Historiographical observations about resistance to technology

Emphasizing resistance to new technologies, as this conference at the Science Museum has, highlights technological creativity, the process of defining a goal and then trying to achieve it. For some centuries now such projects have fascinated, even mesmerized, Western storytellers and social theorists alike. And it is a great story: that a person, or team, or institution would cast an imaginative eye out onto the broad field of the existing order and conceive a plan to insert something new into that field, that such an agent would have the intelligence and power to gather resources and shape them according to the imagined plan so that, one day, the agent could take a deep breath and exult, ‘It works!’

It is a powerful idea to be sure, and legitimately so. Technological creativity has been central to most of the creative work in the history of technology for decades. It is over-simple but still helpful to distinguish historians of technology as tending toward one or the other of two paradigmatic descriptions of technology. Traditionally, technology has been understood in terms of rational achievement. Recently, however, other scholars have begun to describe technology in terms of conflict, as an arena wherein one group wins by succeeding in designing a technology representing its values and vested interests, while other groups lose that same struggle. Those who see technology as primarily rational see the unknown and the uncertain as the main form of resistance.

Introduction

Alain Touraine (Chapter 2) situates the history of social resistance to new technologies in the ‘ambiguous project of modernity, and in the long history of ideas associated with democratic control of instruments of power’. In this context, the nuclear history of Australia presents both a paradox and a possibility. Today, Australia has no civil nuclear power and no nuclear weapons. Its government participates actively in the programme of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has protested against French tests in the South Pacific, and is a keen advocate of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Yet, the last 40 years have seen a long history of nuclear optimism and opportunism, played out among conflicting political and economic interests, domestic and overseas. Has, then, ‘resistance’ to nuclear technology been successful? If so, what has made it so?

To answer this question requires a grasp of the salient features of Australia's affair with the atom. That relationship, which once embraced nuclear energy as a quintessential element in Australia's post-war development, also embraced characteristic features of resistance, operating upon a landscape well known for its contours of intellectual conservatism and radical dissent. Australia's nuclear destiny has depended, in part, upon the prospect of achieving economic nuclear power for domestic use, and advantageous terms for the sale of uranium in overseas markets. But its nuclear history has also come to reflect changing perceptions of the role that Australians wish to see their country play in the nuclear arena.

Regulators' attempts to balance conflicting interests and to convert the public's and politicians' feelings about technology into coherent action have fascinated students of industrial policy (Rothwell & Zegveld 1981; Grant 1989). By contrast historians, though in principle sharing such interests, have tended to treat regulators either as external brakes or as lubricants in processes controlled more directly by market forces and technological logic. Thus historians' interest in the chemical industry which gave rise to studies of companies and processes has not engendered a corresponding corpus of works on such regulatory bodies as the FDA or Britain's Alkali Inspectorate (see the still unmatched study of DuPont: Hounshell & Smith 1988). Now, however, with a new interest in technological systems, we are acquiring a few historical case-studies from modern industrial society in which regulators have themselves been considered central parts of the process, acting, so to speak, as components of the engine itself.

In particular, historians are now investigating policies which, since the 1930s, and latterly during the Cold War, encouraged the development of such state sponsored technologies as synthetic rubber, computing and semiconductors used by the space and military industries. The support of such academic categories as scientific instruments and cancer research is also being elucidated. Rarely, nonetheless, is regulation yet seen as a whole: promoters of new technology have still been conceptually divorced from those responsible for its constraint and from those responsible for the protection of the public and of workers.

Introduction

As pointed out in other chapters in this volume, resistance to new technologies can take several forms. A prerequisite for most of these forms is a negative attitude towards the technology. Therefore, to predict public resistance to new technologies, it is crucial to know people's attitudes (e.g. Williams & Mills 1986; Eurobarometer 1989; Daamen, van der Lans & Midden 1990; Miller 1991). Surveys are important instruments for assessing public attitudes to new technologies. Unfortunately, responses to specific items may be changed dramatically by the characteristics of the questionnaire. For instance, it has been demonstrated in numerous studies that answers to a survey item may either assimilate towards or contrast away from (the central tendency in) responses to preceding items (for reviews see Schuman & Presser 1981; Hippler & Schwarz 1987; Tourangeau & Rasinski 1988). The topic of this chapter is assimilation effects in surveys on technology perceptions.

An early example of an assimilation effect in a survey comes from Salancik & Conway (1975). They demonstrated that attitudes towards being religious were affected by responses to earlier questions about religious behaviour: Subjects in two conditions had to indicate whether statements of pro- and anti-religious behaviours applied to them (e.g. ‘I attend a church or synagogue’; ‘I use the expression “Jesus Christ”’). In one condition, Salancik and Conway inserted ‘on occasion’ in the pro-religious behaviour statements and ‘frequently’ in the antireligious statements.

Introduction

Nuclear energy's initial associations with weapons, war and death were balanced and eventually overcome by politicians and scientists promising ‘Atoms for Peace’. That was the slogan to promote the civilian use of nuclear power in 1953. Now associated with a positive and bright future, nuclear power promised virtually infinite energy; according to Lewis Strauss, president of the US Atomic Energy Commission in 1954, nuclear power would be ‘too cheap to meter’ (Ford 1982, p. 50). Today, as we know, this bright vision has dimmed. Nuclear power is now associated with rising costs, problems of waste disposal, accidents, and fierce citizen opposition. Probably for the first time, a major online technology has been successfully challenged through a long and intense struggle including millions of citizens. The impacts of these struggles have been multi-faceted. The immediate substantial policy outcomes vary from country to country. In some places, despite promoters' efforts, nuclear power programmes were never realized. In others, programmes were realized only in part. In still others, nuclear power programmes were implemented in the face of significant opposition. Overall, however, the tide in the last two decades has turned and nuclear power has been discredited. Even in such countries as France and Belgium where nuclear power produces the lion's share of electricity supply, it is perceived as a necessary evil to be tolerated, at least for a few decades, because of huge capital investments.

This book combines contributions from a conference on ‘Resistance to New Technology – Past and Present’, held at the Science Museum, London, on 5–7 April 1993. The event brought together historians, sociologists, political scientists, media researchers and psychologists to reflect on the problem of ‘resistance’ in relation to technological developments. Around 150 people from twenty countries gathered in the unusual setting of steam engines, automobiles and space rockets provided by the Science Museum.

The aims of the meeting were (a) to take stock of the forms and effects of resistance in the recent past; (b) to compare different technologies in this context; and (c) to think about, and work towards, a functional analysis of resistance in the process of technological development. The meeting provided material to overcome the technocratic bias according to which resistance is nothing but a nuisance in the technological process.

When comparing the forms and effects of resistance the book focuses on three major developments since 1945: nuclear power, computing and information technology, and biotechnology. The story told is mainly, but not exclusively, European. In making comparisons the contributions reach out historically to the origins of the idea of ‘progress’ and the Luddite revolt of the early nineteenth century, and geographically to Australia, North America and Japan. The scope of the book prohibits the inclusion of several dimensions of the problem of resistance worth mentioning.

Switzerland is an excellent case for studying public debates about new technology. The Swiss political institutions of direct democracy enable citizens to set substantive issues regarding new technologies on the public agenda and to subject them to a popular vote (Frey & Bohnet 1993). Given modern society's great functional differentiation and distinct relative autonomy of its various subsystems (see Touraine, Chapter 2), the institutions of the initiative and the referendum provide a means for securing citizens' direct access to the political arena and for voicing their concerns about social, political, cultural and technological developments. The public discourse engendered by initiatives and referenda not only raises citizens' consciousness about the issues in question, but also assumes a monitoring function regarding the relatively autonomous activities pursued in society's various subsystems (see Bauer, Chapter 19). In this respect, initiatives and referenda concerning scientific and technological issues may be regarded as highly constructive forms of public resistance to scientific and technological developments because they stimulate debates in the public arena about the issues in question, enable citizens to state their preferences, and thus bind scientific–technological activity into democratic procedures. The concerns raised by public debates about scientific–technological developments may be interpreted as signals to the respective institutions to reconsider and re-evaluate their activities. These particular forms of public resistance to new technologies may result in significant adaptations of scientific–technological endeavours to address public concerns.

The historiography of resistance to new technology, generically referred to as Luddism, in the British Industrial Revolution has been a curious one. Machine breaking plays little part in most economic history textbooks, labour's reaction to technological displacement, when noted at all, being seen as little more than an irritating and futile minor impediment to progress. Political and social historians have found the riotous crowd rather more interesting but they have tended to see Luddism as symptomatic of some other problem, economic depression or high food prices, rather than as direct hostility to technological change. Thus Briggs refers to the Luddites as the ‘helpless victims of distress’ (Briggs 1959, p. 182). Labour historians, though sympathetic to the problems faced, have often found that Luddism ill-accords with that Whiggish development of a ‘proper’ labour movement characterized by orderly trade unions, deemed the mark of progress. Machine breaking and riot are often seen as being very different and separate from orderly collective bargaining (see, for example, Cole & Postgate 1949, pp. 184–5; Thomis 1970, pp. 133–4; or Hunt 1981, p. 195). Even Hobsbawm, whose pioneering essay on the machine breakers showed how pre-industrial labour utilized machine breaking as a weapon, also saw industrial violence as an anachronism by the early nineteenth century (Hobsbawm 1968, pp. 5–22). Thus the Luddites have been too easily absorbed into popular notions as backwardlooking, blinkered obstructionists, men who failed to see the ineffable benefits of the Industrial Revolution and who were therefore justly and legitimately defeated.

Basic questions

The word ‘resistance’ has become unsuitable for use in the context of new technology. The allegation is that it serves mainly to blame those who resist; talking about resistance implies a managerial and technocratic bias. However, in developing the idea for this conference, I was confident that ‘resistance’ would prove ambiguous in meaning and rich in connotations, particularly in the European context.

Historians of technology recently rediscovered ‘resistance’ as a ‘force’ that shapes technology which requires an adequate analysis (Mokyr 1990, 1992). For the economist resistance is basically the vested interests of old capital in ideas, skills and machinery. In addition, in the light of the critique of the ‘Whiggish’ historiography of technology (Staudenmaier 1985), it seems reasonable to lift ‘resistance’ from the dustbin of history.

Artefacts such as machines, power stations, computers, telephones, broadcasts and genetically engineered tomatoes, and the practice of their production, handling, marketing and use – in other words, technological innovations – are not the only factors of historical change. Technological determinism seems an inadequate account of our history. Various social activities give form to processes and products, facilitate their diffusion and mitigate their consequences. However, technology is not neutral. It creates opportunities and simultaneously constrains human activity. We experience the latter as being paced by ‘machines’ rather than controlling them. The selection of options is not neutral; it is likely to be contested and in need of legitimation.

The assertion of some close affinity, or even ‘striking analogy’ (Harold Green: Radkau 1988a, p. 347), between atomic physics on the one hand and genetics on the other, already has a long history, starting even before Hiroshima and dating back to at least 1916. In that year, Hermann Joseph Muller, one of the founding fathers of modern genetics, pointed out this affinity in order to underline the immense potential of both disciplines (Roth 1985, p. 132). Hiroshima and the emergence of nuclear power made the close parallels even more exciting, but more ambiguous too. The deep conviction that this analogy really existed seems to have been a powerful driving force behind genetic engineering as well as behind the sharpest criticism of genetic engineering; plenty of evidence is to be found in the United States and also, later on, in West Germany. Erwin Chargaff, first a pioneer and afterwards one of the most prophetic critics of genetic engineering, exclaimed in 1977: ‘The two greatest deeds – and probably misdeeds – in my time have been the splitting of the atom and the discovery of a way to manipulate the genetic apparatus. When Dr Hahn made his tragic discovery, he is reported to have exclaimed: “God cannot have wanted that!” Well, maybe it was the devil’ (Radkau 1988a, p. 336). In America, first and foremost, an analogy was drawn between genetics and the atomic bomb.

Basic circumstances of new technologies

Criticism of technology is nothing new. For some years, however, this criticism has had a new quality. A brief look back demonstrates this. The development of road, rail and air traffic did not trigger any fundamental political debates, but rather occurred within the framework of administrative guidelines. Mass vaccination for numerous diseases, chlorination of drinking water and pasteurization of milk were introduced in a similar way, without any significant public debate concerning the advantages and disadvantages, which might have endangered these projects. In contrast, plans for the fluoridation of drinking water in the USA in the 1960s provoked intense public controversy, which already contained important elements of later disputes concerning nuclear power. This is true both for the structure of the conflict – the appearance of citizens' action groups who mustered their own experts, the turning of their actions into a current topic by the mass media, and the shifting of decisions to political institutions – and also for the type of arguments – the assertion that there was an invisible threat, that the whole population was in danger, and that there was a possibility of unrecognized long-term effects, etc. (Sapolsky 1968).

One fundamental reason for the changes mentioned may be the existence of social groups who intervene in politics in an unconventional manner and who find a platform for their criticism and demands in the mass media.

Exploring the public resistance to technology in America, one is immediately struck with a paradox. Some technologies provoke organized opposition; others, no less invasive, no more benign, are welcomed, or, at the least, they are accepted with comparatively little debate. The contrast is rather extraordinary when we compare the response to two important technologies that have burgeoned over the past decade: information technology and biotechnology. These are both pervasive and rapidly expanding technologies, and both have their share of social costs as well as benefits. But they have evoked a very different public reaction.

In this chapter, I will first briefly remark on the diverse responses to these two technologies in the United States, and then explore these differences along several dimensions. Note that by resistance, I refer to overt opposition, not to the passive reluctance of individuals to use word processors or to buy bio-engineered products (see Bauer, Chapter 5). My purpose in the comparison is to shed light on the values and priorities that shape the public response to new technologies in America, and to highlight some fundamental contradictions between the rhetoric of support for science and technology and the reality of public attitudes as expressed in behaviour.

Responses to information technologies

Information technologies – from computers to communications – have obviously had an overwhelming social impact and their economic and social benefits hardly need explanation.

Introduction

The development of a multinational regulatory framework for biotechnology during the past twenty years provides an unparalleled opportunity to study the processes by which technological advances overcome public resistance and are incorporated into a receptive social context. Through the vehicle of regulation, states provide assurance that the risks of new technologies can be contained within manageable bounds. Procedures are devised to limit uncertainty, channel the flow of future public resistance, and define the permissible modalities of dissent. Regulation, in these respects, becomes integral to the shaping of technology. A regulated technology encompasses more than simply the ‘knowledge of how to fulfill certain human purposes in a specifiable and reproducible way.’ Regulation transmutes such instrumental knowledge into a cultural resource; it is a kind of social contract that specifies the terms under which state and society agree to accept the costs, risks and benefits of a given technological enterprise.

The passage of biotechnology from moratorium to market in just twenty years exemplifies this process of social accommodation. During this period, biotechnology moved from a research programme that aroused misgivings even among its most ardent advocates to a flourishing industry promising revolutionary benefits in return for negligible and easily controlled risks. The transformation occurred almost simultaneously and with remarkable speed throughout Europe and North America. To facilitate the commercialization of biotechnology, the United States, and the European Community and several of its member states, adopted laws and regulations to control not only laboratory research with genetically engineered organisms but also their purposeful release into the environment.