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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 186! Technology’s Perspectival Creativity...
Good morning thick contexts of ambiguous becoming,
This week, April First came and went. April Fools. It is always a beautiful day for creative silliness. We hope that you were part of some interesting absurdities and experienced a few! We were (again) totally fooled by a bunch of bacteria into believing we were humans! The recovery is slow and creative as we adjust to being other than human… but we are giving it time.
It is week three of our critical dive into technology. Our theme for these three weeks is exploring some of the general mistakes we make broadly speaking in our contemporary cultural understanding of technology. This week is a special one – while over the last two weeks we have been looking at how technology is not a thing and needs to be considered as an assemblage – this week we are going to try and now carefully add back into the mix its “thingness”.
What is the “thingness” of a technology? And why come back to this after stressing that technologies gain their agency in and because of webs, networks, systems and ultimately assemblages? While this can seem paradoxical – especially because for the last two weeks we have been stressing that technology is not a thing – after all that, it can seem like an abrupt about face – now we want to talk about the “thingness” of technology!
After finishing this newsletter, we realized how much of this newsletter came out of the work we did in the WorldMakers community this week. On Monday, we held our sixth live event called Emergence: Co-creating the Path of Innovation.
It was a uniquely remarkable session exploring the concept of emergence, assemblages, technology, and co-creation – all the topics of this week's newsletter. In the spirit of enaction, we kicked things off by asking everyone to stand for our session instead of sitting. It was fascinating to see how people exapted various tools in their environments to produce ad-hoc new assemblages for thoughtful engagement. The wide-ranging discussion covered emergent technological topics, including: demystifying emergence through games, organizational applications, and crows eating pizza.
Next Monday, we are convening around a live presentation-discussion: "Was it the Wright Brothers? On Ecosystemic Innovation and Feedforward Epicycles" – it is going to be a fun challenge to many of the conventional notions of creativity, the importance of the Wright Brothers, and an alternative approach to innovation of Epicycles and Feedforward. Part of our excitement as we prepare for next week (and finish this newsletter) is the depth of the creative engagements we are having as a community. This is what two of the participants told us this week:
WorldMakers represents for us a qualitative shift in how we engage with you – and ultimately how we all engage with each other. It is an online ecosystem designed to support and catalyze a global community of creative changemakers interested in radically new ecosystemic and emergent approaches to innovation.
If you're excited about the possibility of joining us and becoming a Co-Evolutionary member of WorldMakers and helping us co-develop this new approach to building an alternative innovation ecosystem, then please take a moment to apply to be part of our Co-Evolutionary Team. Accepted members receive exclusive benefits, including a far lower lifetime pricing that won't be available after our fall launch. Apply now.
It is right to see this – that technology is both not a thing and it is a thing – as paradoxical. Things – technologies are never quite what they seem. One one hand, they are what they are because of the assemblage that they are part of: An oak nut is a technology to produce a future oak tree that will only work if it finds its way to grow in soil with sun and nutrients (which are themselves are self-creating ecological assemblages). And because of this, we could be mistaken for thinking that this is what an oak nut “is” – it is a future oak tree. And that becoming an oak tree is the “purpose” of this technology. But that same oak nut is a future pig if a piglet finds that nut lying on the very same forest floor. And that piglet is a future wolf if… And if a dirt bike cruising through the forest slightly damages that oak nut, it will join into the soil making processes (technology) that the next oak nut might grow in. Clearly, nothing is anything outside of the complex assemblage that gives rise to multiple equally possible futures.
Technologies are processes/assemblages always at both the center and periphery of multiple processes that they can tip into – an open set of highly heterogeneous but semi-stable trajectories – with new lines of flight always possible.
What is it about the oak nut (as a process/assemblage) that allows it to participate – and have agency in all of these possible futures? The mistake would be to think that there is some “essence” to the oak nut that allows it to become a tree, or a pig, or soil, or a dye. While the oak nut is not the “same thing” in all of these differing states of the forest assemblage, that does not mean it is “nothing”.
So, things gain their agency because of the assemblage, but they bring “something” – even if it is not one thing- to these assemblages. What is it? What is it that a technology brings to the assemblage?
We started this series by introducing how a useful place to start examining technologies is by considering how they function as “extensions”. The great Canadian philosopher of media/technology, Marshall McLuhan, articulates this view with great precision. All technologies, he says,
“are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical. The wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye. Clothing is an extension of the skin. Electrical circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.”
While this is an important insight, it is an approach to technology that is prone to seeing technology as a series of discreet extensions – when in fact it is always more of an assemblage that “extends” some human faculty. The book alone is no extension of the eye. The book without the technologies of the alphabet, reading, education, the printing press, paper technologies, etc., would be nothing.
We could equally understand the oak nut as an extension of the life of the oak tree. And we could equally see that this is only possible if there is an assemblage of sun, soil, gravity, rains, and much else…
But there is also a danger in over-stressing that “Things = Assemblages” – because we do not have a way to consider what the “actual thing” brings to the assemblage. E.g. – what is the specific agency of the written word or the oak nut in the assemblage? If the thing “is just” what it is because of the configuration of the total assemblage – then we have made the thing itself a type of nothing.
Now, this is deeply ironic because this problematic outcome is what the assemblage approach to technology was trying to originally combat! The assemblage approach to technology was (and is) trying to get at “the agency of technology” that goes beyond seeing technologies as being mere extensions of the (natural) inclinations/intentions of the user.
The conflating technology with the natural inclinations and intentions of the user is part and parcel of the “technologies are extensions of a human capacity” approach. The danger here with the extension approach (in all of its variations) is that it makes technology appear as neutral.
What do we mean by “neutral”? To say that a technology is “neutral” is to say it is just doing what we would do naturally without it – but better, faster, stronger, etc. For example, when we understand the wheel to be an extension of the foot (as McLuhan proposes), it extends our natural propensity to move further, faster, and with less effort. And while this seems correct on the surface of things, this approach makes the fundamental error of seeing technology as mere utility, mere convenience, mere aid, mere ease. And nothing could be further from the truth!
Technologies are never neutral – they are never “nothing.” They don’t make things easier – they make things different. The critical question is, “What is the qualitative difference that a technology introduces into a way of life?”
Marshall McLuhan himself goes to great pains to make this point – focusing on one of the most transformative technologies: writing:
“The dominant organ of sensory and social orientation in pre-alphabet societies was the ear – “hearing is believing”... until writing was invented, people lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind… The goose quill put an end to talk…. it gave architecture and towns…
Western history was shaped for some three thousand years by the introduction of the phonetic alphabet, a medium that depends solely on the eye for comprehension. The alphabet is a construct of fragmented bits and parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be strung together in a line, bead-like, and in a prescribed order. Its use fostered and encouraged the habit of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial terms – particularly in terms of space and time that are uniform,
c,o,n,t,i,n,u,o,u,s
and
c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d.
The line, the continuum
–this sentence is a prime example–
became the organizing principle of life…”
McLuhan's most general point is that technologies are transformative at every level. They change how we sense – and in changing how we sense, they change what we sense. And this, too was Micheal Anderson’s argument that began this whole series on technology:
“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”
The technologies of the alphabet and writing did not simply make memory better, more stable, and easier to access. No, these technologies changed who we are, how we feel, and what we do at a fundamental level. That we think in an atomizing, reductive, and linear manner as a deep cultural disposition is because of the “textualization” and “alphabetization” of the mind.
And it is because of this realization of technology's profound creativity – it fundamentally participates in the historical creation of who we have become- that McLuhan quickly qualifies how he is discussing technologies from focusing only on how they extend some human capacity to how they transform the environment of human action.
How does technology transform “the environment of human action”? He answers that technology transforms the environment of human action via mediation.
What does it mean that technology is a mediator? The simplest meaning of mediator is that it is in the middle – it sits between two other things. Let’s look at his example of communication for a moment. Between us and another person is the mediation of language.
And then, between language and another person is the mediation of writing. and between us and writing are the mediators of pen, ink, paper, and between that is schooling, books – and even lights, chairs and much else…
It continues as it loops through the development of new behaviors, sensations, feelings, and abstractions.
This aspect of mediation is why McLuhan does not use the term tool or technology to describe all of the things that are everywhere and everywhere interconnected in our lives – but media. Media – in the sense of “in media res” – in the middle of things.
And it is a middle that, with technologies, can be infinitely extended. A chain of mediating transformations extending and expanding all gaps.
What does a mediator of the in-between do? At its simplest, it mediates between two positions. As we have seen, all our activities – interactions between one thing and another are mediated by a third thing. There is nothing that is not. And just like a human mediator resolving a dispute between two parties, the tool that mediates is never simply passive or neutral.
Now, we could imagine that these mediators – those tools are unnecessary. After all, we could live without socks, shoes, sidewalks, cars, and much else – in fact, many do. But tools and technology – mediators – are not limited to discrete physical objects. Habits, practices, and concepts are equally technologies. Speech, ways of walking or running, ways of greeting, and empathically questioning are all technologies – mediators. What makes them different is only their inherent instability and weakness in terms of independent agency.
Life being enactive – interactive and social has always been full of mediators – technologies. The so-called “state of nature” is a state full of mediators.
Tools mediate – creatively transform – our abilities. And we gain these new abilities as embodied abilities.
The middle is thick – there is, as John Protevi terms it, a technological “above”, “beside,” and “below” to human life:
With all of this in mind, let's get more concrete. The classical example of the transition from oral technologies to writing is a complex and many centuries long process that can feel like something in our far distant past (to get a sense of how profound and radical this technological transformation was, perhaps the best and most illuminating book textual technologies and their history is In the Vineyard of the Text by Ivan Illich). Let's look at a far more recent shift in technologies of writing: the shift in technologies from the typewriter to the computer and all forms of digitally mediated writing.
Consider your contemporary experience of typing on your laptop:
Our fingers and internal voice achieve new muscular coordination abilities as we engage with typing on our laptops. Soon, we are sensing intuitively new and differing possibilities for action in our environment. We no longer look at the keyboard but look out at things as we find a new speed of typing-thinking. We are typing words, deleting, copying, and pasting. Moving parts around. What is corrected is disappearing. Changes are being tracked. There is an ongoing continuous dynamic mutation and modulation of writing that is happening. And it is a flow that leaves no direct visible trace of these changes.
While this activity could be mistaken for “typing” – what we might have also done with a typewriter in the mid-twentieth century – this is a radically qualitatively different practice. Consider one aspect of the practice of typewriter typing: correction. With the typewriter, we made “drafts” – discrete physical iterations page by physical page. Each piece of paper was a distinct achievement. Major corrections were done as a separate process with a pen to the draft. Sections might also be crossed out. The paper might be cut, parts moved around, and then taped back together. After this, a new draft of the whole document would be typed out.
This highly mediated activity involved its own distinct assemblage of paper, typewriters, ribbons, pens, writing, the alphabet, scissors, tape, markers, proofreaders, dictionaries, etc. Which gave rise to specific potentials for action.
The mediation work of the integrated tool assemblage has emergent propensities – emergent possibilities for action. The emergent propensities of typing and these related forms of textuality co-created and extended specific propensities: There was an object, both in actuality and conceptually. Physically, there was the page, the letter, the article, the book, etc. And we came into a way of being that embodied and enacted this logic abstractly and conceptually: The discreet physicality of the text gave rise to the complete discrete abstract ideal text coming into existence – separate from the physical one. We came to understand ourselves, the world around us, and the phases of our lives as something distinct and readable.
With the introduction of digital technologies, what might on the surface seem like the same activity – typing on a keyboard while looking at an emerging document – the entirety of it and our sense of selfhood has radically shifted. No longer is there a discreet text but a flow of modulation that leaves no trace and has no clear beginning or end.
Our subjectivity at every level is shifting as an emergent propensity of these processes. This shift is not because of some amorphous shift in the “zeitgeist” or simply at the level of mindsets we are changing. No, we need to consider the creative agency of technology – the suite of technologies (working as assemblages) that are co-creating new modes of being alive. Here, it is worth coming back again to Micheal Anderson's statement, but now seeing it in the bigger and broader manner:
“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”
This is not a linear process – what might seem like small alterations – the infinite transformability with a trace of the digital screen can seem to be “just like” working on paper – but they are literally worlds apart.
As we engage with our new abilities and their emergent propensities, we actively transform our environment. We transform our immediate environment: lights, tables, book stands, longer charging cables, and new apps. A different laptop. Glasses, headphones. And we change our bodies micro habit by habit. Our disposition is shifting, and it shifts how we externalize and support our qualitative sensibilities:
In this way, we are always at play with configurations. At all scales (the above, below, and beside).
This assemblage of tools and practices in its specific configuration creatively enables and stabilizes certain possibilities for action:
This is stabilizing as global propensities of the assemblage – now that we are digital, a diverse set of new micro-practices emerge, stabilize, and expand their scope into more far-reaching subjective propensities:
What is critical in regards to the creativity of technology is that our configurations – these assemblages of mediators always outrun – exceed our understanding of them. We did not intend to have a new subjectivity with the development of digital editing tools – we might have just wanted to make something easier. But this is what happened – loop by loop.
And at some moment, this new subjectivity became the thing that began to drive the process – we felt ourselves to be continuously modulating beings – our affective sense of joy and beauty co-emerged with these transformations.
This stabilized and canalized process of looping with its unintended deviations is at the very heart of our everyday technological lives and its creativity that we are very much an active part of – and exceeds us in its invisible becoming other…
Well, this seems like a wonderful point in the digital practices of writing and reading to pause this version of modulations of writing and becoming. Have a wonderful, complex and creative week following and playing with what exceeds us.
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason, Andrew, and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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