Bonum Certa Men Certa

Informatics, Progress, and Technocracy -- Part II: About Progress

By Daniel Cantarín. Original version in Spanish here. Introduction and Part I published yesterday.

Progress/Guitar Eye Portrait



Summary: Part II of Daniel Cantarín's article "Informática, progreso, y tecnocracia"

Following the example of economics, both in Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital, you can find ideas of progress showing the way forward for humanity: opulence development, classless societies, and all the good stuff we all know. And the thing is, it was the epoch calling for that: we had a political revolution in France, and a technological revolution in England. Clearly the world was changing. And at the heart of it all, there were anthropocentrism first, and science later. Man had defeated God, and suddenly he was the owner of its destiny, no longer written in sacred scriptures nor controlled by wise scholastics. And at the same time, science became the tool for ultimate truth. That adventurous spirit, mixing ingenuity with innovation, gave rise to a new ideological bias: technological optimism.



"When Marx saw the exclusion and misery spreading around technology, he didn't condemned technology but the way it was being used in that society..."As decades passed, scientific and technological development left little space for debate, and the feeling began to be that the only real limit for humanity was its imagination. It is not that there weren't any critical voices around at that time, nor also newer problems: it was that technology introduced so many radical and spectacular changes that one could hardly argue against its virtues if used correctly. Such was the case with Marx, for example. When Marx saw the exclusion and misery spreading around technology, he didn't condemned technology but the way it was being used in that society; in fact, he argued that technological development was already not only desirable (as that would be the road to a classless society), but also inevitable.

Yet, even though Marx was more explicit than others about it, getting to the point of saying that history only goes in one direction, the thing is that by that time technology (and its mother science) already had written underground the new destiny of humanity: progress. The freedom from holy scriptures left little for humanity, which invented some new ones, or new sages to take care of them. I'm referring to the same historical time where positivism was born as a philosophical school of science, and where the conflict between nations to solve old issues began to translate into races for scientific, technological, and economic supremacy. This very same historical time started to move the world faster and faster after each generation, and incrementing the scale of every human action.

This optimism lasted until the First World War: a conflict so scandalously devastating that not even nightmares were able to sum up all the disastrous numbers. An entire generation got traumatised from that conflict. So, as the most elemental use of reason dictated, the obvious conclusion was that, at least, after that, it could hardly happen again, given that the whole world understood the insane magnitude of what had just happened. Again, progress; although this time the cost was actually too high, and so the world began to suspect or be sceptical about the alleged good of scientific and technological developments: the immeasurable carnage that was the First World War would have never been possible without the intervention of science.

Of course we all know that then came a second World War, not so long after that, even worse than the previous one. And the cherry on top this time was that it ended with no less than the atomic bomb: a tecnological device born from the purest and most advanced science, that for the first time in human history allowed for credible and immediate threats of extinction for humans and everything else along with them. And even with all that, it also left the world in a state of "Cold War" for half a century, and we may even tell without much shame that this stuff didn't ever end and still goes on.

"Please take note of that last thing I wrote: progress is dead. Nobody sane today who has read a book can speak of "progress" without hesitating at least once."Those few paragraphs (back there in this text) are nothing but a brief history of modernity: an age in human history. And the idea of progress is but a child of modern times: it was born in it, and died with it.

Please take note of that last thing I wrote: progress is dead. Nobody sane today who has read a book can speak of "progress" without hesitating at least once. Progress was literally the flag of our darkest hours in history, and it left the world with deep wounds not yet healed. Speaking about "progress" today, in abstract terms like these, isolated from society, is simply denialist.

But it also happens to be the case that the story of modernity and progress is the story of scientific technocracies. In fact, "technocracy" as a term is quite modern. The rise of economics as a cornerstone and central mandate for modern societies is a consequence of the same ideological biases that gave rise to the other things: the anthropocentrism from renaissance, in union with modern technological optimism. With those two ingredients mixed together as rational basis, it was obvious we would understand or view anything as an object of scientific study waiting to be exploited by the forces of human production.

"This way we reach that article from the beginning, "when progress is backwards", where the people from Sabotage Linux ask themselves if this isn't "corruption" or what's behind such non-progress."And who's better qualified, in times like that, for handling such tasks, than scientists, and to a lesser extent technicians? It's clear that, having at their disposition objective and unquestionable knowledge, scientists and technicians know better than anybody else what to do, always. And if by some strange exception they would do something incorrect, it can only be explained by subjective deviations: as could be ignorance, corrupt personal interests, or even mental incapacity (idiocy).

This way we reach that article from the beginning, "when progress is backwards", where the people from Sabotage Linux ask themselves if this isn't "corruption" or what's behind such non-progress.

It happens to be true that informatics is a somewhat young as a discipline. It was born in the XX century, and over the past 40 or 50 years it hasn't stopped its "technological progress", emulating in a dizzying way all the steps the rest of the scientific and technological disciplines had done before, in previous centuries: first ingenuity, then optimistic, and eventually positivist and technocratic. And so today we look at each other in disbelief while flat-Earthers are almost every day becoming less marginal, hundreds of thousands of people all around the world step up against sanitary measures of isolation in the name of an apparently almighty freedom that seems to have priority over anything else, borderline lunatics threatening the most powerful nation in the world with an armed coup based on deliriant conspirational theories, and there seems to be not a single place in the entire world that is not every day more polarised and on the brink of social conflict. From our field, it seems to me... it is short-sighted, even when maybe a step in the right direction, to ask ourselves in this context something about the progress in gtk or python, while telecommunications are our very tanks and bombers since decades now, and the Internet has become our own atomic bomb.

Perhaps it is time for informatics to learn to question the very idea of progress.

Recent Techrights' Posts

European Patent Office Illegally Gutting and Outsourcing Its Functions, Acting Like an Above-the-Law Commercial Business (It Won't Stop at Formalities Officers (FOs) and Classification Slop at the EPO)
breaking/violating laws and conventions
Links 19/09/2025: Lobbyist of American GAFAM Becomes Data Protection Commissioner in Europe
Links for the day
The Right to Punch People (Apparently)
At Brett Wilson, Brett's job title is "Head of Crime" and Wilson normalises calls for violence
Brett Wilson LLP Seem to Have Had Only One Litigation Client in 2025, He Was Previously Charged, Just Like the Serial Strangler From Microsoft (Whom They Now Represent)
Karma is superstition, regulators are not
Project 2030 to Cover How "Project 2025"-Styled Anti-Media Zealots From America Targeted Techrights and Tux Machines
The common denominator is also their attacks on women
Brett Wilson LLP Failed to Meet Deadlines Set by Judge 7 Months Earlier, Tried to Ruin Our Holiday, Then Had the Audacity to Ask Us for Over 3,000 Pounds for Its Own Lateness
As a matter of principle we will never respond to assassin while we are on holiday
 
Links 19/09/2025: Press Freedom Dying in US, Anti-Austerity Strikes in France, and Alan Rusbridger to Leave 'Prospect'
Links for the day
Offloading to the Sister Site
In the interest of not overwhelming readers
Links 19/09/2025: Coffee Club and "SpellBinding is Now Absurdly Fast"
Links for the day
Links 19/09/2025: Media Freedom Ceases to Exist in US, "Consider Dropping Twitter/X"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 19/09/2025: Thinking and Insect Bites
Links for the day
Microsoft E.E.E.: Git Will Now (or Very Soon) Fully Depend on Rust, Which is Controlled by Microsoft
Microsoft now makes Git dependent on Rust, or making Git dependent on GitHub, which is proprietary
Slop or Fake Articles Have Turned Linux Journal From a Pioneering/Trailblazing "Linux" Magazine Into a Nuisance
some sites with former reputation - good reputation - turn into cesspools
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, September 18, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, September 18, 2025
On Claims That After Bluewashing Red Hat Will Increasingly Become an Indian Company
Discussed this week (long and detailed)
Americans Attacking British Sites Only Months After They Leave America
We find it kind of funny if not ironic that this site, originally an American site, got legal harassment only from Americans and only months after it had moved to the UK
Despite Losing Over a Quarter Million Dollars a Year Software in the Public Interest (SPI) Gives Helping Hand to Libreboot
SPI's financial state depends a lot on its public image or its reputation
Slopwatch: Google Helps Plagiarism and Sends Traffic to Ripoff Artists
That Google as a company helps spamfarms is noteworthy
If You Want to Know the Future, Listen to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Andy Farnell
We're sure the FSF will have plenty of its own output
Links 18/09/2025: A Taliban Ban on Internet Access and Troubled US Job Market
Links for the day
Gemini Links 18/09/2025: Computer Literacy and Accessing Alhena's Database
Links for the day
Links 18/09/2025: US War on Media (Truth Banned, Cancel Culture by the Hard Right), NYT Chief Executive Warns Cheeto is Deploying ‘Anti-press Playbook'
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, September 17, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, September 17, 2025
Slopwatch: Fake Articles, Fake Text, Fake Images, Negative Slant on "Linux"
Google News has lost its value; the signal-to-noise ratio has fallen off a cliff
Gemini Links 17/09/2025: Relax-and-Recover on Proxmox and New Smolweb File Transfer Service
Links for the day
Fact: EFF Got Corrupted by Corporate Money. Microsoft Lunduke (Political Noise): The Issue With EFF is, It Kills Babies.
Microsoft Lunduke - as usual - finds a way to make it about abortions
Pacing Publication Up a Bit
The news cycles have gotten rather light and slow
Links 17/09/2025: Power Outages, Digital Controls, and Attacks on the Mainstream Media (by Insecure and Corrupt Dictators)
Links for the day
Gemini Links 17/09/2025: Flashing LineageOS and ROOPHLOCH
Links for the day
Links 17/09/2025: Long COVID Study, "Exposing Pegasus", and Chatbots Exposing Sensitive Data
Links for the day
Links 17/09/2025: Secret Settlement for Internet Archive and Google’s LLM Slop Summaries Attracting Lawsuits
Links for the day
The True Cost of 'Generative Models'
Funded and promoted by the companies that profit from the waste
'Big Slop' Attacks Contemporary Information/Knowledge and Creative Works, 'Big Copyright' (Cartel) Attacks the Old
Someone at IA will hopefully "blow the whistle" on what they actually agreed
Why We Find It Difficult to Trust Rust
A comparison between C/C++ and Rust
Slop Nihilism is Funded by Big Oil
Eventually human civilisation will destroy itself
Watching the OSI: Our Series Will Carry on Irrespective of the Chief's 'Resignation'
the OSI isn't even the real guardian of the term "Open Source"
Professor Eben Moglen Recovering From Open Heart Surgery
From his public pages (this is not secret)
Just What LibreOffice Needs? Another Language? (Rust)
what's all this concern about memory safety?
Many Microsoft Managers Are Leaving
"Hey hi" chaff or chaff about "hey hi" cannot eternally distract from the difficulties inside the company
There Are Red Hat (IBM) Layoffs, But Google News is Infested With Slopfarms
It contributes a lot to misinformation and it encourages plagiarism
Tomorrow, Microsoft's Tim Anderson's 'The Register MS' Offshoot Will Have Been Inactive for 2 Months (There's Also a Slop Problem)
We've already caught The Register MS using LLM slop for articles
Microsoft's Chief Legal Officer Leaves Microsoft After Nearly 30 Years
And not retiring
Even Windows Users Are Having Problems With "Secure Boot"
When it comes to security - Microsoft strives for the very opposite
Another Competition Crime of Microsoft, Long Facilitated and Advocated by a Bad Actor, Who is Funded by a Third Party to Commit Extortion Against People Who Have Correctly and Repeatedly Warned About It for Over 13 Year
We must always go back to the core issues
3 More Reasons to Replace Mozilla Firefox With LibreWolf
Thankfully there are de-enshittified versions of Firefox
USA Not a Place for Free Speech
In America, as in the US, the attacks seem more enhanced or advanced these days
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 16, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, September 16, 2025
Links 17/09/2025: Google Layoffs in "Hey Hi" (AI), Perplexity Hit With More "Hey Hi" (Plagiarism) Lawsuits
Links for the day
Gemini Links 17/09/2025: Reclaiming Things in a Digital Age and Moon Phases in CGI
Links for the day