The Fullness of Knowing: Modernity and Postmodernity from Defoe to Gadamer

3. Jonathan Swift’s Information Machine and the Critique of Technology

67 JONATHAN SWIFT’S INFORMATION MACHINE AND THE CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGY 3 When the Internet first became popular, I started having a recurring nightmare that we would someday arrive at the point where all knowledge was instantly accessible, but no one would know what it meant. A few years into the Internet revolution , Google adopted the first part of this dream in its stated mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”1 The unstated premise of much information technology, epitomized in Google’s mission, is that society will be better off when we can download all imaginable information to our individual computers. The assumption is that the knowledge of the world should be quite literally at our fingertips. Not everyone is convinced of the social or personal desirability of this promise. Many prominent critics of technology today share some version of my nightmare. In one form or another, the more optimistic of these critics argue that knowledge only becomes wisdom when its users pursue some humane purpose for that knowledge. They insist that increased knowledge must increase its user’s connection with the human or natural worlds. More pessimistic cybercritics doubt that any such connections can be reestablished at this late date. Nearly three hundred years ago, Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) observed a similar explosion in knowledge and its accessibility Q 68 The Fullness of Knowing Q early in the Enlightenment. He urges his readers to question the promises of ever-increasing knowledge and ever-faster data retrieval. His satire on the technology of his own day, notably in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), embraces both optimistic and pessimistic elements, similar to critiques of technology today. From Swift to our own day, these writers warn that treating knowledge as a commodity will result in dehumanization. In this chapter, the connection between the eighteenth-century figure and more recent commentators is more complex than in the previous ones. Wendell Berry, whose critiques most resemble Swift’s, is hardly a postmodern figure. The leading postmodern writers that I will treat, François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida, come at the challenges of technology in strikingly different ways. In addition, this chapter will depart from the rest of the book’s typical organization by incorporating recent critiques throughout its treatment of the topic, rather than leaving them largely to the last section. Enlightenment Technology, Enlightenment Optimism, and Jonathan Swift’s Satirical Response Spurred by the undeniable advances of science, large numbers of Enlightenment writers began to consider the consequences of rapidly expanding knowledge. For the most part, they foresaw only benefits—material, political, and even moral—from this increase. Knowledge, accumulated by methods that could be imitated by any properly trained mind, would be widely available and were imagined to be completely beneficial. The Marquis de Condorcet, a lumière of the late eighteenth century, can barely contain his optimism for the progress of learning: [A]s the number of known facts increases, the human mind learns how to classify them and to subsume them under more general facts, and at the same time, the instruments and methods employed in their observation and their exact measurement acquire a new precision. . . . [S]o truths that were discovered only by great effort, that could at first only be understood by men capable of profound thought, are soon developed and proved by methods that are not beyond the reach of common intelligence.2 Condorcet’s optimism begins from “a hope that is almost a certainty . . . of the absolute perfection of the human race.” This hope, Q Jonathan Swift’s Information Machine 69 coupled with his observation of the Enlightenment’s intellectual and material progress, leads him to predict vastly more abundant food, cheaper manufactured goods, improved working conditions , the elimination of disease (and possibly death), the gradual disappearance of prejudice, and the perfection of laws and public institutions—all as the result of education. Many of Condorcet’s material predictions have come true over the last two centuries. At the same time, however, the Enlightenment faith in human perfectibility , based on the expansion of knowledge, has been largely destroyed. Enlightened intellectuals have often been complicit in political tyranny, from the French Revolution through MarxistLeninist movements, and modern science has produced weapons capable of the complete destruction of humanity.3 Condorcet himself completed his work in hiding from the Reign of Terror. He escaped the guillotine only because he died...