Note: this is a draft for an upcoming book chapter.
In endeavoring to write this essay it has become evident to me that I don’t actually understand what a social issue is. This isn’t to say that I have no idea of what it is, it’s kind of like a regular bad thing but bigger and sadder, but there’s probably a more effective articulation available. When I don’t know what something is, I look it up on Google, and I found an article on a site called DevelopmentAid that explains what social issues are. To be honest I’m not really sure what this site is; it kind of seems like a blog, almost certainly not an actual edited publication of any kind, but it also has job listings and a membership that costs €600 per year at most (which is unclear on what that expenditure actually gives you in return). There’s a lady in the bottom right corner of my screen that’s supposed to answer these sorts of questions for me about DevelopmentAid when I click on her, but when I clicked on her it said she’s AI, so I got uncomfortable and demurred. I am told that a social issue is “an unfavorable condition that has a negative impact on people’s personal or social lives or on various societal groups” (Filipenco, 2024). Not greatly descriptive, but perhaps an improvement from what I had before. The article also tells me that “[p]eople may have different views about these issues and how they can be tackled more effectively” (Filipenco, 2024). I was curious on what ‘tackling these issues’ actually constitutes, but I don’t really know what to do with that ambiguity, so I decided to keep looking for answers on how to tackle such problems. Somehow, I managed to find a site that’s even less trustworthy than the previous one with the article “How to Solve Problems in Society” (2023). Whereas DevelopmentAid seems to be at least some sort of an actual organization with actual authority, at least enough to ask for an absurd amount of money from its users, LessBad.org fails to maintain any and all pretence. Every page has something to the effect of “1. Make a plan, 2. Make the free market do it” bullet pointed as the thesis statement of its praxis. Not a single page on the site has an author mentioned, the entire site is rife with either AI generated imagery or internet memes that are older than I am, and the proposed solutions are, shockingly, not particularly rigorous. On further inquiry, I did find a page that justified the AI stuff if nothing else. Per the unknown author, “It would be wasteful to ignore the power of technology, including artificial intelligence, as we strive to make a better world” (2023). This line in particular struck a chord with me, mostly because it isn’t immediately absurd on its face, but also because it implies a practical imperative for the perennial task of ‘tackling these issues,’ that being to put technology to use. However, that got me thinking. The claim that technology ought to be applied to ethical endeavors seems prima facie agreeable, but technology doesn’t paradigmatically orient itself towards social issues, at least in the current state of modern society. If it’s a waste of technology to not use it towards some sort of explicitly ethical aim, then how is it that contemporary technology often doesn't accomplish goals with those aims in mind? What is it about technology that seems to predispose it against non-market oriented aims?
This essay aims to critique an underlying conception of technology that is present within socio-tech innovation as a philosophical framework of action. This conception is a specific view of technology that reduces it to its instrumental value and the ends that it is capable of accomplishing. This critique of technological instrumentalism will draw less from work done in the social sciences as is common with other literature in the field of socio-tech innovation, but will rather present a philosophical account that draws on the philosophy of technology and language to present a explication the assumptions to which socio-tech innovation occasionally marries itself. Rather than putting to use empirical findings regarding the current state of technology in relation to different organizations, I seek to clarify what’s already available in our definitions: how are the technological and the social different from one another, what does it mean to combine them, and what philosophical measures must be taken for that to be done in a coherent manner? I first start with a clarification about technology in terms of its discursive and symbolic representation such that it’s possible to rephrase or reconceptualize it. Built on this premise of technology as something that can be conceptually rephrased is the elaboration of the instrumental view of technology, critiquing it on two bases. The first critique is a modest one on the semantics of instrumentality on how it fails to properly adapt to the conceptual demands of technological innovation, simply put that the standards of instrumentality don't describe innovation particularly well. The second is a more ambitious critique in accordance with how the instrumentalist model of technology prefigures certain ways of perceiving and interacting with the world that run counterintuitively against the social and ethical ambitions of socio-tech innovation. This will be done through a consideration of the work and thoughts on technology of Gilbert Simondon, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
As a preliminary step, it must be clarified that any cleavage between the technological and the social is not a strictly tenable dichotomy, ‘strictly tenable’ being operative here. I make no claim that the dichotomy between the two is absolutely false; the fact that the separation between the two is operative and pervasive in industry points to at least some kind of pragmatic reliability. However, the dichotomy does not hold up to scrutiny during deeper inspection and comes into tension as the lines between technology and sociality begin to blur. As spoken by Simondon, “the opposition drawn between culture and technics, between man and machine, is false and has no foundation” (Simondon, 1958/ 2017, p. 1). This point will be supported by the subsequent argument on the symbolic content available within technology as we come to understand it. The immediately noticeable engagement between the technological and the social is in the perhaps obvious fact that technology is a human concept with a socially agreed upon meaning: the fact that we can converse about technology implies a social ontology. Everything from corporate R&D, scholarly research, to a family member bringing up the adverse effects of social media on young children; technology is incredibly accessible as a discursive concept, thus implying that there is a common definition that we all operate under. Of course, one might respond that this is merely communication about technology, not technology itself, as what one has to say about phones is a different thing from the phone itself as a physical object. I am convinced by this notion, as the discursive and communicative capacity in which technology exists is fully present in the development and ontology of technology itself, even in its physical instantiation. What must be considered is that the discursive and symbolic content pertaining to technology is indispensable in the constitution of technological objects, and that the computer itself is, first and foremost, a written document. To clarify this with a concept from computer science, the concept of a ‘finite-state machine’ is necessary to adumbrate. The finite-state machine is an abstraction of computation that operates under the principle of a machine that has a limited number of ‘states’ in which it can exist. The proverbial example of a finite state machine is a turnstile with two states, open where visitors can pass freely through, and closed when visitors are prevented from passing. Think of the turnstiles at a subway station. This is usually accompanied by a clause or conditional aspect of the machine that determines when it can be in one state versus another, such that if one has a ticket, the turnstile switches to the ‘open’ state, but if one has no ticket, then the turnstile remains in the ‘closed’ state (Koshy, 2004, p. 762). The important thing to understand is that finite state machines are not physical things but schematics, static abstractions of machines exchanged between developers and engineers, which are often viewed as literal, handwritten documents before being implemented into an actual technological instance of the design. By that notion alone, they act as discursive, symbolic representations before they ever become actual, materially instantiated objects. But beyond that, even in the architecture of the actual machines lies a sort of written documentation. Computers in terms of their material instantiations are finite state machines, which is especially evident when looking at something like firmware, which acts as the middleman between ‘static’ hardware and ‘fluid’ software. While not literally written down on paper at all times, the design of firmware is a strict schematic that exists in the material instances of the technology and among the collective agreement of its developers. Its design relies on an agreed written set of propositions and theories embodied within the pins of the central processing unit.
A good example of this can be found in the concept of microcode. In 1951, the concept of microcode was first theorized in the University of Manchester by Maurice Wilkes. The issue that needed to be solved was simple. The full computer as an abstraction was too complicated an idea at the time to be implemented in any actual technology. Computers are meant to do a lot of stuff, and machines as physical objects have a hard time keeping up with that ideal. So, a middleman was devised to resolve the conflict. Simple logical structures ended up being the abstraction that could create genuinely reliable machines in material implementation, which would then manage the more complex capacities via some smartly chosen heuristics. Even in modern implementations of this architecture, the design philosophy stays the same with minimizing complexity and maximizing simple, discrete functionality (Kent et al., 1993, p. 36). Even today the theory behind microcode is ubiquitous, and to see microcode in a machine is to see that theory written down. The point of criticality is here. The computer, a machine interacted with in a way that is usually considered asocial, is a written abstraction that has been socially determined. Computation is not a spontaneous phenomenon, and its development as technology is one that is cemented in social abstraction and collectively authored by developers, engineers, and mathematicians.
Further, we can surmise from the symbolic representation of the piece of technology that such symbolic representations are not immutable, which is to say that they can be altered in terms of how a piece of technology is perceived and understood. While it may be that the machine itself is in some way resistant to our social affectations, the way we think about such technological objects is not immutably circumscribed, which is a necessary assumption to justify if we are to allow ourselves the choice in changing how we perceive technology. In proposition 193 of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein brings up machines and their symbolic value. “A machine as a symbol of its mode of operation.” This is to say that “If we know the machine, everything else – that is the movements it will make – seem to be already completely determined” (Wittgenstein, 1953/2009, p. 83). The operation of a machine, say, the running of a car engine for the sake of movement, the computing of a calculator to perform addition, the capacity of a hammer to hit in a nail, all these things are operations that take on a symbolic presence in relation to the machine. Keeping consistent with the notion of a machine as a discursive representation, such as a document or an idea, the mode of operation (Wirkungsweise in German), or simply what the machine does and how it works, is symbolically prefigured in such a way that precedes the actual material instantiation of the machine itself. Even when a car is off, left unused, it seems as if the act of driving and its operation of movement are fully present and available to it. Even when left alone in the garage, it seems almost obvious that a car must drive, it’s simply what the machine is meant to do.
However, this symbolic version of the machine, one that is determinate and steadfast in its operation, doesn’t necessarily reflect how its material instantiation might actually function. “Do we forget the possibility of their bending, breaking off, melting, and so on? Yes; in many cases we don’t think of that at all” (Wittgenstein, 1953/2009, p. 84). There is a litany of other things that machines do all the time; they break, they error out, they are used for something they’re not meant for. Cars can do much more than drive, they have radios, seat warmers, charging ports etc. But the Wirkungsweise of a car is not to listen to music or warm your britches. In this sense, the Wirkungsweise is not empirically self-evident, such that seeing the machine is enough to understand its purpose. It is not that a car must drive because that’s all cars have ever been seen doing, but rather because it’s simply the established way that we go about making sense of a car and what it does. And of course, because this is a discursive representation, it can be critiqued given that it fails to meet our descriptive needs.
From here, we are afforded the possibility of reflecting, not on how specific pieces of technology work, but how technology as a collective ontology is presumed to function. To put it simply: what is the point of the category of technology and what does technology do? The answer suggested here is that the operating conception of modern technology is one that epitomizes instrumentality. This is to say that technology exists for the purpose of utility, an end external to the technology. Technology exists because it can do something for us. In his seminal essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger notes that “modern technology is … a means to an end. Everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner as a means.” (Heidegger, 1954/2008, p. 288-289). Technology is about mastery where all aspects of the world become something to be mastered towards a greater end. In most contexts, this definition seems to cleanly apply to how technology is thought of today. As an example from ordinary life, a clock is constituted as a piece of technology on account of the instrumental value given in its ability to track and effectively quantify the movement of time. We epistemically take power over time itself and master the measuring of it to perform the various operations of our daily lives that require it. What makes a clock a ‘good’ piece of technology directly corresponds to exactly how effectively it goes about accomplishing these goals; mechanical clocks are as ubiquitous as they are specifically because they are able to track time with extreme precision and lawlike regularity. Before the mechanical clock, the ability to track the passage of seconds would have been tacitly absurd. As opposed to something like a sundial, where time is only loosely ascertained to the hour in the best conditions and simply can’t be tracked at all in the worst (such as during a cloudy day or at night), the mechanical clock is unrestricted and consistent in its effectiveness. One could apply this rubric of utility in accomplishing a goal to most modern pieces of technology and get a satisfactory understanding of their value and how they came to take their current shape. Precision and consistency become markers in terms of how effective a technological object is in accomplishing its presumed goal. It is this instrumental definition that contributes to the notion of technology as an outside interlocutor in the sphere of human affairs. In the instrumental context, technology is asocial in nature. Qua instruments, knives and hammers and phones do not speak, inherently existing outside of human affairs, and only after the fact of their presence are they brought into such affairs to accomplish specific goals.
As it does to many areas of study and inquiry, this framework of instrumentality is absolutely pervasive in the literature concerning socio-tech innovation. Scillitoe et al. describe the activity of a socio-tech venture as “employing technological innovation as a key component of its value proposition” (Scillitoe et al., 2018, p. 1), such that the implementation of technology qua instrument is what brings value. It is that socio-tech ventures in particular “leverage technological innovations in ways that traditional social enterprise, nonprofits, and government agencies do not” (Poonamallee et al., 2020, p. 2), which endows them with innovative and pragmatic import. The very subtitle of a key text on the field is “Harnessing Technology for Social Good.” (Poonamallee et al., 2020), indicating technology as a utility aimed towards external goals. Even further, the definition proposed by Scillitoe et al. posits socio-tech innovation as “novel solutions that involve development or adoption of technological innovations to address social and/or environmental problems with a view towards creating benefit for the larger whole than just to the owners or investors.” (Scillitoe et al., 2018, p. 4). ‘Technological innovation,’ then, is a leveraging, an employment, a harnessing, a development, an adoption–in all cases an instrument to specific ends.
My citing of these instances isn’t meant to indicate that they’re prima facie problematic. The instrumental view is ubiquitous for a reason and to dispense with it would render us unable to describe most cases of our interacting with technology. However, there are underlying philosophical quandaries that lie nestled underneath the description, hidden behind the veil of its ordinary and tacit usage. To start, there are ways in which the instrumental conception fails to adequately describe the ways in which a socio-tech outfit would be interested in engaging with technology that differ from non-technological ventures, particularly in relation to the notion of innovation as a concept in particular. The issue here is not necessarily in the notion of technology occasionally being considered this way, but rather that being the exclusive conceptualization for socio-tech innovation. The risk that is undertaken in this scenario is one where socio-tech innovation fails to establish itself as conceptually distinct from ventures that don’t operate within its intermediary space, for all ventures use technology to instrumental ends. Even further, and perhaps of more concern than the semantics of instrumentality, there is a danger posed in the uncritical adoption of this conception, especially caustic to the endeavors of any social institution oriented towards serving the public good, which will be considered later.
The lighter, semantic concern pertains to the question of how socio-tech innovation differs from any other venture in regards to the harnessing of technology. All ventures use technology in almost every operation they conduct, perhaps even universally across all facets of operation. Modern life simply doesn’t function without an entire technological infrastructure being instrumentalized towards the exacting of day-to-day goals. So then what is it specifically about socio-tech that makes it tech? The answer has less to do with the ‘tech’ in socio-tech innovation and more to do with the ‘innovation’ part. Critically, it is not tech on its own but rather tech as a form of innovation, technological innovation, that takes particular importance. Returning to the definition proposed by Scillitoe et al., it is the development and adoption of technological innovations, novel developments not quite yet adopted into the proceedings of day-to-day life, that represent the primary preoccupation here. Similar to what makes a tech company distinct from all other categories of firm, it is not simply the use, but rather the development of technology that ascribes unique meaning.
“While socio-tech ventures may appear similar to purely social ventures due to their commonality of having a social mission, socio-tech ventures also have to develop and manage a technological innovation that is key to their output and social impact, distinguishing them from purely social ventures” (Poonamallee et al., 2020, p. 2).
This would be in line with what Poonamallee et al. refer to as an enabling technology (one that simply allows for core operations to take place) and a core technology (which is an active site of innovation and a primary preoccupation of the venture) (Poonamallee et al., 2020, p. 2-3).
The problem here is that the instrumental definition of technology fails to effectively describe technological innovation (with emphasis on innovation in specific) in a way that clarifies its unique properties and characteristics. If simply adopting instrumental language to describe the role that technology plays here, the socio-tech innovative venture seeks to use the practice of innovation almost in the same way that one would seek to use a technical instrument to achieve a goal, innovation is used to an end. The difficulty in this comes from the fact that innovation is not a purely instrumental concept and is not held to the same standards of quality as instruments that are used in our day-to-day lives. Firstly, innovation is not regularly useful. There are many more failures in the landscape of technological innovation than there are successes, such that if we were to treat a technological innovation as an instrument, it would be a comically unreliable one. Imagine if your car broke down with the same frequency as every failed tech campaign trying to make Uber but with horses or vaccinations that get added to a blockchain, no one would leave their houses! Go beyond the survivorship bias of successful innovations in technological history, see the unmarked graves of the million dead ideas on which they stand, and it becomes clear that innovation is a shockingly unreliable instrument in consistently accomplishing any goal. This isn’t to say that the innovation as a practice is ‘bad’ (whatever that may mean), but rather it’s to say that in normal circumstances, we evaluate the practice of innovation by very different standards than by how we evaluate our technological instruments. There is a massive risk of failure, but innovation is nonetheless considered worthy of the expenditure of time, money and effort. This is simply not how we evaluate or treat instruments, and as such, to consider innovation an instrument is semantically insufficient.
Secondly, innovation is not law-like. Not only is innovation as a practice dubious in reliability, but perhaps even worse, it is unpredictably unreliable. Innovation must always bring something new, it must introduce the novel upon the world, and novelty is often near impossible to predict the actual shape of. All ventures that engage in technological innovation operate under the assumption that the technology they’re investing in has some plausible value that is yet unrealized, even if the technology itself is yet to exist. But this is always a gamble, and oftentimes one doesn’t find out whether something is possible or profitable without betting big on it. As such, innovation is a practice that fails to match the predictability of an instrument. Even a bad instrument will usually operate in a bad fashion, but innovation can be immensely effective just as often as it can be utterly disastrous, and the factors that determine why it went one way and not another can remain utterly opaque until years after the fact.
As a result of these asynchronies between innovation and the ways that we typically evaluate individual instruments and pieces of technology, my argument is that an instrumental definition of technology fails to fully map onto the notion of technological innovation. In some sense, this is a good thing for socio-tech innovation, for it shows just how unique it is as a practice and area of inquiry, distinct from the tech firm or social venture. However, in order to understand that, one must resolve the semantic confusion that arises from the use of instrumental language to describe the practice of innovation. Technology cannot be considered in a purely instrumental capacity. Further on will be a consideration of the more pernicious danger that resides in the instrumental view of technology, specifically in terms of its conceptual relation to extractivism highlighted by Heidegger and Simondon, along with a suggestion for a possible conceptual rephrasing as an alternative for moving forward.
The more problematic aspects of the instrumental view begin to emerge on further inquiry. Returning to “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger understands modern technology not simply as the presence of machinery, as if technology can simply be reduced to the total sum of computers, guns and automobiles, but instead a phenomenological procedure performed on the world by us. This procedure is deeply ecological in nature that precedes any individual technological object, a way of looking at the world that converts it into what Heidegger calls the standing-reserve. This subjective act upon the world to bring out certain qualities in it happens prior to the creation of individual technologies, and instead acts as the necessary precondition for them. This standing-reserve is representative of the way in which the environment (natural or otherwise) is revealed to be made available in terms of its resources. “The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such. … The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit” (Heidegger, 1954/2008, p. 296). It is representative of a perpetual practice of exposing and storing resources for use, “directed from the beginning toward furthering something else, i.e., toward driving on to the maximum yield at the minimum expense” (Heidegger, 1954/2008, p. 297). This is in some sense comparable to (though not quite the same as) the notion of stock, an inventory that’s kept, a collected resource catalogued and placed in storage. All is quantified and counted in cardinal sum in the standing-reserve, not as grain itself, but x kg. of grain stored in the refinery, x number of looms, x number of data entries in a set. “Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object” (Heidegger, 1954/2008, 298).
In equal measure does Simondon understand the danger that comes in the reduction of technology (and the extended world used to build it) to instrumental value. Even more explicitly does he make the connection, eliding any fanciful explication, adducing the dangers of “philosophy that takes the technical ensemble as a place where machines are used in order to obtain power [puissance]. The machine is only a means; the end of is the conquest of nature, the domestication of natural forces by means of a first act of enslavement: the machine is a slave whose purpose is to make other slaves” (Simondon, 1958/ 2017, p. 141). It is precisely the instrumentalization of technology that is operative here, an instrumentalization of technology that leads to an instrumentalization of the world itself.
Barring the phenomenological and metaphysical sensitivities of the assertions, what Heidegger and Simondon are observing here share shocking resemblance to the recent and contemporary scholarly work on extractivism. Extractivist work in the social sciences understands the practices of exploitative resource accumulation to be paradigmatic issues of the modern era. There are contending definitions to some extent, but in broad strokes tend to involve a resource hungry appropriation of material and financial wealth, associated with the accumulation of capital and centralization of power for the individuals in power. “Thus, extractivism refers to a complex of self-reinforcing practices, mentalities, and power differentials underwriting and rationalizing socio-ecologically destructive modes of organizing life through subjugation, depletion, and non-reciprocity” (Chagnon et al., 2022). Notably in reference to the present inquiry, extractivism has recently been posed as an organizing practice that “denotes the emergence of global extractivism as a way of organizing life. … By conceptualizing extractivism as an organizing concept, we hope to elicit further critical research, and engagements in the social sphere, which disrupt extractivist practices” (Chagnon et al., 2022). As such, given the notable symmetries between Heidegger’s and Simondon’s understandings of technology as an instrumental means of domination and the current literature on extractivism that pertains to organizational theory, the insight is not simply a philosophical proposition cordoned to the past, but a deeply critical intervention in our current our technological practices in relation to our modes of organization.
It can be reasoned that the extractive tendencies of instrumentalized technology are a contributive reason to why technology has been partial to the asocial pursuit of market forces in contemporary history. Of course, there are perfectly pragmatic observations to be made about how technological innovation is often deeply resource intensive and costly in ways that might require a market-based approach. Scillitoe et al. note how balancing between the social and technological “may be even tougher as technological adoption and development is often costly, requiring greater attempts and infusion of capital to achieve market viability, which suggests the possibility of compromising on social value generation” (Scillitoe et al., 2018, p. 2). In light of the “struggle to balance the tensions between technology innovation development, creating social value, and sustaining operations that can result in competing forces that ultimately influence economic and social value outcomes” (Scillitoe et al., 2018, p. 3). But I would suggest that this is also connected to the ways in which extractivism presents itself in the instrumentalization of technology. The machine as an instrument is resource hungry by nature, a slave designed to make slaves of the world it exists within, so naturally it coerces an extractive relationship out of the organizations that use it. The most successful technologies are the ones that yield the greatest instrumental value, which, within a globally capitalist system, ought to be market oriented. The technological instrument is always partial to what is asked of it, that being the market, and in continued use, one becomes more partial to the market themselves. As such, the mode of operation that is given to technology is one with its partisanship explicitly wed to market forces and aims. One could presumably surmise that at the philosophical level, my suggestion would be that to be true to the social end of socio-tech innovation, one would need to move away from the instrumentalist conception of technology. Technology can only be a preoccupation of a venture interested in social issues if it is admitted that technology is more than simply a means to an end.
It’s worth mentioning that in its etymology, technology’s definitional history is not necessarily oriented around instrumentality, but rather art and craft. Technology in its original Greek root of tekhnē denotes the notions of skill, art and craft, typically including practical matters such as weaving or sailing, but also including sculpting, flute-playing, ect. Critically, while there are ways in which tekhnē is instrumental, utilizable to accomplish certain goals, it does not envelop the whole definition. In referring to an art and craft, tekhnē pertains less towards tools in exclusivity and more towards technique, the pursuit of technical excellence in which an instrument may be included. Further on, as of 1859, technology’s definition pertained not to objects but to the “study of mechanical and industrial arts” (Online Etymology Dictionary, 2024). In the same way that there is a logic to the art of sculpting, there is in equal measure a logic to mechanics and industry. At no point does this reduce to a means-end vocabulary. This is to say that technology is not predisposed to instrumentality from the outset and its current reduction is much more a product of a contemporary use of language, rather than something immutably hereditary. This is no genetic predisposition. As such, there ought to be other alternatives in how technology might be phrased, a movement away from exclusive instrumentality that better accommodates the endeavors of involving it in social ventures.
To propose a preliminary step in moving away from technological instrumentalism, I propose a notion of technology that denatures it from existing at our behest, such that it is not entirely reducible to what we have created and put to use. Technology is not necessarily something exclusively in the hands of our individual control, nor is it fully reducible to a means to specific ends. Borrowing from Simondon, this rephrasing of technology is a vision that is deeply amenable to the process of technological innovation, but orients more in terms of technological evolution. This evolution is not one that is determined by the personal preference of the inventors, nor is it an artificial or instrumental imposition on the world, “the technical object mustn’t be seen as an artificial being; the sense of its evolution is a concretization” (Simondon, 1958/ 2017, xv). In a note about her father’s work, philosopher Nathalie Simondon emphasizes that when it comes to technics, “the study must be a genetic one, and allow itself to leave behind the false categories (of genera and species) to which we reduce technical objects when we think of them starting from the way they are used” (Simondon, 1958/ 2017, xi). This perspective is one that deemphasizes the human being as the creator or father of technology, begotten for and predisposed towards industrial ends.
It must be recognized that technology is not magical in any sense of the word, it is not an inscribing of one’s will upon the world such that anything can be done. It is an extremely careful application of scientific observation to reach specific ends. The scientific laws that technics must abide by in accordance with are utterly apathetic to the ambitions and aspirations of the inventors that work with them. To imply that technology is entirely constituted by our will is to imply that technology is reducible to the imparting of our will upon the world. It becomes a demiurgic activity, given overt cosmological primacy. Of course, this is not reflective of the difficulties and tribulations that exist throughout technological development; if it were so easy, then no tech startup would ever fail. The notion that the laws of physics, mechanics and engineering are simply obstacles to work around in the process of creation is not true to technology, and is rather a fiction created by industrial ambition, as “what holds their attention is not so much the machine as enterprise” (Simondon, 1958/ 2017, p. 142). The way that man accompanies the development and evolution of technical objects throughout history is not one that can be accounted for by economic explanation or market forces. “On either side of the machine, [worker and industrial boss,] … both lack a true relation with the individualized technical object in the form of the machine” (Simondon, 1958/ 2017, 135). While it is true that technology seems paradigmatically oriented towards acting in favor of market forces, it is not the market that elucidates the machine’s form and the most effective ways to describe its ontology, especially not in the sense of the relationship that the inventor has with the machine.
“Running a company that uses machines, or owning one, is no more useful for the attainment of this awareness than is labor: it creates abstract points of view regarding the machine, causing it to be judged, not in its own right, but according to costs and the results of its operation.” (Simondon, 1958/ 2017, 18).
As such, the work the inventor puts into making and instrumentalizing technology is not the whole of technology, but one constitutive aspect, a single part in the larger movement of technical progress. “The technical object has been apprehended through human work, thought and judged as an instrument, adjuvant, or product of work. … [However,] [i]t is work that must be known as a phase of technicity, not technicity as a phase of work” (Simondon, 1958/ 2017, p. 247). With this model of evolution in which the engineer is an integral participant rather than demiurgic creators, we elide the language of instrumentality. If we are to integrate technology into the aims of a social venture, a venture which seeks to operate for the public good, then technology cannot be instrumentalized in the way that Heidegger and Simondon observe. The standing reserve will always be partial to market forces, market forces that count, quantify, and store the world into usable resources. Machines will be slaves designed to make other slaves until there’s nothing left to incorporate into the hierarchy. Technology and market force are only inexorably complementary to each other when conceptualized in this way. Rather, to be made cooperative with the social good, the technological reality must be acknowledged as having a degree of independence from us, a history and evolution that we only take part in and influence, rather than single-handedly decide. We do not decide the movement of technology.
This suggestion isn’t meant to be revolutionary, but is rather meant to be an initiating step such that this work isn’t simply a negative critique of technology as it currently stands, but also provides avenues for positive reconceptualization. Through this, the hope is that socio-tech innovation might become more effective in bridging the relationship between technology and organization towards social ends.
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Filipenco, D. (2024, January 23). The biggest social issues that affect modern society. DevelopmentAid. https://www.developmentaid.org/news-stream/post/173559/social-issues-that-affect-modern-society
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