Greeks Bearing Gifts: tracking the labyrinthine path of technology’s progress(laphamsquarterly.org)
laphamsquarterly.org
Greeks Bearing Gifts: tracking the labyrinthine path of technology’s progress
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/technology/greeks-bearing-gifts
4 comments
The title "Greeks Bearing Gifts: trakcing the labyrinthine path of technology's progress" goes fairly unremarked in the article, but it left a big impression on me, was something I expected this article to encompass, since it touches less on technology as a stand-alone thing unto itself, and more of how technology is wielded & for whom.
From Steve Talbott's Devices of the Soul[1],
"Now, jumping ahead to our own day, I’d like you to think for a moment of the various words we use to designate technological products. You will notice that a number of these words have a curious double aspect: they, or their cognate forms, can refer either to external objects we make, or to certain inner activities of the maker. A “device,” for example, can be an objective, invented thing, but it can also be some sort of scheming or contriving of the mind, as when a defendant uses every device he can think of to escape the charges against him. The word “contrivance” shows the same two-sidedness, embracing both mechanical appliances and the carefully devised plans and schemes we concoct in thought. As for “mechanisms” and “machines,” we produce them as visible objects out there in the world even as we conceal our own machinations within ourselves. Likewise, an “artifice” is a manufactured device, or else it is trickery, ingenuity, or inventiveness. “Craft” can refer to manual dexterity in making things and to a ship or aircraft, but a “crafty” person is adept at deceiving others.
This odd association between technology and deceit occurs not only in our own language, but even more so in Homer’s Greek, where it is much harder to separate the inner and outer meanings, and the deceit often reads like an admired virtue. The Greek techne, from which our own word “technology” derives, meant “craft, skill, cunning, art, or device”—all referring without discrimination to what we would call either an objective construction or a subjective capacity or maneuver. Techne was what enabled the lame craftsman god, Hephaestus, to trap his wife, Aphrodite, in a promiscuous alliance with warlike Ares. "
It's powerful groundings, and all too often I wonder & I fret about where we stand: how understandable is our technology? How much technology exists that spreads the memetics, the idea of it's means, that illuminates the world? Trying to understand technology feels like being lost in the labyrinth, I fret.
At this point, Ursala Franklin's Holistic and Prescriptive technologies wikipedia link[2] is on my browsers hotlist, it knows real quick where I'm headed, cause I go here a lot. Prescriptive technology is designed to enact control, to perform functions: it's about a mechanism that does the task, does the job. It's the pulley block factory production line mentioned in the article. And modern technology, even social ones, resembles this: use technology to gather posts/pictures/content from all over, bring them together into big data centers, then send that data back out. This is technology as mechanism, a device.
Ursala also describes holistic technologies. These are more the tools Marc Brunel and Henry Maudslay used to create this production line, the tools they used to devise their factory. Holistic technologies don't necessarily have to enlighten & illuminate their users, but they do have to empower them, give the user flexibility.
I have great hopes that computing is a place where we can extend the holistic nature of technology. Where technology is less about deviousness of bending materials & systems &, in communicative capitalism, people, in to a specific form, and more about expanding generally prowess & capability of the weilders. And letting users participate in expanding & augmenting the tooling, letting the user become a tool maker. But, as the article does somewhat mysteriously abruptly shift & wrap up to,
"As Daniel Susskind so dismayingly notes, our computational muscle has now reached a point where we can create machines—devices variously mechanical, electronic, or atomic—that can think for themselves. And outthink us, to boot.
[...] and though not all is lost to science since in certain places our ability to perform archaic crafts remains intact, still there is an ominous note sounding not too far offstage."
[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/devices-of-the/97805965...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...
From Steve Talbott's Devices of the Soul[1],
"Now, jumping ahead to our own day, I’d like you to think for a moment of the various words we use to designate technological products. You will notice that a number of these words have a curious double aspect: they, or their cognate forms, can refer either to external objects we make, or to certain inner activities of the maker. A “device,” for example, can be an objective, invented thing, but it can also be some sort of scheming or contriving of the mind, as when a defendant uses every device he can think of to escape the charges against him. The word “contrivance” shows the same two-sidedness, embracing both mechanical appliances and the carefully devised plans and schemes we concoct in thought. As for “mechanisms” and “machines,” we produce them as visible objects out there in the world even as we conceal our own machinations within ourselves. Likewise, an “artifice” is a manufactured device, or else it is trickery, ingenuity, or inventiveness. “Craft” can refer to manual dexterity in making things and to a ship or aircraft, but a “crafty” person is adept at deceiving others.
This odd association between technology and deceit occurs not only in our own language, but even more so in Homer’s Greek, where it is much harder to separate the inner and outer meanings, and the deceit often reads like an admired virtue. The Greek techne, from which our own word “technology” derives, meant “craft, skill, cunning, art, or device”—all referring without discrimination to what we would call either an objective construction or a subjective capacity or maneuver. Techne was what enabled the lame craftsman god, Hephaestus, to trap his wife, Aphrodite, in a promiscuous alliance with warlike Ares. "
It's powerful groundings, and all too often I wonder & I fret about where we stand: how understandable is our technology? How much technology exists that spreads the memetics, the idea of it's means, that illuminates the world? Trying to understand technology feels like being lost in the labyrinth, I fret.
At this point, Ursala Franklin's Holistic and Prescriptive technologies wikipedia link[2] is on my browsers hotlist, it knows real quick where I'm headed, cause I go here a lot. Prescriptive technology is designed to enact control, to perform functions: it's about a mechanism that does the task, does the job. It's the pulley block factory production line mentioned in the article. And modern technology, even social ones, resembles this: use technology to gather posts/pictures/content from all over, bring them together into big data centers, then send that data back out. This is technology as mechanism, a device.
Ursala also describes holistic technologies. These are more the tools Marc Brunel and Henry Maudslay used to create this production line, the tools they used to devise their factory. Holistic technologies don't necessarily have to enlighten & illuminate their users, but they do have to empower them, give the user flexibility.
I have great hopes that computing is a place where we can extend the holistic nature of technology. Where technology is less about deviousness of bending materials & systems &, in communicative capitalism, people, in to a specific form, and more about expanding generally prowess & capability of the weilders. And letting users participate in expanding & augmenting the tooling, letting the user become a tool maker. But, as the article does somewhat mysteriously abruptly shift & wrap up to,
"As Daniel Susskind so dismayingly notes, our computational muscle has now reached a point where we can create machines—devices variously mechanical, electronic, or atomic—that can think for themselves. And outthink us, to boot.
[...] and though not all is lost to science since in certain places our ability to perform archaic crafts remains intact, still there is an ominous note sounding not too far offstage."
[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/devices-of-the/97805965...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...
Knowledge is power, and far too many people have zero interest in how things actually work. I'm allergic to such ignorance, if I can find out how something works, generally it is pleasing for me to do so. I suspect this trait is shared universally by those here on HN.