Aleksandr Dugin on Technology
Nothing is neutral, technology is a tool wielded by a master
Dugin, the “controversial” (because everyone outside the Liberal Democratic paradigm is controversial as a matter of rite) Russian political philosopher is a proponent of a type of political realism. For a realist, the importance of a socio-political phenomenon is not in how it can be ideally justified, but in how it actually exists in the world as it is. Thus, in reference to topics like technology, Dugin and other types of political realists would play down the significance of questions like “can technology be used for good?” or “how can society avoid the abuse of technology?”
Instead, they would ask: from whence does technology come? who is its master? against whom or what is technology being wielded? what is the function of technology with the development of world history?
In this way, he understands, as did technology’s skeptics like Jacques Ellul, that technology was never neutral. Nothing is neutral. Technology was born of a certain world spirit, and is employed by that world spirit to achieve specific ends. Ellul famously derided the technification of all of life and interpreted the role of technology in the West as being a vehicle for cultural decline. Technology’s victory over man in the twentieth century was the funeral, not a sign of progress, for Western Man.
And so Dugin understands that technology is a tool of a certain Master, not a mere neutral given that We the Living must use for good:
Technology is not neutral. The market is not the territory of free enterprise and fair competition. It is a myth. The market and technology have a very definite master. And if he does not like something, he can change the rules at any time, because he invented them and imposed them.
This is because technology’s essence is the repudiation of older understandings of metaphysics and culture and society:
Technology, by its very nature, carries the poison of materialism, exploitation, violence, and, ultimately, vice. It replaces being, reality, labor, life, feeling, morality, love. Technology is alienation, and it cannot, sooner or later, but lead to the replacement of the real with the virtual, to a world of total disinformation, simulacres, electronic illusions and direct impact on the consciousness of people.
Technology therefore, being the creation of a specific world spirit with a specific conception of man and society, is the embodied renouncement of traditional man:
Technology is the absolute enemy of man. Now more than ever, we are convinced of this. There is no technology which belongs to everybody and nobody. Everything in the world has a master.
Spengler said that when culture dies, it turns into a technical civilization. Today we can see for ourselves what he meant. The modern West has lost culture altogether. It has become pure technology.
In this last comment, he echoes quite clearly the view of Ellul:
Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.