The
Systems Idea In Action
In Autonomous Technology:
Technics-Out-Of-Control (1989), Langdon Winner takes a sobering look at modern
predicament:
Society is composed of persons who
cannot design, build, repair, or even operate most of the devices upon which their lives depend.... In the
complexity
of this world people are
confronted with extraordinary events and functions that are literally
unintelligible to them. They are
unable to give an adequate explanation of man-made phenomena in their immediate
experience. They are unable to form a coherent, rational picture of the
whole. Under the circumstances,
all persons do, and indeed must, accept a great number of things on faith.... Their way of
understanding is basically religious, rather than scientific; only a small portion of one 's everyday
experience in the technological society can be made scientific. ...The plight of members of the
technological society can be compared to
that of a newborn child. Much of the data that enters its sense does not
form coherent wholes. There are
many things the child cannot understand or, after it has learned to speak, cannot successfully explain to
anyone.... Citizens of the modern age in this respect are less fortunate than children. They never escape a
fundamental bewilderment in the
face of the complex world that their senses report. They are not able to
organize all or even very much of
this into sensible wholes.... An objection might be raised that difficulties of the sort I have
mentioned soon will have remedies. Systems theory, artificial intelligence, or some new modern way of knowing
will alleviate the burdens....
Soon there will exist tools of intellectual synthesis. I must report I
found no such tools in practice. I
have surveyed the various candidates for this honor — systems theory and systems analysis, computer sciences and
artificial intelligence, new methods of coding great masses of information, the strategy of disjointed
incrementalism and so forth. As
relief for the difficulties raised here none of these offers much
help.... The systems idea is
another — and indeed the ultimate — technique to shape man and
society.
By allowing the existence of large
bureaucratic systems under centralized control, whether corporate, governmental, or institutional, we
unwittingly enter into a hideous
conspiracy against ourselves, one in which we resolutely work to limit
the growth of our minds and
spirits. The only conceivable answer is to break the power of these
things, through grit, courage,
indomitability and resolution if possible, through acts of personal sabotage and disloyalty if not.
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