Toward a Minor Tech:Chavez Heras 500

The Digital Pastoral: a Minor Critique of Minor Tech

Daniel Chávez Heras

Minor tech, with its nod to minor literature, reminds of Wendell Berry’s reluctance to buy a computer in the late 1980s. Bemoaning digital technologies increasing dependence on strip-mined coal, Berry wrote “How could I write conscientiously against the rape of nature if I were, in the act of writing, implicated in the rape?” and went to to defend his writing on a mechanical typewriter and only during the daytime. He also prescribed a list of injunctions to evaluate technological innovation, including that proposed new technologies ought to be cheaper, at least as small in scale and consume less energy than their predecessors, be repairable, and not disturb community relations.

These prescriptions deeply echo some of today’s criticisms about big or “major” tech, with its supranational powers, polluting data centres, opaque corporate governance, and profound and often nefarious influence in social relations. Take for example Anna Tsing’s critique of scale and scalability, a version of which has been picked up by cooperative, community-driven, horizontal, decentralised, federated, initiatives that “resist scale” as a deliberate counterpoint to corporate big tech; from feminist servers to the Small File Photo Festival which questions the “endless growth of higher and higher resolutions”.

Though I share many of the concerns posed by the unchecked corporate takeover of digital technologies, and I am sympathetic too to the political dimensions of these arguments, I am less persuaded by their proponent’s tactical choices and concrete instantiations of what I would call, in reference to Berry, the digital pastoral. To stick with scalability, for example, it seems to me that it is a feature of technological systems that can be more easily resisted when one is thinking about art festivals and niche online communities, and not so much when we think about the global systems that regulate networked communications upon which millions of people depend everyday. I am not convinced that non-scalable technologies are the best way to address the needs of the global south, with its vast populations and very large, very pressing, problems. Intuitively, I tend to believe that the vast majority of the world cannot afford not to think at scale on the face of the systemic threats that beset the planet and our collective survival in it.

I am sceptical about minor tech for many of the same reasons I am sceptical of Berry’s arguments. I think he fundamentally misunderstands the nature of technological innovation, and its and in following these injunctions minor tech risks misunderstanding how many people already depend on large-scale systems ―systems that that certainly can and ought to work better, more fairly, and more democratically, but probably will not and should not cease to exist. We might not like our dependence on these systems, and individually we might even be able to retreat from them, but I would caution not confuse this desire for individual emancipation with our collective responsibility to the many who cannot afford to resist scale. The issue for me is not how to avoid scale, but rather how and who decides what to scale and how. This is, I want to clarify, a hopeful scepticism. One aspect that I like about minor tech and that makes me optimistic about its future is that in its very definition there is potential: it does not have to stay minor; it might come of age and perhaps come to enact some of its poignant and otherwise intellectually rich criticisms in broader social arenas; heck, some of it might in fact scale much better than we originally thought!