Ignoble Noble:

The Religion of Technology needs a Reformation


Like the devastation of ‘pre-americas’, it won’t take long until a neutral cyberspace is colonized and exploited for its goods. Or that’s what I get out of Noble’s ‘text’ “The Religion of Technology” anyways. I can’t help but hear “The White Man’s Burden” booming in the background of Noble’s hagiographies, narrated through dates and hanging quotations.

According to Nobles text, it seems whatever potential salvation technology can offer is delivered entirely on Christian terms, and that the rise of ‘practical arts’ as spiritual enlightenment is only conceivable within a Eurocentric world. Noble’s text is a chronicle of important technological developments inspired by a spiritual pursuit towards transcendence, omitting of course the intrinsically mystic and mathematical designs of Islamic Arts, and other contributors outside of America and Europe, like Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, an imortant figuer in establishing Algebra. Only briefly is there mention of Hiroshima, but not as the city of the world’s most technological advance country, but victim to the apocolyptic zeal of millenarianism.

(But of coures, in Nobles defense, since the Japanese have no souls, their Yen doesn’t let them ride the mechanical messiah.)

Not only is Noble’s ‘narrative’ completely eurocentric, it is entirely phallocentiric. But I suppose the two are interchangable. Yet, not ignorant to his 21thcentury audience, he attempts to address this issue as a pithy appendix note in the end of the book entitled: “A Masculine Millennium: A note on Technology and Gender.” However, he provides no alternative perspective on the blatant phallocentric approach to technology, but only confirms the predominant sexism as he list misogynisitc moments in history, as if his own text void of a female name, save for Eve here and there, did not provide blatant enough evidence of a gendered discourse. Even the meagre concluding paragraph of the ‘appendix’ that attempts to provide some hope for equality, is a quotation lifted from another source; there is nothing in his own words that show any bias agianst the patriachy of dialogue.

As you guessed, I’m a ‘bit’ disappointed in the first reading, and hope the others in the course will broaden our horizon of prejudice. I’m hoping that $80 course kit will put Noble to work, pushing the parameters of the discousre towards more interdisplinary perspectives.