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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 184! Three Mistakes in Considering Technology (from the Perspective of Creative Processes)...
Good morning beings of world-opening embodied extendings,
The moon is waning. The birds sing of spring. And some celebrated the spring equinox on Thursday. Others celebrated the Persian New Year, Nowruz. Fires were jumped, grasses grown, apartments cleaned and the next year begins!
Spring and the new year finds us writing about things – technologies and their fundamental role in creative processes. This is a new series that we began last week in Newsletter 183, which we ended with this quote and question about how 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?
This week we hope to begin to answer these questions within the spirit of Micheal Anderson’s quote.
This, that tools are extensions of some aspect of our enactive bodily activities, is arguably the best place to start to understand technology. We find as diverse a set of thinkers as Marshall McLuhan, Andre Leroi-Gurhan, and Bruno Latour starting here in their expositions of humans as tool-beings. Glasses extend the reach of our vision. Clothes extend our bodies' insulating capacities. Notebooks extend our thinking abilities to be far more stable and explicit. Smartphones, our memory. Knives and forks extend our teeth's cutting and chewing abilities. Cooking our digestion. And shoes extend the firmness of our feet ' skin.
They make us more. More speedy. More insulated. More knowledgeable. More physically capable. And more is different.
Yes, different in degree – but as thresholds are crossed: different in-kind – we become other.
So, it is easy to see that tools are extensions. But this insight can set us off on the wrong path as well.
Focusing in on just one tool hides from us that the equation is never “one tool/technology = one extension”.
Tools always come in what can seem like an avalanching swarm of stuff. There are so many of them that come all at once! Endless things accompany things within things. When we open our bedroom doors to discuss the humble and simple bed – we are met by an avalanche of things:
It is not just that you have a bed, but the bed is a frame with distinct mattresses, springs, screws, bolts, sheets and more sheets, duvets, blankets, duvet covers, pillows and pillow covers – and pillows of all kinds: throw pillows to body pillows shaped pillows, backrests, bedside tables, lights, and night lights, bed testing safety equipment and certification organizations, carpets, vacuums, shades, blinds, dusting cloths, pajamas, buttons, night music, snoring aids, sleep therapists, dream analysis, pharmaceutical sleep aids, discourses on sleep, diplomas on sleep therapies, laws governing the composition and off-gassing of carpets, sleep monitoring tools, alarm clocks, noise regulations, bed bugs, specialized insecticides, heated floors, tree farms, cotton fields, specialty stores, the mattress tag police, and unique shipping techniques…
It's always a vast world of highly interconnected things upon things upon things. The “extension” is more a web than just a simple set of discreet things one by one extending our bodies in a neat checklist fashion:
This, then, is perhaps the first mistake that is made in understanding technology: Technology – tools are not the discreet and solitary things working by themselves. We cannot look at a pillow, carpet, gun, traffic light, or house shoes alone and learn anything about what it does – which is to say: what effects it has. The effects tools have are the consequence of how they participate in the emergent effects of a web (eg assemblage) of tools. Things do not show up alone.
There is no bed without a whole host of other things – from beings that sleep with “bed sleep habits”, to sheets, pillows, regulations, etc. And obvious what this web is can vary considerably. Yes, you place your mattress directly on a carpet on the floor without a bed frame – that is not what is important in this discussion. What is critical is understanding that no thing shows up alone.
Now let's go further into the relational web-like logic of tools. Notice that in our statement, “we cannot look at a pillow, carpet, gun, traffic light, or house shoes alone and learn anything about what it does – what effects it has” – we are saying nothing about what a tool “is”. It simply does not make any sense to continue to talk about what something “is” – as if a pillow “is” a tool to support the head. Perhaps that was the intention of the maker, but no matter the intentions of the designer, the very same pillow can as easily be used to suffocate that very same head, mute a trombone, have a pillow fight, or seal a large hole in the floorboards...
Things – technologies are all of what they can participate in doing. They are all of the effects that they can be coaxed to participate in collaboratively producing. While we can divide up effects by intended and unintended as if they were clear and distinct categories – how things work is by having collaborative effects. Everything has effects far beyond initial intention or purpose from the very moment it came into existence. The Intended is bleeding out into endless novel unintended effects in use. And the infinite bubbling up of the unintended is being folded back into purpose as it is being used otherwise. Nothing could be more mundane than the co-opting of the intended for the unintended (exaptation).
And while some management consultants will make the utilization (co-opting) of unintended effects (exaptations) seem like a radically exotic aspect of innovation that only emerges/only is useful in certain so-called complex situations – it is a fundamentally normal aspect of all technologies, and the most mundane of occurrences in everyday life. To imagine otherwise is to misunderstand technologies as part of active assemblages – technologies are all of what they can participate in doing.
There is a very real danger in this approach that needs to be explored. The danger in such statements as “technologies are all of what they can participate in doing” is that we can easily get pulled into saying/believing that “things have no meaning”. We certainly see this in the discourse of some of the most virulent reactionaries in the NRA who love to say, “guns do not kill – people do”. The obvious rejoinder from our perspective is: If guns do not kill – then neither do people. What we are saying is that guns (a technology) plus a whole avalanche of connected and co-shaping things that inherently must always also be there (constitutional amendments, toys, games, bullets, enactive habits (people), histories, etc.) will lead, to far more likely than not, to specific effects and propensities – in short, they do participate collaboratively in shocking mass killings and everyday acts of despair in the context of contemporary America. But it is not the gun alone nor the people alone.
So is it guns plus people that leads to bad outcomes? Is it that people can be violent and that guns “just” extend the force of this?
This brings us back to this first error with technology – it is never one thing alone augmenting/extending some pre-existing human capacity. Technology is always a web – an assemblage of things – of which embodied skilled humans are a key part. There is never the situation of humans plus guns.
Let’s explore this further by looking at the claim “It is not the gun, its “just” that humans kill humans.” But just like guns don't kill (alone) – neither do people! People don’t just kill people – despite what NRA apologists for guns love to claim. A whole host of technologies always participate in any and all killings (it turns out it is very hard to get people to kill each other in most circumstances as John Protevi powerfully demonstrates in his remarkable latest book Regimes of Violence: Towards a Political Anthropology). Even if we could imagine a culture of naked humans without any physical tools – there would still be many technologies at play: embodied and spoken technologies of identity, individuation, revenge, retribution, rage, etc… These are “soft” social technologies that are always part and parcel of being alive whatsoever. Let us remember – people are not born naked and alone – even in baboon communities that have no physical technologies of any kind, no real language of any kind – they are born into a technological way of life – the difference is their technologies are “soft” social technologies.
Our lives are lived in and of a vast web/assemblage of soft and hard technologies that are always intra-woven. The real gun debate is, like all technological debates, and all creative questions – one about composition. What needs to be part of the assemblage to have the field of effects that we wish for? It is an experimental, empirical, and ongoing question/activity. Technologies are not inevitable, black or white, or progressive events that we must accept – they are assemblages within which we are actively recomposing fields of possible effects.
This brings us to another critical aspect of technologies: stabilization. The difference between the “soft” technologies (those found in embodied habits) and “hard” technologies (those found in physical objects external to us)) is that the addition of physical tools to the assemblage of “soft” technologies adds a transformative level of stability to the mix. Materially distinct (from us) technologies allow us to offload the need for continuous engagement and effort. Think about the difference between internal memorization techniques and external memorization via writing: The technological practices of embodied memorization (such as the classical Greek technique of building a “memory palace” in the mind and then with great effort and skill adding memories to it) and the technological practices of writing things down – both have a similar effect, but writing it down is far more stable, durative, independent and public.
This discussion can make it seem like “hard” technological assemblages replace “soft” ones. But this is never the case – the “soft” – the embodied and enactive never go away – they are just transformatively augmented/extended.
While it can seem that we are wandering away from our key point: that tools as extensions of the self are never alone – but always part of an “assemblage” of many other tools. It is critical to recognize that it is precisely the durative quality of physical tools that fools us into missing the web/assemblage: When these relations become highly stabilized in a specific context, then we can make the mistake of confusing an effect with the identity and purpose of the tool alone – thus rendering the web invisible – but the web is always there.
Tools/technologies are never solitary things – they never exist in a vacuum. They are never singular extensions of some capacity. Nor is their meaning deep inside their singularity. Things and their multiplicity of effects always come in inter-woven webs or technologies.
So what is this web? What is this “assemblage” that defines how tools/technologies produce effects? At the risk of adding one too many examples, let's turn to one of our favorite stories – that of crows cracking nuts in collaboration with traffic intersections to illuminate what exactly is an assemblage.
This example gets at how the meaning of a technology is not to be found in its solitary existence but in an assemblage/web. Crows collaborate with traffic, roads, intersections, and traffic lights as a technology to have the effect of cracking nuts:
The Crow Intersection Technology:
Lights turn red, cars stop, crows fly down from their “perch” (the overhead electrical wires), and drop the nuts they collected from their “nut orchard” (the local park) directly in front of “nutcrackers” (car tires), fly back up to their perch, the light turns green and the nuts are cracked, the light turns red and the cracked nuts can be eaten…
And this is the Assemblage (see above diagram):
At an event we organized this week on the early tasks of innovation, Mark Stolow brought up a really wonderful question (asked in “warm data” circles): “Who can we be when we are together?”
And this is precisely the experimental question of composition that the technological assemblages that we are always inherently of – ask us: who are we becoming now that we are together? Who can we become now that we are together?
The mistake we could make in answering such a question that we wish to highlight in this newsletter is twofold: that there is an “I” that is separate from how it is of technological assemblages (eg that this is not a technological question), and secondly that the technology can be ignored as simply a product of our intentions – without its own emergent agency (which is made visible in its propensities).
Let's end this newsletter by entangling a bit more with this second error: that of conflating technologies with intentions. We are continuously confusing our intentions in designing an assemblage/web of tools with the effects that it has and can have. So in the case of the traffic Intersection, the intention was to produce the safe and efficient movement of cars and pedestrians – and it does have these effects – but this is only a partial scope of its full propensities. Of course, the intersection has the effect of moving traffic in a reasonably safe manner. But the meaning of tools is never reducible to the intention of the maker. Other propensities of such intersections are:
And there are others. All of these are stable propensities – which is to say: effects that emerge with statistical regularity (opportunities for action). The error is to see these as simply “mistakes” – noise that can be removed in the next iteration. But they are a fundamental aspect of what we become when we are together (in this assemblage)... If you doubt this, then look at the contrast with another way of safely regulating the intersecting movement of cars: the traffic circle – none of these propensities would be part of the assemblage of a traffic circle. It has its own regularities of effects.
Lest we think there is little creativity or such assemblages are monolithic– let's come back to our crows. Things are agents in their own right and as such when they join other webs the actual effects will be radically novel. So when a crow finds ways to collaborate with this open web of technologies – bringing differing intentions, bodies, and practices – the effects change – new parallel propensities of effects emerge.
The technology of the traffic light or the car is never alone – it is always part of a web burring into many other webs. And it only becomes what it “is” – the effects it can have – because it is joined experimentally to many other technologies as part of other very distinct but totally interwoven practices.
And this adds one last multiplicity to tools: the first is that they always come entangled in a web to have any effect whatsoever, and the second is that these webs are themselves always multiple: the crow nut cracking web and the safe traffic web overlap in nearly every detail. Every tool – every technology is part of multiple webs, each having very different effects – while being open to yet more novel assemblages and effects.
While crows entangling with intersections make this multiplicity very clear – our human lives are also always like this. Our lives move us through – into and out of assemblages as well as with assemblages those that stay with us as we move into, out of, and across others. And in each, we are both becoming of the assemblage (its propensities that emerge with us) and shifting the assemblages.
And here we come to the wonderful news – from the perspective of creativity because we cannot pre-specify all that might join in collaboration with an existing assemblage, nor can we say what aspects of things that compose the assemblage that might be relevant – nor can we say in what manner they might be relevant – creativity will always be in the relationally given in a way that exceeds what exists and what can be known.
Well, on such a positive note, we end our writing for another newsletter.
You might ask – what about the other two mistakes in considering technology that we promised in our title? Isn’t it true that we only covered one of them?
Yes, we have only covered one of the three.
Some back story: Initially when we planned this newsletter it was going to be on a different aspect of technology, extension, and embodiment. But as we started to write the work pulled us backward into daylighting and meditating on some of the dangerous assumptions we make about technology. We narrowed this down to three. Then we thought we could squeeze all three into one newsletter, but things got longer – so we thought perhaps we would cover two… and finally all that could fit was one!
So here we are, with a bit of a cliffhanger – but also remember that we, as writers – makers, are never fully in control of what we write – we too are of the propensities of an assemblage!
We will see you next week for the second error! Till then keep experimenting with who you are becoming with what you gather with.
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason, Andrew, and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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