Philosophy of Technology

Writing Prompt 1

Technological determinism is the idea that human history is controlled by industrial development and that its path is predetermined as well as unavoidable past a certain degree of progress, which has already been exceeded. The reason that this is the case is because it, technology, becomes an autonomous pressure which influences cultural, political, economic, spiritual, and social aspects of the societies it is a part of, which, as a result forces certain outcomes to occur. Marcuse argues that modern technological determinism has more defense mechanisms deployed to stop any potential forces seeking to change its trajectory because it is further along than the technologies that came before it.

For example, because technology is able to extract and process resources faster and more efficiently than before, it is able to give abundance to those who would be inclined to revolt. This makes it so that the revolutionary spirit is dulled in the populous and rebellions are less likely to halt technological progress through obstructing the system, especially because full and distracted consumers do not make for good soldiers for a civil war, nor do they have an incentive to start something.

This advancement also gives those in power more means of suppression to deploy on any rebellions that are to occur. While physical weapons and armaments like riot gear, tanks, tear gas, even nuclear war heads have improved, the primary methods are more subtle and prevalent. With technologies like GPS, backdoor keys, media algorithm editors, and integrated system banning, those in power can see, silence, or eliminate opposition with out firing a single shot. With no access to banks, no ability to contact anyone, and all one’s devices working against them when it comes to privacy, attempting a coup or riot is nearly impossible unless those in power allow it.

Heilbroner, however, states that technological determinism is specific to capitalism and cannot be universally applied to all technological systems and the governments that they inhabit. Places that are high in capitalism and low in socialism experience technological determinism because the market forces with them force the society to surrender to it more readily than in other forms of government. So, technological progress, a social activity, is responsive to social directions present in the society it is in because the progress has to be compatible with the existing social conditions to propagate and become dominant. This means that, hypothetically, a way out of the seemingly unavoidable fate of technological determinism is not primarily within changing the technology, but rather in changing the social systems surrounding it. For instance, if no one wants a computer or feels the need to subscribe to a monthly entertainment platform then those devices and practices will cease to exist.

Baudrillard complicates this solution with the idea that the evil demon of images is a prolific and dangerous instrument used to stop any potential shift that Heilbroner claims can change things. In other words, simulations, like movies, videos, and photos, are now self-referential and self-replicating.

A good example of this is how historical documentaries and images are used to remember those supposed events. People know they happened because they see it with their own eyes, and they believe in their authenticity because they can see it. This cyclical reasoning makes the validity of one’s claims hard to quantify despite making it easier for everyone to declare that they are unmistakably correct in their assertions.

This is exacerbated by the proliferation of reuploaded content. The video of something is copied, altered slightly, and then copied again in a seemingly never-ending cycle of obfuscation. This makes it difficult to find the original unedited version in the sea of replicas, not to mention verifying the origin’s validity.

As a result, a catch-22 is formed. If one wants to be sure that they are correct in the digital age they need to dig through countless archives of data designed to distract and lead one astray. This makes it so that one cannot be certain of the conclusion they reach, no matter how hard they reach. But if one does not reach at all they are also likely to not be correct because what reaches the surface of one’s feed or attention tends to be the most edited and refined information, almost flawlessly designed to distract or entertain, rather than provide with a complex nuanced and potentially uncertain truth.

This simultaneous uncertainty and certainty of reality is how 9/11 could be argued to have been a false flag operation or potentially not happened at all while a theory as initially absurd as “Pizzagate” did happen and is being covered up by the same deep state that did the former. With most of one’s waking hours being spent behind the glowing lights of a screen; a purely rational conclusion can be reached despite being entirely wrong by conventional standards. Such things also contribute to polarization which undermines and sometimes even completely discredits a universal consensus reality among a population. This complicates both Marcuse’s and Heilbroner’s ideas because political unrest generated by this breakdown of universal standards could derail not just technological determinism by a violent and dangerous civil war but also could be unavoidable because this level of development seems to be inevitably hazardous to the continuation of civil society. After all, no matter how many waves are made in a pond through rain, rocks, motion, or movement of any kind, eventually entropy will take it all away, leaving only a calm pond, perhaps even an empty one, devoid of water, and devoid of life.

Writing Prompt 2

Simondon and Stiegler both speak about the interconnected nature of humanity and technology and the implications surrounding said relationship. Simondon rejects hylomorphism because he believes that the process of invention is done through concretization instead. In other words when there are flaws or imperfections in a technological system inventors cannot design a new more effective system immediately because they do not have the intermediary steps necessary in order to achieve the intended outcome. This means that invention is not grounded in the past because what has yet to be invented is not necessarily directly related to the future iteration of that technology because new and more efficient methods of performing the task may arise independently from the current system’s modality.

This process is hampered by the nature in which people address and label things, especially when pertaining to technical objects as a whole. For example, people say something is a car or a plane and not as an amalgamation of many separate parts. As a result, one is less likely to change the overall structure or individual parts of the object because the label fixates it in a stagnate state rather than in a process of continually becoming better than it already is.

On another point, Stiegler states that the interconnectedness between technics and humanity leads technological objects to be just as responsible for the creation or invention of humanity as humanity is for the creation or invention of technology. More specifically, homogenization stems from technology. The spear and the tools associated with that make it possible for humans to have become humans. This leads to a sort of ambivalence or undecidable dilemma of whether humans or human technics came first. For example, if the clothing and technology currently possessed is stripped from people, they become dehumanized, but if they gain it back again, they start to regain their former habits.

As a consequence of this, humanity has a sort of identity crisis where there is uncertainty on what a human is. Humans project towards their past and are unsettled by it, as they do not find the answers they are looking for and are not happy with what they find instead. Origin myths like Prometheus and the fire he gives humanity because there where no more skills left for humans highlight this as a theme in what makes humans what they are.

This directs towards his belief that all that ever has been and will be is a trace, and that humans are a trace of a trace. Because of that, humans attempt to understand how their culture and cultural memory exist and where or how it is rooted in space and time. This cannot be fully actuated because humans, and everything else, are always attempting to catch up to the current moment and inevitably failing in that regard as it is consistently just out of reach. Deferance, a deferral and differentiation of things via a specialization of time and a temporalization of space is related to this.

For trace or residue structures or memories to go beyond the individual and to be intergenerationally inscribed and imprinted into the next individual one must have that exist somewhere in space and not just in the mind of someone else. This means that time has to be spaced to be inscribed, preserved, and archived otherwise it is lost and cannot be recovered. But this does not mean that it has to be videotaped or directly passed down from tutelage. While still feasible as memory supports there are also other things that can contribute to this, like intergenerational objects, as they bear witness to time and the changes of the world around it.

For instance, I have a shoehorn that was my great grandfather’s on my mother’s side of the family with shows the changes in culture and in life, sort of like how an archaeologist or geologist finds artifacts from events and times long since passed. These memory supports, while imperfect, allow for the preservation of what once was into the ever fleeting now.

This means that there is no such thing as pure presence, as everything is technically supported in a spectral way, which makes ghosts of the past alive. As a matter of fact, according to Stiegler there is nothing but ghosts, and everything is haunted by the past as no time can be fully unto itself. In short, now can appear only by disappearing. Thus, to survive through the passage of time one must have specialization occur. In this way though, what survives can be erased by the new present, because it is always at risk to time.

This risk, and the ambivalence that resides so closely to the center of humanity that it is present within humanities origin myths, help explain why so many are persuaded by others to act and do things that cause turmoil and chaos to the overall structure of society. The uncertainty of nature and the desire not to be forgotten make history, the past, the present, and the future haunted with ghosts, ones that are not always kind.

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