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Welcome to Emerging Futures - Volume 183! Creativity and the Worldmaking of Technology...
Good morning enfoldings of technological becomings,
We just wrapped up the second and final week of our yearly international green change-making workshop in Graz. As this issue of our newsletter arrives in your inbox, we will be landing in Newark after a beautiful night far above the North Atlantic – writing to you somewhere between storm battered Greenland and the tranquil distant stars.
A big aspect of this changemaking workshop involved coming to grips with technology – after all, so much of our culture’s contemporary approach to the environmental crisis is to look for a technological solution.
What is technology? And what is its creative agency in our modern world?
Technologies are things that we make, but then seem to take on a life of their own. Or do they? The debate in the US about guns exemplifies this: do handguns kill? Or is it people? It is a misguided debate but it does a good job of illustrating how hard it is to figure out the agency of things – tools and “technology”.
Are tools just tools – neutral “equipment” that has a proper use and utility, and can be used properly or improperly?
Or is there something different going on?
Coming to grips with the questions of “what is a thing?” “What is a tool?” and “what is a technology?” are critical to understanding agency and creativity in our modern world – where are they and what are they? Over the next few weeks, we are going to go into these questions, exploring technology, tools, and the creativity of the modern world. This will both take us back in evolution to the development of bilateral symmetry, and ultimately the development of the hand, and outwards to engage with the work of thinkers like Isabel Stengers, Gilbert Simondon, and Andre Leroi-Gourhan amongst others.
From how technology is discussed in the media, it would seem that we all know what technology is: it’s the iPhones, the internet of things, AI, driverless cars, and the latest apps. Today, in popular culture, the word technology is almost fully synonymous with modern hi-tech stuff. When someone says “I’m good with technology” it means, “I can help you set up your new smart phone” – not, “I am proficient with the alphabet”. But, why is this? Both are technologies, and arguably alphabetization has done far more to shape us than Instagram (Barry Sanders and Ivan Illich wrote a wonderful book on this: A. B. C. The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind).
Not that this modern hi-tech focused usage of the word is wrong, far from it. After all, the meaning of a word is simply how it is used. But, this very circumscribed contemporary usage of the term technology hampers us from seeing how every aspect of being alive has always involved technologies – from speech, to writing, to fermenting, to childrearing. And more importantly that these technologies have made us who we are – they are not external to our “nature” but an integral aspect of being alive.
We can see intimations of this more encompassing understanding of technology by going into the etymology of the word. It is fascinating how far the meaning of the word has shifted. Two thousand five hundred years ago, when the Greek-speaking peoples of eastern Mediterranean and Middle East region created the term techne (the word that evolved into our modern term “technology”), it meant a skill, a craft – a practice of making. Techne was the activity of making, and Poiesis was the process of making – how something that was not there came into being.
While the gap between the original and contemporary use of anything is always radically discontinuous, and we should never privilege origin in getting to an understanding of the meaning of anything (think of the original usage of the feathered wing amongst dinosaurs), there is nonetheless something very interesting in this earlier focus on skill and the art of making. The focus on skills and practices puts attention on the integration of technologies into an ongoing life.
As we move forward in this series, it will be important to keep in mind that to speak of “technology” cannot be simply equated with a discussion of modern hi-tech tools. And that to speak of “things” – the material stuff of technology – the “tool” is always also to speak of practices – situated activity.
Modern technology – the smartphone and the self-driving car are ultimately tools – equipment. As tools, they connect to practices – skills to allow certain outcomes to be made: techne. They are part of our ever ongoing creative practice of making and remaking everyday life.
The real question is what do they make? One common and seemingly obvious answer is that they make our lives easier. For many that is what a well made tool does. A well-made hammer allows one to get nails into wood and build a house far easier than using a rock for hammering. And a well-made phone allows you to talk to people at great distances from one far easier than screaming might allow.
Tools seem to solve problems. Tools do allow us to do things that we could not do otherwise. And when well made, they do it better than other tools. A hammer is better than a rock at driving metal nails into wooden boards. There is no doubt about this.
But why do we have the problem of needing to insert bits of metal into long skinny rectangular pieces cut out of trees? We could say that this is just an expression of some universal human need for shelter. But this will explain nothing and falsely reduce all life to mere generic “utility.” If we begin an understanding of tools and technology by focusing on the practical utility of tools, we will lose sight of what they do to make us who we are.
Exploring tools from the perspective of utility can make it seem like we as humans are rational disembodied universal agents that come to have an idea spring into their minds, “let’s hammer this into that so we can make a structure to keep the rain off us” and then we simply scan the world around us looking for a suitable object that fits the bill. Our eyes land on a rock, we use it. It works. Then we improve it and soon enough we have a modern hammer, nails, lumber – and ultimately houses with three-car garages.
But we are not universal ahistorical disembodied minds making rational decisions about what to do and then looking around for very practical solutions. We are specifically embodied beings embedded in an ongoing way of being alive, that is co-created by an extended set of tools in ways that enact and bring forth a specific inherently all-encompassing and meaningful world via a landscape of affordances. (NOTE: We discussed the problems with this disembodied, inside vs outside, Cartesian approach to reality at length in Volume 177: Emotion and Unlearning the Embodied Lies of Creativity).
Importantly, the intentionality of “let’s hammer this into that so we can make a structure to keep the rain off us” presupposes a far more primordial form of engagement and a way of being with things than one that can be put into words and concepts. Our everyday mundane practices are irreducible to “know-what” – being clearly articulated in terms of words (See Volume 180: Creativity – Sensing is Perturbating for a discussion of the differences between “know-how” and “know-what”). This claim can sound strange to our rational modern understanding of ourselves – how can there be a part of us that we do directly engage with or understand via intentional analysis?
A good example of this kind of behavior is the distance we stand from others in social settings. We were never explicitly taught this. And none of us explicitly know this distance – or will ever need to know it explicitly (unless we are researching this topic). We learnt this practice of standing a certain very specific distance from others via embodied enactive attunement from a very early age. We rarely ever think about this (“know-what”). Rather, it is something we feel (“know-how”). And we certainly do not explicitly think about this when we are at a party – no one is consciously thinking “I am at an American social gathering and in this context I need to stand 34-38cm from those I converse with…”
So what does all of this have to do with tools and technology? We are already, as part of an ongoing way of life directed towards things, and practices. We are pulled into loops of habits, behaviors, and practices that are part of a way of meaningfully being alive – that cannot be reduced to or explained by any explicit form of knowing (know-what). We are already embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive such that we affectively sense the world as meaningful without it ever needing to be made explicit. Most of this cannot be made explicit – remains at the level of being embodied and extended. Most of our everyday mundane actions are in no way deliberate (but retrospectively we can explain as to “why” we did something – even if this is only a post-rationalization). Tools are an integral aspect of this invisible world-making that gives rise to who we are.
Seeing what is closest to us is hard, at least until something goes wrong: it is when tools break that we can first get a glimpse into their agency in world-making. In Volume 176 of the Newsletter we wrote about Iain’s experience of breaking his phone screen:
“I could still see the screen but I could not do anything with it. No tapping, swiping, or typing. I could see I was getting a call but I could not answer it. Luckily, I live near the store of a phone service provider – so I just walked there. I was ok with just getting a new phone. But, as they pointed out – if you cannot interact with the screen we cannot do anything to figure things out and transfer your account... So no new phone…
So what to do? I needed to look up a repair store, or figure out some hack/workaround to get my screen to work or get access to the contents of my phone. The phone store couldn’t help – they were just in the business of selling phones.
How would I do this? Without a working screen – I was stuck. I needed my phone to do any of this:
The maps app would let me locate a good repair store and then navigate to it.
Searching on the internet would help me find a workaround.
But the phone could not do any of this.
Meanwhile, I had calls to make and I could see that I was getting many calls coming in. I knew I had appointments – I was getting notifications… – things that needed attending to… But none of it was possible.
My world was no longer there… I could sense it more clearly than ever, but could not join it. So frustrating…”
In the end, I could go home, use my computer, figure out a workaround, and eventually get a new phone. Not a huge deal by any means. But the feeling – the visceral sensation of frustration and inability to do things was one of a world-loss. In an instant, connections and the possibility of everyday actions disappeared, and in this experience, what has disappeared paints in the negative the contours of a world that tools – technology – as an embodied, embedded, extended practice brings forth. (NOTE: The most insightful source to go further into this aspect of tools and worlds is to be found in chapters three and four of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time).
In our everyday lives, we do not encounter, or use tools, in an analytical manner of careful intentional deliberation, rational choice, and pre-planned activation. Rather, as we see from this example, we simply use them. We sit in chairs, cut with knives, eat with forks, pressing into plates, resting on tables, situated on the floor in rooms, secured under the roof of houses, nestled on city streets connected by plumbing, electrical cables, data cables, roads and sidewalks. And as we eat, seeing with lights, we browse Instagram on our device, take calls, and are informed about how many steps we walked. In all of this we encounter tools as a seamless invisible whole – a mutually interwoven, mutually supporting creating and enabling configuration that is not solving some universal problem but giving rise to a specific way of being alive and its (delimited) propensities.
This intra-dependent and tightly intra-woven world – this assemblage – this configuration of configurations – all of it recedes from visibility. We get on with actions: talking, texting, eating, standing the right distance at parties without a second thought until something breaks. In the moment when a key tool breaks, we see, perhaps for the first time, how it co-makes a world – and what it is to be of a world. Tools actively and creatively bring together embodied practices and environments such that specific affordances become available to us in stable ways. And we see this only when they stop working – we see a negative outline of our way of being – of our world in this loss.
But we cannot forget,
“We are [embodied] social environment-altering tool users. Tools give us new abilities, leading us to perceive new affordances, which can generate new environmental (and social) structures, which can, in turn, lead to the development of new skills and new tools, that through a process… of scaffolding greatly increases the reach and variety of our cognitive and behavioral capacities” (Micheal Anderson)
So what of the specific world these tools co-create? How can we disclose what we are? What is the logic of our technology?
These are the questions that we will return to over the next few weeks.
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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