Technological Literacy for Democracy: a Cost-Benefit Analysis
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Technological Literacy for Democracy: a Cost-Benefit Analysis Manuel Carabantes 1 Received: 6 August 2019 / Accepted: 10 September 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Proposals for the democratization of technology imply a necessary condition of universal emancipatory technological literacy. However, in the literature on the topic, people’s willingness to assume the cost in time and effort involved in acquiring that knowledge is often taken for granted. In this paper, we apply Anthony Downs’s economic theory of political action in democracy to analyze the cost-benefit ratio of this literacy from the perspective of the individual subject who should acquire it. Our conclusion is that the cost does not rationally justify in an instrumental sense a benefit that, being mainly of an indivisible nature, motivates individuals to avoid their share of the cost to produce it. Keywords Technological literacy . Emancipation . Democracy . Anthony Downs . Cost-
benefit analysis
1 Introduction Since its birth, capitalism has intensively used technology for its purposes (Mumford 1963), to the extent that there are scholars who speak of an entanglement of technology and capitalism under the name of technocapitalism (Kahn and Kellner 2014; SuarezVilla 2001, 2009, 2016). Technology, which can be both an enabler and a disabler of democracy (Sclove 1995), has been both throughout time. In a sense, technology under the free market regime has facilitated democracy, in so far as it has democratized consumption. But in another sense—perhaps deeper because it transcends material well-being—it has done the opposite, since it has driven the development of capitalism from its primitive form to the current one, in which economic power tends to concentrate in monopolies and oligopolies that, although not having been democratically
* Manuel Carabantes [email protected]
1
Facultad de Filosofía (Faculty of Philosophy), Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Complutense University of Madrid), c/ Profesor Aranguren, 28040 Madrid, Spain
M. Carabantes
elected, have a decisive influence on governments (Connaughton 2012; Wedel 2009), while providing these powers with effective instruments to monitor and limit civil liberties (Zuboff 2019). Against this historical fact that diminishes the quality of democracy, there is a movement of contemporary thinkers from various academic fields who propose to free technology from the control of capitalism and put it at the service of humanity by giving it a political direction within the framework of democracies (Diakopoulos 2015; Feenberg 1999; Marcuse 2007; Mumford 1963; Pasquale 2015; Petrina 2000; Winner 1989). These democratizing proposals share a nuclear deontic thesis: it is necessary to provide people with a technological literacy that allows them to understand what they must decide on. In this sense, a universal technological literacy is needed, i.e., a literacy about technology that, as a regulative idea, everyone should possess. This literacy must be carried out through two main ways:
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