High Tech Rhetoric

2021.04.04

Citizens often believe that societal problems can be solved by technological innovations. Because of that belief, there is a kind of public reverence for new technology. That reverence is manifested in public discourse as techno-optimism. Casual readers of digital publications such as Wired or Medium are familiar with techno-optimism, even if they have never explicitly encountered the term. The idea was succinctly summed up by the historian Margaret O’Mara as “the belief that technology and technologists are building the future and that the rest of the world, including government, needs to catch up.” Setting aside the veracity of such a belief, techno-optimism is worth studying for its rhetorical merits. As a trend in long-form journalism and think tank reporting, techno-optimism has developed a rhetorical voice of its own, complete with modern reformulations of the traditional persuasive appeals to ethos, logos, and pathos. An excellent example of this rhetorical approach is Jon Evans’ essay “It Is Engineers, Not Politicians, Who Can Solve Climate Change,” originally published in 2017 by The Walrus, a Canadian outlet for digital pamphleteers. Evans’ new-fashioned employment of classical persuasive appeals to argue for technological solutions to the problem of climate change exemplifies the rhetorical potential of techno-optimism.

To understand why Evans’ work is so effective, one must look to the classical background of rhetorical theory. The most systematic approach to persuasion set out in the ancient world is found in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. To Aristotle, a piece of rhetoric has three components: the rhetorician, the subject (the behaviour or decision the rhetorician attempts to influence), and the audience. Because this triad forms the fundamental structure of rhetorical communication, all such communication can be analyzed according to three corresponding persuasive appeals: ethos, the appeal of the rhetorician’s character and credibility; logos, the appeal of the strength of the argument; and pathos, the appeal derived from tailoring the persuasive communication to the emotional state of the audience. If we use this framework to analyze Evans’ essay, we can see that he uses the ancient approach to influence contemporary opinions regarding climate change.

One of the toughest rhetorical challenges for the techno-optimist is explaining difficult, technical concepts in a way that average readers can understand. Evans uses this challenge to establish an ethos, or ethical appeal, that remains unstated throughout the work. He adopts the strategy of “show, don’t tell” writing. He never mentions that, in addition to being a well-published author of futuristic novels and high-profile tech journalism, he is a career software developer with degrees in electrical and computer engineering. Instead, he persuades the reader by speaking plainly and authoritatively on complex issues such as the difference between exponential and linear growth forecasts of developing solar power technologies. He also avoids industry jargon and arguments that might be over-the-head of the lay person. For example, after analyzing the potential merits of geoengineering and carbon sequestration — two concepts that are likely foreign to most readers — he does not dismiss the ideas on abstruse technical grounds. Rather, he sums up the unknown dangers of such technologies in language the average reader can understand: “The atmosphere is an insanely complicated system, and nobody pretends to think they understand the potentially disastrous repercussions.” Evans’ ability to explain, evaluate, and adjudicate esoteric concepts such as geoengineering in language that non-specialists can understand appeals to readers and earns their trust, assuring the audience that he knows what he is talking about.

Unlike his ethos, however, Evans’ logos, or logical appeal, is very pronounced. Logos literally means “word” in Greek, and the logical appeal refers to the rhetorician’s orderly use of words to present evidence for their claim. Traditionally, a popular approach to persuading a reader through logic has been to present empirical data and factual reporting that supports the rhetorician’s case. This often involves statistics, historical documents, and opinion papers written by experts. Evans utilizes many such tools, but he does so in a uniquely techno-optimistic way. For example, he cites reports from tech-savvy sources such as McKinsey & Company, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Isaac Asimov. What’s more, as if his tech bona fides were not strong enough, while arguing that policy advisers consistently underestimate the year-over-year growth of renewable energy, he embeds a tweet in his article from a researcher at the Eindhoven University of Technology that graphically depicts how inaccurate the International Energy Agency (IEA) has been in its predictions of the rapid increase of solar power output. This combination of old-fashioned logical appeals coupled with information age sources and social media delivery platforms gives his essay an air of sophistication and worldliness, making his argument seem compelling and timely.

That unique combination of sophistication and worldliness is also on display in Evans’ use of pathos. The appeal to pathos persuades the audience by framing the subject within the context of their unique concerns and circumstances. The aim of such an appeal is to arouse emotions within the audience that will influence their judgment to the benefit of the rhetorician. This is often difficult for the techno-optimist because most audiences do not typically have strong feelings about technological ideas such as carbon sequestration. Evans’ pathos is achieved by explaining such ideas in a style befitting The Walrus readership: intelligent, but not pretentious; detached and objective, but also alert to social issues. Consider this passage from the article:

“To stop global warming before it becomes catastrophic, we need to take technology which is currently restricted to the very wealthy, and make it available to the poorest of the poor, in a matter of only a decade or two. If only the global technology industry had essentially been training for this superhuman feat for its entire existence. If only this was arguably the one thing that it is incredibly, consistently good at. Oh, wait.”

Notice how the first sentence is a bold, defensible claim such as one might find in a political science journal. But with the “If only…” he immediately juxtaposes a playful, conversational style. Then, in the third sentence, he employs explicit sarcasm. Finally, there is the exclamatory “Oh, wait” — a facetious turn of phrase less appropriate to a political treatise than to the day-to-day repartee of common, middle class twenty- and thirty-somethings. Evans’ article is a constant balancing act of this kind of tonal-shift, and it is punctuated by many classical rhetorical devices such as isocolon (“Desperate times, desperate measures”) and metaphor (“vast pale forests of turbines”). His ability to merge these different tones — academic, conversational, grandiloquent — into a fresh, techno-optimistic voice likely appeals to the average reader of The Walrus, an online magazine that seeks to “provoke new thinking.”

Evans’ unique blend of classical appeals and high tech culture is rhetorically effective — but does that make him right? Besides the Aristotelian appeals, there are other conceptual lenses through which his article can be viewed. Twentieth century philosopher Stephen Toulmin proposed a model of argumentation that expanded upon Aristotle’s theory of logos. For Toulmin, an argument has three parts: the claim (“You should not study rhetoric in college”); the grounds (“Those who study rhetoric are unlikely to find employment after graduating”); and the warrant, often left unstated, that connects the grounds to the claim (“People go to college to find a job after graduating”). For Toulmin, the success of an appeal to logos hinges on the audience assenting to the warrant. If we analyze Evans’ essay using Toulmin’s model, the warrant Evans needs his audience to accept is that solving climate change is a matter of developing better and cheaper technologies and not something else, such as changing widespread human behaviours or eliminating existing business interests that encourage polluters. This, for Toulmin, would not be a warrant but another claim that needs to be defended, regardless of how persuasive Evans’ techno-optimism may make it sound.