In my new series of "A as B" I submit the title as thesis: technology is an ecology, if we take ecology to be the study of the relationships of organisms.
Technologies create environments. For instance, I can't imagine someone living thirty miles away from work before the car. The car creates the suburbs. Or my favorite example, the television orients the living room. From every chair in most everyone's living room you can watch television, creating a physical space predicated on the idea that the way we hang out is we watch stuff together.
Now it seems that a basic principle of Darwin would be that species are shaped, molded by their environments. So technology is not simply an ecology; it's also an ontology. Technologies create environments and these environments work on/work over the people that dwell in them.
Okay but it's not that simple. If it were we'd all be socially determined creatures and Skinner would be correct, which we aren't. So there is a negotiation - a feedback loop if you will. This occurs primarily because we can still rebel - as Camus gloriously says: I rebel therefore I am.
This rebellion, though, is predicated on the possibilities that open up through the environments that exist. I can, for instance, choose not to be a mindless consumer, but I can't choose to be unaffected by consumer culture. I think that's the point the Unabomber basically forget when he attempted to live in the woods, read Strunk and White of all things and write a manifesto. Living in the woods seemed to just piss him off more. He could attempt to avoid the ecology in a literal sense, but not in the larger ontological sense, i.e., all that shit still worked on his Being.
The larger point, I think, is that our existence is shaped by objects, by technologies: we are molded from the outside in, though we think of reality as emerging from our minds. We still think of reality as being a projection from our minds - we are still Romantics.
I saw a wonderful exhibit at MOMA recently that was devoted to this notion that objects communicate with us. (I'd recommend anyone reading this to look it up) The ATM directs me; the hyperlink seduces me. Again, we have agency, and it's probably never been more important to think about the ways we partake in technologies and support institutions. There is no us and them in a classical subject/object dichotomy - there is simply the muck, of which we are all knee-deep in. Sometimes we wallow. Sometimes we wash.
I like this idea that technology has this ecological relationship with us, and us with it. It impacts us, we impact it. An interesting way to approach it is that technology is a living , breathing thing (metaphorically, of course). It alters our behavior and in turn we alter it's next stages of development; Changing it's evolution and ours at the same time.
ReplyDeleteIt seems inescapable at this point of reality I live in. I spend roughly 8-10 hours in front of a computer, 2-3 hours in front of a TV- DAILY. I like to envision myself as a warrior/hunter 1000 years ago, but sadly this is not who I am. I am a "linked in" piece of a globalized network, absorbing and mutating faster than I care to apprehend.
I think what's interesting is that it may not be literally correct to say technology is living - perhaps that still is a metaphor - but technology certainly exerts agency. For the longest time I assumed all agency resided in the subject side of the subject/object divide - a divide which is of course problematic, as are most dichotomies. Now, it seems to me that there's a complex entanglement between me and the world of objects. I mean the ATM literally tells me what to do, orders me around, and I follow gladly because based on how well I follow it decides whether I get money or not.
ReplyDeleteTechnology seems to have more of an immediate evolutionary aspect to it than most of the other objects that surround me. For that reason, I attribute an metaphysical organic characteristic to it. I know it is not living, in the sense that living things can think, feel and draw upon eons of existence for survival/meaning. I still feel that because it is created by us, and adapted by us, that is alive in the sense of mutability. An inescapable duality, where we both alter and are altered by it, exists at increasing velocities.
ReplyDeleteI don't believe this to be good, as it feels fundamentally wrong with my inner nature. In short, our tools have become us.
I'd be curious to hear more about the idea of an "inner nature." It seems like we can feel out of place - homeless in the modern world. And at the same time, it seems that our nature has to arise because of our environment. Perhaps our current nature is to be conflicted.
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