Scratch a digital capitalist and you’ll find a technological determinist – someone who believes that technology drives history. These people see themselves as agents of what Joseph Schumpeter famously described as “creative destruction”. They revel in “moving fast and breaking things” as the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, used to put it until his PR people convinced him it was not a good vibe, not least because it implied leaving taxpayers to pick up the broken pieces.
Tech determinism is an ideology, really; it’s what determines how you think when you don’t even know that you’re thinking. And it feeds on a narrative of technological inevitability, which says that new stuff is coming down the line whether you like it or not. As the writer LM Sacasas puts it, “all assertions of inevitability have agendas, and narratives of technological inevitability provide convenient cover for tech companies to secure their desired ends, minimise resistance, and convince consumers that they are buying into a necessary, if not necessarily desirable future”.
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How refreshing it is, then, to come across an account of what happens when the deterministic myth collides with democratic reality. It takes the form of “Resisting technological inevitability: Google Wing’s delivery drones and the fight for our skies”, a striking academic paper soon to be published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, ie a pukka journal. Authored by Anna Zenz and Julia Powles of, respectively, the Law School and Tech & Policy Lab of the University of Western Australia, it relates how a big tech company sought to dominate a new market, regardless of societal consequences, using a shiny new technology – delivery drones. And how alert, resourceful and determined citizens saw off the “experiment
