In the The Real World of Technology, Franklin defines two forms of technological development: holistic technologies and prescriptive technologies. In the former, a practitioner has control over an entire process, and frequently employs several skills along the way. In Franklin’s words:
Holistic technologies are normally associated with the notion of craft. Artisans, be they potters, weavers, metal-smiths, or cooks, control the process of their own work from beginning to end. Their hands and minds make situational decisions as the work proceeds, be it on the thickness of the pot, or the shape of the knife edge, or the doneness of the roast. These are decisions that only they can make while they are working. And they draw on their own experience, each time applying it to a unique situation….Using holistic technologies does not mean that people do not work together, but the way in which they work together leaves the individual worker in control of a particular process of creating or doing something.
Franklin, The Real World of Technology, page 11
By contrast, a prescriptive technology breaks a process down into steps, each of which can be undertaken by a different person, often with different expertise. Franklin calls this specialization by process, as opposed to holistic technologies’ specialization by product. The classic prescriptive technology is the factory model that emerged in the Industrial Revolution, but Franklin locates much earlier examples, in particular, Chinese bronze casting from 1200 BC. This I’ll quote at length:
Imagine, then, it is 1200 BC, the height of the Shang Dynasty. A large ritual vessel has to be cast—let’s say a cauldron, a three-legged Ding, examples of which can be seen in the Royal Ontario Museum. First a full-sized model of the Ding is to be made. It is usually made in clay, although it could be wood. Archaeologists have discovered lots of these models; such a model is a complete likeness of the vessel and all its decorations. From this model, a mold is made. This is done by putting layers of clay—first very fine clay, then coarser material—onto the model and letting this coating dry. The mold is then carefully cut into segments and taken off the model in the way we take the peel off an orange. Because the mold is taken off in pieces one speaks about a “piece mold” process. The mold segments are then fired so they keep their shape and their decorations. They must be fired at temperatures that are higher than the temperature of the molten copper or bronze which the mold later contains. Consequently this casting technology became possible only in a civilization that had developed the techniques for producing high-fired ceramics.
Once the piece molds are fired, they are reassembled around a core, leaving a gap between the core and the mold large enough to receive the molten metal. The mold assembly has, of course, to include a means of pouring the liquid metal into that gap between the core and mold as well as ways for the air that the liquid metal displaces to escape completely so that the casting is of good quality. Once the mold assembly is finished and properly positioned in a casting pit, the liquid bronze can be poured.
Up to this point in the process, essentially two main steps have been executed. The designer and model builder have constructed the model in a manner that allows the formation and the cutting away of the mold. This involves design expertise as well as a full knowledge of all subsequent steps in the process, because they all depend on the proper design of the model.
The next steps of building up the mold, of cutting it away, firing it, and reassembling it around the core in order to make it ready for casting, constitute a series of operations where the expertise is essentially that of pottery work.
The casting steps that follow the assembly of the mold require different expertise. Here the metal has to be prepared; the alloy has to be mixed in proper proportions and fused to a temperature high enough to allow a successful casting. Most, if not all, Chinese bronzes contain, in addition to tin, enough lead to make possible the casting of objects with very finely and elaborately designed surfaces. We are here talking about large castings. It is astonishing that towards the end of the Shang Dynasty, the Chinese cast cauldrons that weighed eight hundred kilograms or more. From technical studies, such as X-rays of the vessels, we know that they were cast in one pour. This means that groups of metal workers were handling about a thousand kilograms of liquid bronze to cast a large vessel. These alloys melt at above 1000°C. They were poured from crucibles; a large number of them had to be ready for pouring at approximately the same time.
Franklin, The Real World of Technology, page 13
Whereas holistic technologies support a certain amount of improv, prescriptive technologies require each person to operate with precision, according to a pre-arranged plan. With holistic technologies, the worker is in control; with prescriptive technologies, the worker is under control.
Today’s real world of technology is characterized by the dominance of prescriptive technologies. Prescriptive technologies are not restricted to materials production. They are used in administrative and economic activities, and in many aspects of governance, and on them rests the real world of technology in which we live. While we should not forget that these prescriptive technologies are exceedingly effective and efficient, they come with an enormous social mortgage. The mortgage means that we live in a culture of compliance, that we are ever more conditioned to accept orthodoxy as normal, and to accept that there is only one way of doing “it.”
Franklin, The Real World of Technology, page 17
Prescriptive technologies give rise to management structures and surveillance: someone has to watch over everyone preparing to pour molten bronze into an enormous mold, lest a step be missed or executed incorrectly. An entire subgenre of technology emerges in that surveillance: punch clocks, key cards that record when someone is in their office, monitoring systems that show how much time each worker spends on specific tasks, records of activity that attribute every minute action to a particular person, noted with a timestamp. If a company also has access to a worker’s location and health data (say, via a company-supplied mobile device), they can further control that worker’s movements and habits. Each prescriptive technology begets additional prescriptive technologies. Franklin, again:
The acculturation to compliance and conformity has, in turn, accelerated the use of prescriptive technologies in administrative, government, and social services. The same development has diminished resistance to the programming of people.
Franklin, The Real World of Technology, page 19
(Emphasis mine.) I’m thinking here of rumors of Apple employees standing up en masse because their watch told them to do so. Ordinarily, a program instructs machines to perform tasks in certain ways; here, a program instructs a person to do so. And there are all kinds of reasons to support that: using machines to help us be better humans is entirely reasonable. (I’m using a machine to write this, of course, and you’re using a machine to read it.) But something about the spectacle of watch-wearing Apple staff spontaneously standing up in response to a buzz on the wrist is, well, unsettling. We shouldn’t be so quick to shake that off. We should be unsettled.
Writing about images from the Reformation forward (which, I’ll note, is also from the printing press forward), Franklin comments on the ways in which imagery has, in a sense, colonized our brains:
Today, technological realities have very much the force and authority of religious doctrine, including the notion that the laity is unfit to question doctrinal content and practice. It is in a spirit of questioning authority that we should ask, “What about people who are at the receiving end of technologically produced pseudorealities of images?” Their work has changed as their lives have changed. Life and work have been restaged by exernal forces. The literature of television and advertising is testimony to that, but more so is the practice of both. The reconstructed world of images has taken over much of our vernacular reality, like an occupation force of immense power. And somewhere, someone will have to ask, “How come the right to change our mental environment—to change the constructs of our minds and the sounds around us—seems to have been given away without anyone’s consent?”
Franklin, The Real World of Technology, page 37
There’s a notion among certain media circles that reading on the web means consenting to whatever tracking or targeting or advertising technology they can throw at you. (This notion is often spoken of in the same breath as the idea that using ad block is theft—which, nope, but more on that another time.) The thing about this idea of consent is that it implies that simply being somewhere—entering a space, looking around, staying there for however long—is indicative of consenting to whatever happens in that space. If you didn’t consent, you would just leave, right? But that neglects the possibility that you might need to be in that space, that you might be obligated to be there, while also disagreeing with all or some of what is going on. For example, if I refused to read any ad-supported websites out of my objections to the ways in which ad tracking operates, I would also rob myself of access to information and cultures which also just happen to be gateways into the most lucrative career paths. In other words, however queasy I am about the ways in which advertising operates, I pretty much have to exist within it if I want to keep a roof over my head. Likewise, in order to live in a dense, urban place (that is, a sustainable, human place), I have to walk the street: I have to be in that world in order to survive. But that doesn’t imply my consent to street harassment. Being somewhere does not constitute consent; it’s simply being.
More to Franklin’s point, part of what’s so troubling about image making in advertising is the way in which it actively eliminates freedom: every purchase we make, every product we covet is at least partially constructed by “external forces.” Do you really want that shiny new thing because it will improve your life in some way, or because you have been programmed to want it? How can you tell the difference?
Unusually hot, dry, June weather has me thinking about climate change (of course), which brings me to Ursula Franklin and her earthworm theory of social change:
Social change will not come to us like an avalanche down the mountain. Social change will come through seeds growing in well prepared soil—and it is we, like the earthworms, who prepare the soil. We also seed thoughts and knowledge and concern. We realize there are no guarantees as to what will come up. Yet we do know that without the seeds and the prepared soil nothing will grow at all. I am convinced that we are indeed already in a period in which this movement from below is becoming more and more articulate, but what is needed is a lot more earthworming.
Now, how do we do that? First of all, it is necessary to transcend the barriers that technology puts up against reciprocity and human contact. One of the reasons why I dwelt so much on non-communications technologies and on the concept of reciprocity is that one has to realize just how technology makes it very difficult for people to talk to each other. People rarely work together on regular, non-technologically interrupted projects. Because of this we have to make the time to create the occasion—be it on the bus, or in the waiting room—to talk to each other not about the weather, but about our “common future.”
Franklin, The Real World of Technology, page 121
With all respect to Franklin, we absolutely must talk to each other about the weather, because the weather is our common future. But I think it’s also instructive that Franklin connects earthworming to being in unmediated dialogue with one another. That is, you can’t do this work alone or at a remove; you have to be in the dirt with your comrades. It’s through talking to one another that we plant seeds, that we loosen up the soil, that we cultivate the future we want. We do this together or we do it not at all.
“Again and again,” writes Hannah Proctor,
I kept coming to the same conclusion, which provides no consolation at all: psychological experiences require patience while so much in the world demands urgency.
Proctor, Burnout, page 205
Proctor calls this quality “patient urgency,” and returns to it throughout her work on burnout—a work that retrieves burnout from the skincare industrial complex and brings it back to a dialogue about how our efforts to change the world are so often, and so cruelly, defeated. She is admirably unwilling to define the phrase in tactical terms, calling it only,
a sense of urgency for social transformation that can tolerate difficulties, differences, delay, objective gaps, and interpersonal strains.
Proctor, Burnout, page 156
Importantly, this does not mean simply waiting about for social transformation—that old refrain that progress will happen in time, as if time was an ally working on our behalf. The urgency is in the present moment to act, even as we know those actions will need time to bear fruit, even when it’s unclear how or if they may do so. As I’ve sat with the idea, I’ve thought more and more of planting a tree: you need to plant it at the right time and in the right place, make sure it has enough water and light and compost, protect it from pests and people, but you must wait years for the first peach. Nothing will hurry it along.
And really, you ought to plant a whole grove, or scatter seeds about wherever you can, without ever knowing which ones will be trampled or lost to drought or wind, and which ones will, against the odds, grow tall and strong and true. To have patient urgency is, I think, to know that you must plant those seeds, that you must prepare the soil, that these things cannot wait. That the future we hope for waits upon us, today.
