Technology and the Moral Order

Tik Tok's algorithms have likely superceeded the pioneering analysis that aimed to bring empirical data to bear on the hypothesis that technoenvironmental variables determine basic social and cultural patterns in human society. In 1962, Alvin Gouldner and Richard Peterson applied factor analytic techniques to two major datasets on 71 preliterate societies, an exploratory study that would not have been possible without computational power. The book's central issue is on the relationship between technology and ideology and whether or not a causal priority exists between them.

If Gouldner and Peterson's Technology and the Moral Order is still relevant today, it's because the tendency to assert a single factor--economic, biological or technical (determinism); maybe: "the" system-- to explain "where we're headed" still breeds polemic. So does the cloud of particulars that surround supply and demand, transaction costs and the unintended consequences of the platform economy on social and urban life.

But -- if-- as the writers of "Technology and the Moral Order" conclude, technology influences culture by a hair, then the question is not which technologies prove the staying power of societies but how. And, if ideas don't change the world, but tools, then how do ideas work (if at all?)