A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Chapter 62

US Politics, Economy and Technology

DAVID M. HART

Technological change is a social process. Individuals who are the agents of such change are generally embedded in organizations, which are themselves structured by institutions, which are in turn embedded in cultural systems of meaning and value. Together, these layers of governance regulate the pace of technological change and determine its direction. The layers interact continuously, usually reinforcing one another, thereby producing characteristic paths of development at the national level.

In the American context, governance in this broad sense conspires to foster relatively rapid and occasionally radical technological change. American culture tends to be accepting of new technologies and is often enthusiastic about them. These cultural biases and their expression in law and in public policy support what Nathan Rosenberg calls “economic experimentation,”¹ a diversity of private efforts to combine and recombine technological systems with organizational schemes for producing and exchanging new goods and services. The market generally decides which of these “experiments” deserve to be continued and which are to be relegated to the dustbin.

Until the twentieth century, the US federal government did little more than passively countenance this dollar-based process of generating and selecting new technologies. Since the country attained Great Power status, and especially since the Second World War, when it assumed a dominant ...