The Promise of Technology: Politics and Advocacy in the Digital Age
This thesis develops the concept of ‘the promise of technology’ to understand the current moment of temporal politics for four emerging digital technologies: Bitcoin, quantum computers, large language models, and artificial general intelligence. Drawing on the scholarship of Hannah Arendt and Emma Stone Mackinnon, I argue that the promise of technology is an overarching historical narrative of progress in time, to which the specific promise-making relating to each technology above can appeal. The promise of technology is a distinct way of making sense of technological developments, which cloaks investment hype and salesmanship in the language of participatory politics, while undermining the conditions that facilitate such politics. Promises are temporal speech acts that, according to Mackinnon, can preserve a political moment into the future by reinterpreting the past for the present. As such, promises are worldmaking actions. In the thesis, I read the advocacy for digital technologies, spanning private industry, government and academia, as claims to extending this political moment of technology optimism into the future. Silicon Valley technologists are iterating the promise of technology to maintain their claims to power, while simultaneously harming the conditions for political contestation. However, the promise of technology is not just speech, it is coupled with ever-increasing investments in digital infrastructures, despite the looming threat of anthropogenic climate change. I argue that contemporary discussions of technologies like Bitcoin and AI are repurposing the promise in a way that pays lip-service to its emancipatory potential, while simultaneously undermining the possibilities of political participation, for example by eroding on the foundations of a habitable earth or undermining language as a ‘public thing.’ I conclude that the promise of technology mount particular challenges to politics in the 21st century. However, promises are always contested and contestable speech acts and approaching this discourse as promise-making can be a way to start challenging technological and political developments.
Digital Technology, Political Theory, Promises, Silicon Valley, Democratic Theory, Historymaking
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