Every "new" technology is always ushered in with the language of inevitability, which tautologically justifies its existence -- it's been "pulled into existence

Every "new" technology is always ushered in with the language of inevitability, which tautologically justifies its existence -- it's been "pulled into existence," a side-effect of progress, "make some thing people want," etc. etc. I quote at length from Raymond Williams's study Television published in 1974 (!) > The physical fact of instant transmission, as a technical possibility, has been uncritically raised to a social fact, without any pause to notice that virtually all such transmission is at once selected and controlled by existing social authorities [...] > If the effect of the medium is the same, whoever controls or uses it, and whatever apparent content he may try to insert, then we can forget ordinary political and cultural argument and let the technology run itself. It is hardly surprising that this conclusion has been welcomed by the 'media-men' of the existing institutions [...] > The model can be related to history only by endless retrospect, in which by selection such a process can be generalised or demonstrated. Characteristically, in such a model, there will be no more history: a culminating age has arrived. MS Paint diagrams give the gloss of spontaneity; the big goofy arrows tell a version of history reduced to simple cause and effect; the easy steps "Democratization, Aggregation, Transformation" flatten it into a linear treadmill. Clubhouse becomes an overdetermined effect rather than something deliberately built -- it's another stop on the three-step treadmill that's coming whether you like it or not (so get your investment dollars in now). Under this ideology, technology is something that happens to us. But as Nowaldo says, it is "trying to market itself into existence" [1] and appeals to inevitability are exactly how they do it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26144055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26144055