The Vulnerability of Technological Culture

Abstract

other attacks since, have demonstrated how vulnerable our modern societies are.1 These events shattered many people’s basic feelings of security and safeness, though 9/11 probably did not radically change the view of scholars in science, technology, and society studies (STS). Work on this chapter started in response to 9/11, when several historians and sociologists of technology and science asked in what ways their research could be relevant to understand these events.2 I will argue that it is worth to investigate the vulnerability of technological culture, and that this can be done fruitfully from an STS perspective. My main point, however, is different. I want to suggest that vulnerability is not to be taken as something purely negative. Living in a technological culture, I will argue, inevitably implies to live in a vulnerable world. And vulnerability is not only an inevitable characteristic; it is even an important asset of our technological culture as a prerequisite for living with the quest for innovation. To live in an open, changing and innovative culture, we must pay the price of vulnerability. Vulnerability is a central issue when thinking about innovation. Joseph Schumpeter’s recognition that the fundamental instability of capitalism presents an ever-present possibility of entrepreneurs ’ seizing upon innovations can be read as an early formulation of a positive relation. Vulnerability seems to be a condition sine qua non for innovation, as it is the inevitable result of the instability and dynamic development that Schumpeter identified as prerequisites for innovation (Schumpeter 1939). The relation has also been made vice versa: innovation makes vulnerable.