Dissolving Cyberia

For those who like a book to tell a story, Nair's book is the brilliant and rambling narrative of a class on Technology and Culture she taught at IIT Delhi. It is here I think that both the book's intellectual excitement, its problems, and its potential for future work lie. An example will clarify the point. Nair's discussion of the distinction between natural kinds (gold, mountains, rivers, tigers, things 'out there' in the world) and nominal kinds (stories, monuments, thermos flasks, things that are humanly created) points out that philosophical difficul-ties arise when the categories are not clear-cut. Therefore, a culture needs technical expertise to resolve ambiguous cases. Nair extends this reasoning convincingly to show how 'expert' accounts of, say, the Bengal Famine of 1889, confused natural with nominal kinds. Drawing on Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze, Nair demonstrates to her students that the famine was created by an economic system which forced the agricultural produce of rural Bengal to be sold to a metropolitan centre, causing food scarcity in the villages and the inability of the poor farmers to buy back the products of their own labour. Results: massive debts and large-scale starvation.

While it is easy to blame nature for every disaster, conceptualising disaster as a nominal kind caused by man-made economic systems allows us to resolve situations by managing our systems better. The students are forced to come to terms with the fact that technology is not always better, because a colonial state which employed superior technology also created massive famines with its economic systems.

So far, so good. Technobrat is full of insightful and thought-provoking segments like this one. It is in the relationship of these segments to each other that problems arise. Some of the ideas explored are philosophical perennials like cultural relativism and its relation to technology or the Kripkean notion of natural and nominal kinds, while others are the current and relevant concerns of today: the mindset and status of the technical expert, commodity fetishism, the diasporic migrations of the engineers trained at such expense by an impoverished Indian state, what professionalism means today, and many other interesting topics. I would argue that the topics that the book covers are also a mixture of kinds, much like the confusion of natural and nominal kinds which mixes up our explanations of catastrophes such as famines. All these things are not susceptible to the same kind of intellectual analysis, yet they are included in a series of chapters on technology. Yet this should not be counted against the book, for it reflects the central problem in thinking about technology.

What sort of intellectual problem is technology? Is it a matter of thinking about technical expertise? Is it a philosophical issue? Is it a cultural phenomenon? It is all of these, and much more, and Technobrat lets the reader explore these proliferating lines of inquiry without prejudging the result and coming to a fixed conclusion.