While science fiction often showcases technology, often very front and center, there’s often a lot of additional tech in the world that goes barely remarked. We can call this ancillary technology, in a way that offhand mentions of tech in a sci-fi book often include – one-liners that function as set dressing that end up becoming prescient for future real-world innovations.
We see examples of this throughout science fiction, from the simple screens, tricorders, and automatic doors of Star Trek, to the various uni-functional droids in the Star Wars universe, to the aforementioned one-liners in cyberpunk novels that end up becoming part of our daily lives: think smartphones and credit cards and dashboard cameras. There’s some amazing stuff there hidden between the margins.
Ancillary tech is a corollary to the idea of the technological sublime. In his work on the electrification of America, David E. Nye noted how the technology really gained traction when it disappeared behind the walls, when it became infrastructure that would just reliably work with the flick of a switch. This sublimation of the tech into the built environment evokes the dual meaning of the root word: it becomes awesome (or awful, I guess. Either way there’s lots of awe involved in the sublime). This is similar to the Albert Borgmann’s device paradigm, where our relations to our tools and tech changes when it goes from being a thing we do to a device where we push a button (frex).
This idea of Ancillary Tech popped up again for my during a recent re-read of Virtual Light (Gibson, 1993), as we noted in a recent issue of the Newsletter. I noticed the text had several examples of tech in the marginalia, things like one-time credit cards, rear view cameras in vehicles, led displays on vehicles and all kinds of surfaces, and several other besides. Many of these are things where we can see a version of it in our daily lives.
Ancillary Tech is all around us in the media. If you see some examples of Ancillary Tech, let me know your fave. 🙂