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.