A first problem is that while techno-phobia, as a pejorative designator, is commonly uttered, it is rarely defined. It is assumed to function on its own, with reference only to itself. It falls into the fallacy of circular reasoning, whereby phobia is immoral because it is wrong, and it is wrong because it is immoral. The result is a concept devoid of signification on its own terms. Along the way, phobia has been stripped entirely of its clinical origins and psychoanalytic definitions. In psychoanalysis, phobias are qualified by a chronic anxiousness that has roots in sexual neuroses.
Further, at least in Freud, phobias have multiple stages, and themselves take on multiple forms. Which expressions of phobia do accusations of techno-phobia insist on? What, if any, are techno-phobia’s libidinal origins or investments? How do those separate it from, for instance, what we may call techno-mysia (the active hatred of technology) or techno-neurosis (a more general mental aversion towards technology)? The critics of techno-phobia offer us no leeway into such questions. But that which makes it doubtful as a concept—its inconsistency—is also what becomes an advantage when employed as an insult to demonize an adversary.
Undefined, yet forceful; such is the work of an insult. Without reference to either its defining qualities or specific expressions, the label ‘phobia’ can be applied almost anywhere whilst losing little of the severe moral evaluation that appears inherent to it. In fact, it is extra powerful precisely because it requires this little analytical precision; labeling a person as fearful can, in theory, be sufficient to challenge the critic of technology’s legitimacy.
This moral judgement is based upon a vague definition of techno-phobia by way of what is it not. When the economics journalist Henry Hazlitt coined the term in his 1946 Economics in one Lesson, it was as part of his anti-leftist attack on unions looking to safeguard jobs in the face of automation. The defining feature of techno-phobia, in this work, is the lack of rational logic: “The technophobes, if they were logical and consistent, would have to dismiss all this progress and ingenuity as not only useless but vicious. Why should freight be carried from New York to Chicago by railroads when we could employ enormously more men, for example, to carry it all on their backs?” From its beginnings, techno-phobia was simply a means of describing a presumed antithesis to technological rationality.