Engineers for Change―Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America

In the late 1960s an eclectic group of engineers joined the antiwar and civil rightsactivists of the time in agitating for change. The engineers were fighting to remake theirprofession, challenging their fellow engineers to embrace a more humane vision of technology. InEngineers for Change, Matthew Wisnioski offers an account of this conflict withinengineering, linking it to deep-seated assumptions about technology and American life. The postwarperiod in America saw a near-utopian belief in technology's beneficence. Beginning in the mid-1960s,however, society--influenced by the antitechnology writings of such thinkers as Jacques Ellul andLewis Mumford--began to view technology in a more negative light. Engineers themselves were seen asconformist organization men propping up the military-industrial complex. A dissident minority ofengineers offered critiques of their profession that appropriated concepts from technology'scritics. These dissidents were criticized in turn by conservatives who regarded them ascountercultural Luddites. And yet, as Wisnioski shows, the radical minority spurred the professionalelite to promote a new understanding of technology as a rapidly accelerating force that ourinstitutions are ill-equipped to handle. The negative consequences of technology spring from itsvery nature--and not from engineering's failures. "Sociotechnologists" were recruited tohelp society adjust to its technology. Wisnioski argues that in responding to the challenges posedby critics within their profession, engineers in the 1960s helped shape our dominant contemporaryunderstanding of technological change as the driver of history.