Technology and Its Discontents: On the Verge of the Posthuman

Immediately marized coming war on terrorism as their theology versus our technology, suicide bomber against nuclear power.1 His statement missed point: is American theology. For Americans, it is not Christian God but that structures American sense of power and revenge, nation's abstract sense of well-being, its arrogant sense of superiority, and its righteous justification for global dominance. In introduction to Technological Visions, Marita Sturken and Douglas Thomas declare that popular imagination, is often synonymous with future, but it is more accurate to say that is synonymous with faith in future both in future as better world and as one in which United States bestrides globe as colossus.2 Technology has long been unacknowledged source of European and Euro-American superiority within modernity, and its underlying mythos always traffics in what James W. Carey once called secular religiosity.3 Lewis Mumford called American belief system mechano-idolatry as early as 1934; few years later he deemed it our mechano-centric religion. David F. Noble calls this ideology the religion of technology in work of same name that traces its European roots to doctrine that combines millenarianism, rationalism, and Christian redemption in writings of monks, explorers, inventors, and NASA scientists. If take into account functions of religion and not its rituals, it is not deity who insures American future but new technologies: smart bombs in Gulf War, Viagra and Prozac in pharmacy, satellite TV at home. It is not social justice or equitable economic distribution that will reduce hunger, greed, and poverty, but fables of abundance and rhetoric of technological utopianism. The United States is in thrall to techno-fundamentalism, in Siva Vaidhyanathan's apt phrase; to Thomas P. Hughes, a god named has possessed Americans. Or, as public policy scholar Edward Wenk Jr. sums it up, we are ... inclined to equate with civilization itself.4