1/2/23 Agamben Intervention

On the Tech Forcing Change

https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-la-tecnica-e-il-governo

A taste of the article and rest at link.

The technique and the government

Some of the sharpest minds of the twentieth century agreed in identifying the political challenge of our time with the ability to govern technological development. «The decisive question», it has been written, «is today how a political system, whatever it may be, can be adapted to the age of technology. I don't know the answer to this problem. I'm not convinced it's democracy." Others compared the control of technology to the feat of a new Hercules: «those who manage to submit the technique that has escaped all control and to insert it in a concrete order will have responded to the problems of the present much more than those who with the means of technology seek to land on the moon or Mars."
The fact is that the powers that appear to guide and use technological development for their ends are actually more or less unconsciously guided by it. Both the more totalitarian regimes, such as fascism and Bolshevism, and the so-called democratic ones share this inability to govern technology to such an extent that they end up transforming themselves almost inadvertently in the direction required by the very technologies they thought they were using for their own purposes. A scientist who gave a new formulation to the theory of evolution, Lodewijk Bolk, thus saw in the hypertrophy of technological development a mortal danger for the survival of the human species. The growing development of both scientific and social technologies produces, in fact, a real inhibition of vitality, for which «the more humanity advances on the path of technology, the nearer it gets to that fatal point where progress will mean destruction. And it is certainly not in man's nature to stop at this». An instructive example is provided by weapons technology, which has produced devices whose use implies the destruction of life on earth – therefore also of those who possess them and who, as we see today, nonetheless continue to threaten to use them.

It is possible, then, that the incapacity to govern technology is inscribed in the very concept of «government», i.e. in the idea that politics is in its very nature cybernetic, i.e. the art of «governing» ( kybernesis in Greek the pilot of the ship) the life of human beings and their possessions. Technique cannot be governed because it is the very form of governmentality. What has traditionally been interpreted – from scholasticism to Spengler – as the essentially instrumental nature of technology betrays the inherent nature of an instrumentality in our conception of politics