The Milkbar Manifesto

This is a manifesto that I wrote in 1999 to accompany my work Milkbar.com.au (as an angrier man… grrrr). I still believe in most of these things, especially the points that I have highlighted. Passive technological determinism is so engrained in the popular imagination that an entire professional class (many employed in universities )  manipulate its discourses to make themselves look special, cash in, and reinforce in the popular mind that technology advances in a politically neutral, positive, progressive, and inevitable way.  All technological advancement creates winners and losers, and those that tell us we don’t have a say in this can piss off!

The Milkbar Manifesto: ‘Does Technology Drive History?’(1)

• The proprietor of the milkbar believes that technology advances in a social context. Technology and society cannot be separated; we cannot understand culture without communications devices, and technology cannot exist without community (and Historians use technology to communicate understandings of our past)
• Technology is not always necessary. However, the meanings and opinions embedded within the technology are. Technology is a modern word that combines the Greek techne (skill, metier) with logos (knowledge). Techne crudely translates into the ‘skill of knowledge’ and is not just the skill of technique or creating a form.
• There can be no such thing as a Luddite
• The proprietor of the milkbar believes that no one disciplinary discourse or practice owns the Internet
• The proprietor of the Milkbar believes in the public good model of the Internet
• The Milkbar proprietor believes that the idea called ‘cyberspace’ is not that helpful. Technology lives in a place and a history of ideas; technology is not placeless, and amnesia is not freedom.
• The proprietor of the milkbar believes that technology need not be practical, technology need not be helpful, technology need not be rational. Technology is embedded within culture, and culture is contradictory.
• The proprietor of the milkbar believes that proselytisation, determinism, monomania, transcendence, ‘vanguardism’, neologisms, sophism, solipsism, and ‘e’-separatism are cheap tricks by people who aren’t that special.
• Beware of the technologist as condottiere (i.e. anything for anybody anywhere)
• The proprietor of the milkbar believes that technology does not always lead; people with technology lead (in this instance, historiographical and methodological approaches lead, combined with technology)
• The milkbar proprietor believes you have a right to be a Libertarian. Still, I also have a right not to be killed (understanding power is a good start in escaping the iron-cage of post-industrial Libertarianism).
• The proprietor of the milkbar respects process-led learning models, but not without understanding the particular contextual knowledge that the model seeks to advance (i.e.. History)
• History is an art, not a science (design is something else altogether).

(1) Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (eds) Does Technology Drive History? : The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.