To Daniel Boorstein, we face an era of advancement like no other, comparable only in name to the renaissance, featuring an updated epithet: Rather than the “Republic of Letters,” whose citizens shared knowledge, we wake up to creation’s next revelation, the “Republic of Technology” (3). Following from this change, he argues that such an epoch is “not only more democratic, but also more in the American mode” (3) touting universal opportunity for entrance and engagement as its most critical feature. And yet, to Boorstein, those two supposed values of early America are in absence of a third, crucial to the new Republic: a “shared experience,” the foremost enabler of total democracy (3). And yet, whereas Boorstein’s contention that the Republic of Technology will ultimately yield a wholly democratic experience for the United States—if not the whole world—based on the egalitarian nature of technological advances that often make imprints across the entire national community, he fails to acknowledge the potentially catastrophic repercussions of the social forces leveraging that very technology. In prizing universal knowledge, the real and dramatic possibility of manipulation by higher forces is left untouched. As such, while the Republic of Technology may lead to a future of similar, comparable lifestyles for people across the nation, their experiences might be trodden upon by a misuse of power on the side of the informants, who hold the value of communal democracy in their very hands.
Boorstein clarifies that the Republic of Technology is one of compatible and comparable experiences among people across America, as his basis for the Republic’s inherent democratic value. With a reasonable conjecture that American lives would become “more instantaneously similar than had ever been imagined possible” (4), he confirms convergence as the “supreme law” of the Republic, in which even distinctions among nations, including “developed” and “underdeveloped,” imply a universal national existence (5). With nearly universal access to technology, the Republic supposedly becomes “ruthless[ly] egalitarian” (10). It is critical to recognize that this argument, which halts at egalitarianism of experience—in that everyone may separately delight in their own individual, personalized technology (10)—is his sole basis for the democratic nature of the Republic. Such a conflation between egalitarianism and democracy, however, is illegitimate. By way of definition, democracy is simply governmental rule by the people. Voting rights do not necessarily guarantee equality, and likewise, cohorts of majority-identifying citizens may very well harm, with minimal recourse, the minorities in their midst who might have equal suffrage. One could lend the argument that, in a democratic system, or even a liberal democracy, such disparities in rights and liberties oscillate according to the results of each election and the contemporary government’s policies. However, if the equality of a nation’s populace is based more on its coalition of politicians in power than the governmental system itself, then egalitarianism is surely related to the system, but certainly not a cause or corequisite. On the converse, a nearly universal quotidian experience for all of a nation’s populace guarantees no development of democracy, or equality, for that matter. Two college-aged students living in the Republic of Technology, for example, might have nearly identical memories of watching Full House with their family after weeknight meals, of downloading the most popular songs on iTunes at the moment of their release, of standing in line for hours on end at their local Verizon store to purchase the next available Samsung Galaxy smartphone. And yet, because of a factor as arbitrary as racial differences, they might face wholly different experiences when confronted by, say, local police. An evermore pervasive technological system may guarantee many shared patterns and habits among people across demographic lines, but an extension of that argument to guarantee full-fledged equality, given rifts within a nation’s populace surrounding those same differentiations—such as race and religion—is a tad naïve to the harsh realities of the system at large. Overall, regardless of the qualifications for democracy, a populace with very similar technological habits is likely insufficient.
However, there exists a greater crisis in the mere thought of technology bringing to the people a shared, universal experience: Such a phenomenon leaves great space for powerful forces within governments, corporations, and other substantial, pervasive organizations to manipulate the population by means of altering the information and media the people consume. Boorstein identifies the striking ease of reaching nearly the entire populace, regardless of educational status or even literacy: Lessons from television, unlike printed material, are accessible to everyone (5). That is the purpose of “the great levelers,” to bring content to the entire nation, without any discrimination (7). Such an idea is complicated by his acknowledgement that, in the new Republic, media is available to everyone, but it might be personalized—and differentiated to an unclarified extent—according to the varying identities of the people whom informants intend to reach (10). Potentially, in the new Republic, priorities on personalization over egalitarianism render the latter as obsolete. Such a dichotomy expands in significance when considering technology’s praxis of begetting itself in new generations, as we enter a “feedback world” (9). In such an epoch, already existent technology plays a much more extensive role than that of human nature itself in determining what technological developments come about in the future (9). In the Republic of Technology, we continue development to satisfy unrealistic “‘needs’ for the unnecessary” (9). The above sufficiently evidences the reality of human weakness to technology by acknowledging that, in the right position, we may fall victim to unrealistic desires, as a product of our own exposure to the technology around us.
This extrapolation leads to a scary conclusion: If people are vulnerable to manipulation at the hands of technology, then those who control the media and information systems driving such pervasive technology hold frightening abilities to exploit everyone in the nation. Thomas Jefferson qualifies this as “corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators” (qtd. in 89), but the ramifications could be much more widespread. Such influence, on behalf of the governments and corporations harnessing mass media, impacts more than merely “the germ of virtue” of the populace (qtd. in 89). It might alter the spending habits, political affiliations, and all that makes each American even a little bit unique, given the grandiose role of technology in quotidian life. Indeed, Jefferson goes as far as to suggest that even secure conceptions of truth can be knocked off the kilter, as long as no one is too distracted by technological consumption to forget about fighting for them (96). Given Boorstein’s reiterations of evidence on behalf of technology’s political power in the modern world—including the dismantlement of armies and the takedown of political rulers (7)—it’s not unrealistic to envisage a world ruled by those who control such pervasive media and information systems. In the brave new world that is the Republic of Technology, it might even be ironic to suggest that such potential for mass-manipulation might be concerning, for even the word “concerning” itself implies communal attention to the issue. For this new epoch of perpetual universal consumption of individualized—and thus potentially comparable, but no longer strictly egalitarian—information and media, attention seems to be the nation’s most critical deficiency. At the fiercest extent of the Republic of Technology, democratic values are destroyed when no one even cares to look.
If anything is certain from Boorstein’s categorization and my own analysis of the new Republic, it is that the Republic of Technology exists on a continuum, as might fit such a system rooted in the rapid technological development of modernity. Thus, while certain aspects of it are recognizable in so many “developed” societies, including the United States, such as near universal usage of technology in myriad aspects of quotidian life, the nightmare of a population wholly under ideological siege by greater commercial and governmental forces likely remains to be seen. However, its roots are in our daily lives, without any doubt. Ultimately, such a scary social structure should encourage people to reanalyze what it means to exist within a culture so dominated by a supposed universal necessity for ongoing, consistent usage of technology. Continued engagement with technological devices implies consent to their repercussions, so one should reconsider whether they are actually worthwhile, given their purported advantages and their often hidden downsides. One should also consider the roles of those who control our technology—the nonprofit and commercial organizations issuing technology and content, the governments regulating them, and the individual power-players who breathe life into the systems that make up the new, developing Republic. Pervasive technology may, in certain contexts, become an egalitarian force, and if it does not create democracy, it might surely assist in democracy’s fulfillment. However, without perpetual attention toward the system at large, rather than merely its dividends—the technology we use—we may do both our nation and our world a great disservice in the genesis of the Republic of Technology, as it contemporarily unfolds.
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