"technical code" of the object mediates the process
<p class=default>
<b>The Technical Code </b>
<br/>
That these conflicts over social control of technology are not new can be seen from the
interesting case of the "bursting boilers."22 Steamboat boilers were the first technology
the U.S. Government subjected to safety regulation. Over 5000 people were killed or
injured in hundreds of steamboat explosions from 1816, when regulation was first proposed,
to 1852, when it was actually implemented. Is this many casualties or few? Consumers
evidently were not too alarmed to continue traveling by riverboat in ever increasing
numbers. Understandably, the ship owners interpreted this as a vote of confidence and
protested the excessive cost of safer designs. Yet politicians also won votes demanding
safety.
<br/>
The accident rate fell dramatically once technical improvements were mandated. Legislation
would hardly have been necessary to achieve this outcome had it been technically
determined. But in fact boiler design was relative to a social judgment about safety. That
judgment could have been made on strictly market grounds, as the shippers wished, or
politically, with differing technical results. In either case, those results
<u>constitute</u>
a proper boiler. What a boiler "is" was thus defined through a long process of political
struggle culminating finally in uniform codes issued by the American Society of Mechanical
Engineers.
<br/>
This example shows just how technology adapts to social change. What I call the "technical
code" of the object mediates the process. That code responds to the cultural horizon of
the society at the level of technical design. Quite down-to-earth technical parameters
such as the choice and processing of materials are
<u>socially</u>
specified by the code. The illusion of technical necessity arises from the fact that the
code is thus literally "cast in iron" or "set in concrete" as the case may be.23
<br/>
Conservative anti-regulatory social philosophies are based on this illusion. They forget
that the design process always already incorporates standards of safety and environmental
compatibility; similarly, all technologies support some basic level of user or worker
initiative. A properly made technical object simply
<u>must</u>
meet these standards to be recognized as such. We do not treat conformity as an expensive
addd-on, but regard it as an intrinsic production cost. Raising the standards means
altering the definition of the object, not paying a price for an alternative good or
ideological value as the trade-off model holds.
<br/>
But what of the much discussed cost/benefit ratio of design changes such as those mandated
by environmental or other similar legislation? These calculations have some application to
transitional situations, before technological advances responding to new values
fundamentally alter the terms of the problem. But all too often, the results depend on
economists' very rough estimates of the monetary value of such things as a day of trout
fishing or an asthma attack. If made without prejudice, these estimates may well help to
prioritize policy alternatives. But one cannot legitimately generalize from such policy
applications to a universal theory of the costs of regulation.
<br/>
Such fetishism of efficiency ignores our ordinary understanding of the concept which alone
is relevant to social decision-making. In that everyday sense, efficiency concerns the
narrow range of values that economic actors routinely affect by their decisions.
Unproblematic aspects of technology are not included. In theory one can decompose any
technical object and account for each of its elements in terms of the goals it meets,
whether it be safety, speed, reliability, etc., but in practice no one is interested in
opening the "black box" to see what is inside.
<br/>
For example, once the boiler code is established, such things as the thickness of a wall
or the design of a safety valve appear as essential to the object. The cost of these
features is not broken out as the specific "price" of safety and compared unfavorably with
a more efficient but less secure version of the technology. Violating the code in order to
lower costs is a crime, not a trade-off. And since all further progress takes place on the
basis of the new safety standard, soon no one looks back to the good old days of cheaper,
insecure designs.
<br/>
Design standards are only controversial while they are in flux. Resolved conflicts over
technology are quickly forgotten. Their outcomes, a welter of taken-for-granted technical
and legal standards, are embodied in a stable code, and form the background against which
economic actors manipulate the unstable portions of the environment in the pursuit of
efficiency. The code is not varied in real world economic calculations but treated as a
fixed input.
<br/>
Anticipating the stabilization of a new code, one can often ignore contemporary arguments
that will soon be silenced by the emergence of a new horizon of efficiency calculations.
This is what happened with boiler design and child labor; presumably, the current debates
on environmentalism will have a similar history, and we will someday mock those who object
to cleaner air as a "false principle of humanity" that violates technological imperatives.
<br/>
Non-economic values intersect the economy in the technical code. The examples we are
dealing with illustrate this point clearly. The legal standards that regulate workers'
economic activity have a significant impact on every aspect of their lives. In the child
labor case, regulation helped to widen educational opportunities with consequences that
are not primarily economic in character. In the riverboat case, Americans gradually chose
high levels of security and boiler design came to reflect that choice. Ultimately, this
was no trade-off of one good for another, but a non-economic decision about the value of
human life and the responsibilities of government.
<br/>
Technology is thus not merely a means to an end; technical design standards define major
portions of the social environment, such as urban and built spaces, workplaces, medical
activities and expectations, life patterns, and so on. The economic significance of
technical change often pales beside its wider human implications in framing a way of life.
In such cases, regulation defines the cultural framework
<u>of</u>
the economy; it is not an act
<u>in</u>
the economy.
<br/>
</p>