‘Dark technology’, aggressiveness and the question of cyber-ethics

Abstract

We live in a thoroughly technocratic culture (Castells 2010; Germain 2017). 'Technocratic' means literally 'the rule of technology', and as Heidegger demonstrated in his forceful essay, "The Question Concerning Technology" (1977), our era is marked by this. It assumes many guises, of course, and although Heidegger was thinking of industrial technology, such as, among other things, factories spewing black smoke into a once pristine atmosphere, what may seem to be the innocuous and 'clean' technology of computers, iPads and smartphones, turns out, on closer inspection, to be far less so. Some years ago there was a keynote address at a communications theory conference (IAMCR, June 2013) in Dublin, Ireland, presented by Professor Richard Maxwell, of Queens College, New York. He disabused his audience of the idea that the laptops and smartphones we use are 'clean' technology. The materials and industrial processes that are involved in manufacturing these, he said, amount to the equivalent of approximately 800 000 cars' carbon emissions per annum. But this 'materialist' perspective is not the only one to reveal a downside to our precious communications technology, the mainstay of which is the internet. Arguably, the social effects it has on human lives are even more deleterious. Granted, technology is a pharmakon-poison and cure-so we do not dispute its usefulness as a tool; in fact, without our laptops we could not write this paper, nor write up any research. But most people seem to be blind to its 'poisonous' character, which has to be kept firmly in mind if one wishes to live a fairly balanced life. This poisonous, or 'dark', aspect of communications technology, or broadly, of connectivity-which one knows all too well from the phenomenon known as 'trolling' (let alone 'cyber-crime'; see Gross 2018) on various internet sites (Moreau 2019)-is strikingly thematised in Henry Alex Rubin's critically acclaimed film, Disconnect (Rubin 2012). The film's title can be read as both a descriptive term pertaining to the almost pathological situation of 'connectivity overload' and 'performance exhaustion' among (especially young) people in a so-called