Review: Nihilism and Technology by Nolen Gertz
First, some context: I read Gertz’s book on its release in 2018. I thoroughly enjoyed it and hoped to review it for publication. I worked for several weeks on a review and pitched it to a couple of publications. Hearing nothing from those publications, I promptly forgot about it. I was a newlywed at the time, I had other concerns.
In digging through my files to organize some thoughts and syllabi on technology, I found my draft of my original review, which I’ve decided to foist upon my readership with some light editing. In short, if you’re interested in philosophy and technology, you really do need to get this book. It is, I would argue, more timely and useful today than even when it was released. Enjoy.
Review: Nihilism and Technology
by Nolen Gertz
Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.
Paperback, 242 pages, $34.95.
It is difficult to find sincere, thoughtful consideration of the relationship between human beings and technology that does not fall into one of the dual traps of breathless optimism or hopeless doomsaying. Science fiction horror tales dominate streaming services while Silicon Valley executives trumpet the potential of machine learning to solve humanity’s problems, and all the while technological dependency grows. Nolen Gertz’s recent book Nihilism and Technology represents a refreshing, albeit ultimately unsatisfying, attempt to provide a more thoughtful contribution to what is truly an era-defining conversation about how people create, use, and think about technology. As Gertz explains, we all too often forget that the very devices we enjoy in turn shape the things we want to create, and conversely that our deepest desires are reflected in the technologies we crave.
Gertz begins with a bold wager: we might better understand our present technological moment if we take the time to compare it to late 19th century nihilism, as described in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. A nihilist, Gertz explains, is someone who simply doesn’t care. Nihilists do not care about ultimate questions or living their lives to the fullest, because that would involve the pain and challenge that comes from delving deeply into difficult issues. In Gertz’s eyes, modern technological people in the developed western world are like the nihilists in The Big Lebowski: when it comes down to it, “We believe in nothing.”
But as Gertz notes, not caring is actually quite challenging. Nihilism, allowed to come into its own, brings great suffering and instability. If we hope to remain passive in our unwillingness to question the moral system and position in which we find ourselves, we require the assistance of priestly figures who make our pitiful state palatable. In Nietzsche’s Genealogy of the concepts of good and evil, he suggests that it was religious, ascetic priests who endeavored to “make nihilism palatable, to help sufferers to live with their suffering rather than letting them spread their suffering to others.” On Gertz’s view, the contemporary analogues to the ascetic priest are new technologies and the companies that feed them to us.
Gertz spends the rest of the book unpacking the ready comparisons between the five tactics Nietzsche claims ascetic priests use to keep men passive and the corresponding five uses of technology that we daily accept in order to inoculate ourselves against the terrifying truths of nihilism. These are “self-hypnosis, mechanical activity, petty pleasures, herd instinct, and orgies of feeling.” Gertz creatively assigns a technological analogue to each: “techno-hypnosis, data-driven activity, pleasure economics, herd networking, and orgies of clicking.”
It is in his later chapters touching on each of these five in turn that Gertz hits his stride. His comparisons between Nietzsche’s five “human-nihilism relations” and their modern counterparts are stirring, sure to make any reader question his own relationship to technology. Many of the five points are intuitive, and the subject of many popular think pieces on the negative influence of technology on the mind and habits of the individual. We hypnotize ourselves with Netflix, we gamify our lives with data points on our Fitbits, and the list goes on.
Gertz’s most significant contribution, however, is to repeatedly emphasize that we are not exclusively passive recipients of mind-numbing indoctrination via technology. There is a codependent, symbiotic relationship between us and the technologies we use. Our supposed needs are shaped in part by tech companies, Gertz admits. For example, we would never have considered face-to-face interaction “inconvenient” if tech companies like Google had not desired to sell us substitutes in the form of online networking.
But the fault does not lie solely, or even primarily, with an “other,” a big corporation Big Brother who keeps us, the powerful individual, down. Rather, Gertz suggests, we actually do desire things like self-hypnosis through our technologies. We prefer to binge watch television shows rather than sincerely reflecting on the meaningfulness, or lack thereof, of our own lives. Commenting specifically on the Netflix phenomenon, for example, Gertz explains, “If anything it would appear that we like screens precisely because of their zombifying effects… In other words, we know that to watch TV is to escape reality, and that is precisely why we like it.”
In other words, Gertz’s input to the conversation surrounding technology is to force radical self-examination. Rather than talking about what technology does to people in the abstract, whether good or bad, Gertz forces his readers to consider why it is that they crave those things technology does to them, and why they keep coming back for more. His explanation, that people are fundamentally and predominately self-medicating nihilists, is somber and provocative, but not altogether shocking or unreasonable.
The book is at its weakest, however, in an early section on transhumanism. In order to defend his proposition that modern usage of technology breeds passive nihilism, a painkiller against suffering in the face of meaninglessness, Gertz is forced to contend with those who use technology to attempt to overcome the things that bring suffering and terror in life, things like sickness, aging, and death. “Transhumanism” is a broad movement that, at its core, suggests that humanity can become something greater than it is currently by harnessing the power of technology to combat things people have previously accepted as inevitabilities.
On Gertz’s view, these transhumanists are nothing more than religious devotees who have replaced classical theism with belief in technology or science as a God. Gertz explains, “Again, it may appear that transhumanists are likewise saying ‘God is dead,’ but in reality they are saying, ‘Technology is God.’”
What’s more, transhumanists are fervent “ableists.” Gertz explains, “Ableism is the belief that there are ‘normal’ human abilities, and whoever is lacking in those abilities is not only disabled but abnormal, inferior, in need of being fixed, of being made human.” Transhumanism adopts ableism because it asserts that “the unenhanced life is not worth living.” This, Gertz implies, is wrong.
This critique seems to me to be a misreading of the transhumanist agenda. A transhumanist who thinks himself a Nietzschean could instead argue that technology is the Promethian fire from the gods that allows man to become greater than he was previously. Man himself has harnessed the power of nature to overcome myth and religion and ascetic values. Technology provides a means for us to transcend and overcome our present limitations, both those imposed by “masters” in a world of loosely held religious moral standards and those imposed by simple biology that can itself be mastered and tamed.
What’s more, in the absence of any teleological view of humanity, Gertz’s analysis offers little substance to rebut the transhumanist desire to modify and improve the human body. Calling those who seek to improve the human body via technology “ableist” pejoratively, with no consistent reason to prefer passive acceptance of human frailty to optimism about human physical potential, is merely to adopt a new standard of good and evil. The body-positive standard is then just as arbitrary and externally imposed as any ascetic priestly moral system. Nietzsche would be disappointed.
This does not mean that Gertz’s criticisms of transhumanism are entirely misguided, nor does it mean that transhumanists are not wrong to prefer change to stasis, technological to natural. Rather, in attempting to stick to a purely Nietzschean critique of technology, combined with contemporary concerns about ableism that do not seem to mesh well with Nietzsche, Gertz handicaps his analysis by providing no basis to himself prefer what is natural as opposed to what is technologically enhanced.
In attempting to stay true to his primary inspiration, Gertz’s analysis stops short of being completely fulfilling. Like a passive nihilist, Gertz’s work is primarily destructive, critiquing but not fully correcting, tearing down but offering little more than perpetual questioning as a substitute to what has been destroyed. His critiques, however, are well-founded, and his insights into the relationship between humans and our technologies are thought-provoking, to say the least. This leaves room for thinkers from alternative traditions to contribute their own analyses of similar issues. Anyone who desires to think deeply about technology going forward would do well to consider Gertz’s work.