The Systems Idea In Action

In Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-Of-Control (1989), Langdon Winner takes a sobering look at modern predicament:

Society is composed of persons who cannot design, build, repair, or even operate most of the devices upon which their lives depend [...] In the complexity of this world, people are confronted with extraordinary events and functions that are literally unintelligible to them. They are unable to give an adequate explanation of man-made phenomena in their immediate experience. They are unable to form a coherent, rational picture of the whole. Under these circumstances, all persons do and, indeed, must accept a great number of things on faith [...] Their way of understanding, however, is basically religious rather than scientific; only a small portion of one’s everyday experience in the technological society can be made scientific [...] the plight of members of the technological society can be compared to that of a newborn child. At first the child cannot organize the buzzing chaos of worldly phenomena. Much of the data that enters its sense does not form coherent wholes. There are many things the child cannot understand or, after it has learned to speak, cannot successfully explain to anyone [...] Citizens of the modern age in this respect are less fortunate than children. They never escape a fundamental bewilderment in the face of the complex world that their senses report. They are permanently swamped by extraordinary phenomena bombarding them from every side. They are not able to organize all or even very much of this into sensible wholes [...] Another possible objection might be that there is no problem because difficulties of the sort I have mentioned either do or soon will have remedies. Society will find means of effective synthesis to deal with the problems of understanding that arise from an increasingly complex milieu. Systems theory, artificial intelligence, or some new distinctively modern way of knowing will alleviate the burdens [...] soon will exist tools of intellectual synthesis capable of dealing with extreme complexity—I must report that I have found no such tools in practice. I have elsewhere surveyed the various candidates for this honor—systems theory and systems analysis, computer sciences and artificial intelligence, new methods of coding great masses of information, the strategy of disjointed incrementalism, and so forth. As relief for the difficulties raised here—the bafflement of human intelligence by the sociotechnical complexity of the modern age—none of these offers much help [...] the systems idea another—and indeed the ultimate—technique to shape man and society[p.298 →]

By allowing the existence of large bureaucratic systems under centralized control, whether corporate, governmental, or institutional, we unwittingly enter into a hideous conspiracy against ourselves, one in which we resolutely work to limit the growth of our minds and spirits. The only conceivable answer is to break the power of these things, through grit, courage, indomitability and resolution if possible, through acts of personal sabotage and disloyalty if not.