already don’t quite do what they claim. The fixes just make things worse. And so, ordinary devices aren’t likely to feel more workable and functional as technology marches forward. If anything, they are likely to become even less so.
Technology’s role has begun to shift, from serving human users to pushing them out of the way so that the technologized world can service its own ends. And so, with increasing frequency, technology will exist not to serve human goals, but to facilitate its own expansion.
I think Bogost starts strong and ends weak in this piece. Technology is not an agent, acting like a colony of ants or a class of capitalists. I think he veers away from pointing a finger at the real culprits behind the dehumanization of technology. He fails to ask the question ‘who benefits?’
The same people who gain and consolidate power through the growing precarity of workers – the 1% and the deep government that serves them – are also served by technology ephemeralizing all work, just like they’ve benefitted from all other workforce reductions, and the zeroing out of the power of counterinstitutions like the unions, and civil and social activism.
Ian Bogost on Why Nothing Works Anymore
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