Technology and the Moral Order

Alvin Gouldner, Richard A. Peterson

In 1962, Alvin Gouldner and Richard Peterson applied factor analytic techniques to two major datasets on 71 preliterate societies, an exploratory study that would not have been possible without computational power. The book's central issue is on the relationship between technology and ideology and whether or not a causal priority exists between them.

If Gouldner and Peterson's Technology and the Moral Order is still relevant today, it's because the tendency to assert a single factor--economic, biological or technical (determinism); maybe: "the" system-- to explain "where we're headed" still breeds polemic. So does the cloud of particulars that surround supply and demand, transaction costs and the unintended consequences of the platform economy on social and urban life.

Tik Tok's algorithms have likely superceeded the pioneering analysis that aimed to bring empirical data to bear on the hypothesis that technoenvironmental variables determine basic social and cultural patterns in human society.

If, as the writers of "Technology and the Moral Order" conclude, technology influences the normative, then the question for Urbit is not which technologies prove the staying power of societies but how. Gouldner and Peterson employed data from the Yale Cross-Cultural Files representative of societies around the world. The team coded 59 variable and correlated them in a matrix, then extracted a set of factors using mechanical criteria.