Introduction

Burriss spoke these words in 1971, at a symposium of the Society of Women Engineers and the Engineering Foundation in the US. By then, a sea change in the public's perception of modern technology was underway. In the course of a few years, experts and technocratic approaches had lost much of their authority—at least for “our young people,” as Burriss phrased it. Technocracy's expert-driven, high-tech, and large-scale innovation choices were strongly criticized. The critique also targeted technocracy's systems approaches to making future-proof technology choices. The linear model of innovation, which set innovation agendas, also came under fire.

New social movements, including protest movements, led the attack on technocracy's systems thinking. These social movements intersected with a “youth culture” or “counterculture” of a generation that rejected the social norms of their parents. Despite their diversity, protesters united in their repudiation of what they saw as a “dominant Western technological worldview.” New activist organizations such as Friends of the Earth (1969) and Greenpeace (1971) denounced postwar technological systems for having been designed and optimized to efficiently exploit nature—and destroy the environment. Civil rights activists lamented that technocrats made social decisions that ignored minority viewpoints—and reached beyond the democratic control of citizens and their elected representatives. In the context of the nuclear arms race and chemical warfare in Vietnam, antiwar protesters concluded that technocracy's military-industrial-university innovation system had produced perverse weaponry. Counterculture authors believed that technocrats had used systems of rationality and order—only to stifle emotions, self-expression, and communality. Many felt that radical change was needed: humans, not “the system,” should come first.