Part 1 of a series
Technoprogressivism is an objective philosophy of technology concerned with developing the intellectual means, and political tools, for directing sociotechnical progress — the entangled development of technology and society, as well as the co-production of social and technological progress. It is a way of thinking and a worldbuilding project — a deliberate, collective effort to construct a coherent view of the world capable of guiding action, which despite the prefix techno-, is a holistic philosophy stretching across the whole of sociotechnical life, or what is the same thing, modern life.
It can be a helpful heuristic to think of it as a progressive philosophy of modernity or a form of progressive modernism, in a manner similar to The Enlightenment, which is why James Hughes situates technoprog as an Enlightenment project for the 21st century. Within this broad framing, it is more than strictly a technophilosophy. It is also a social, cultural, and political movement.
Yet there is a reason why it is fruitful to use the prefix, and rather than thinking of it as a successor to The Enlightenment in a general sense, grasp the contours of the project simultaneously as tech-forward social philosophy and as social-forward technophilosophy. It is this entanglement that makes technoprogressivism distinct from progressivism as a whole, and part of why it deserves to be understood as its own project rather than absorbed into progressivism generally.
In matters of society, politics, philosophy, and culture, the technical embodiment — which is how these things come into existence in the physical world — is sorely neglected, rendered one-dimensionally, an afterthought. Technoprogressives, of course, insist that the questions raised by its technopolitical and technocultural project are fundamental to life in modern society, in ways we must not ignore if we want to build the better world progressivism seeks, but this is often overlooked, and a great many people think of the concept as simply applying progressive principles to matters of technology.
This is not completely wrong, but it reduces technoprog to a narrow field within progressivism rather than treating it as a project with its own set of key questions, which sometimes overlap with the mainstream of progressivism and, at other times, diverge wildly to consider matters that do not register for non-technoprog progressives almost ever. As such, the progressive in progressivism should primarily be understood as a progressive way of knowing and worldbuilding, and thus it is crucial to consider technoprog a progressive philosophy of knowledge, or a progressive knowledge praxis, which as an active philosophy is also a progressive form of worldbuilding. But what does this really mean?
It means, at minimum, that I owe you two things: an account of what philosophy is actually for, and a working sense of what makes knowledge progressive. The first is the difference between a philosophy that merely interprets the world and one that can change it. The second is the difference between an intellectual exhibition and a body of knowledge that can actually orient action, even when we do not know the whole way forward in advance.
I propose working both of those out in public, starting with a series on technoprogressive knowledge and the responsibilities of possessing and making that knowledge. There is more to it than reading the right books, though reading the right books is where it has to start. The reviews, the reading lists, the deep dives with James Hughes and others — this is the beginning of that activity, carried out in public.
We do not pretend to already have the answers to all the questions, nor do we know in advance precisely from where we must draw both good questions and the answers that can guide our path. We are simply setting out with a perhaps not-so-humble goal: to develop a technoprogressive epistemology, robust and rich enough to actually guide how we think, organize, and act — tested, as any progressive knowledge must be, against the collective experience of the many fields and communities technoprogressivism draws from, and against whatever we actually manage to build with it.
Next up: What Is Philosophy For? — [link coming soon]